One Night in Guangzhou

With plane ticket prices jacked up during Christmas period but still wanting to travel, we decided, “Why not try the new High Speed Railway in Hong Kong?” and go somewhere in China, like Guangzhou?  So two days before our trip, we decided to book our hotels and train tickets, leaving on a Thursday, and coming back to Hong Kong the following night.  So yeah, one night in Guangzhou.

One look at the people from Guangzhou and you can see the huge resemblance, in fact I would say just a mirror copy, of people from Hong Kong.  Compared with other Asians such as Japanese, Taiwanese, Koreans, even other provinces from China, you could still see some sort of difference between them and Hong Kong people.  But with Guangzhou, you could literally swap these two populations and they wouldn’t differ in terms of their physical appearances.

In fact, I could quickly imagine how Hong Kong would have been if it wasn’t occupied by the British but instead was governed by China all this time… it may have been very identical to the city of Guangzhou. Continue reading One Night in Guangzhou

Haikou is a No Go

Of all the countries I’ve been, China somehow continues to disappoint again and again (exception of Chengdu).  This was how I felt in Lijiang and Shangri-La, and especially this time in Haikou.

Coined “China’s Hawaii”, Haikou has semi resemblances with the beautiful island of US, except we don’t use the word beautiful in this case.  Haikou does have beaches and sunny weather that reminds you of other islands or beachy places like Kenting, except it’s so polluted and quite dirty and rather boring.  Haikou is definitely one of those cities where going once is enough, in fact more than enough. Continue reading Haikou is a No Go