A couple of weekends ago we had a long weekend for Tomb Sweeping Holiday. This seemed the perfect opportunity to get out of Xiamen and visit somewhere new. We left it quite late to book tickets and were running low on money so decided to go to Chaozhou in Guangdong province, just three and a half hours away by bus. The bus cost 86元 from the Xiamen University booking office and we got the bus from HuBin Nan station in the middle of the island.
Unfortunately our journey and arrival didn't go too smoothly. After rushing down there from Xiang'an campus for our 2pm bus, we found out that it had been delayed and we would be leaving at 15:10 instead. We sat in the station playing minesweeper on my laptop to kill the time! Once we were on the bus, the journey itself went smoothly. As we neared our destination, I checked to see if my internet was still working on my phone by opening up my email as I'd never taken it to another province before. I then saw that we had an email from Ctrip saying that we needed to call them urgently about our booking which we'd made the night before. It turned out that the hotel we'd booked at couldn't accept foreigners or people from Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macau so we needed somewhere else to stay. After Alex's long conversation with them on the phone, offering us Ctrip coupons to pay the difference of a new hotel they'd found, we decided to get some food while they sorted out the new booking for us. We went to a Chaozhou cuisine restaurant and asked the waitress what she recommended...
BIG MISTAKE. We ended up with Chaozhou fried rice which was ok, but also an oyster omelette. I had food poisoning from the next morning, throughout our entire stay, return to Xiamen and for another day once we were back. 5 days in total! We ended up spending the majority of our time in our hotel room which stank of smoke as it was a "Business Hotel" i.e. where businessmen go to smoke and have fun with prostitutes! Thankfully there was a Macau film channel on the TV with the films all in English with Chinese subtitles which gave us something to do.
Anyway, after the restaurant we decided to walk the 3km to our new hotel (because we disagreed to pay a higher price for a new hotel we got one that was a long way out). The walk wasn't all that interesting as it was just a long, straight road with shops, businesses and restaurants either side. When we finally reached the hotel, the receptionist was very glad we could speak some Chinese as she'd been worrying about trying to speak English with us!
Because of my food poisoning, we only made it out to do some sightseeing on the Sunday. We got a tuk-tuk from outside our hotel to Guangji Bridge which seemed to be Chaozhou's main sight according to our online research. Towards the very end of the journey, we came across a very narrow gap before a bit of road they were doing some work on. Our driver went through the gap and onto this bit of road before the tuk-tuk got stuck and the door fell off leading to us getting out and Alex helping the guy push it. 不好意思 for the driver!
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| Tuk-tuk |
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| Chaotic section of road |
We got to the bridge and decided to get our picture taken by a professional photographer. As we were standing together, she told me to put my hand on my hip to look 很漂亮 (very beautiful) and her colleague edited the photo to make us whiter, the bridge darker and the sky blue.
After this we went in search of food as we hadn't eaten yet that day. I only fancied plain boiled rice as didn't think my stomach could handle that much more but that proved difficult to find. Who would have thought that finding a bowl of rice in China would be difficult? We ended up in a fast-food place a bit like KFC.
Then it was time to go on the bridge itself. Guangji Bridge is one of China's four ancient bridges. It costs 50元 to cross the bridge, 25元 for students, but it is well worth the money. I've never seen a bridge like it! It had so many different sections, the most interesting of which was the middle which was made up of boats. These boats get taken away at the end of the day to allow traffic through and we were lucky enough to be on the bridge at the time this operation was happening when we were on our way back.
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| On the bridge |
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| Bridge made of boats |
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| Taking pictures with the funny white man |
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| Hand on hip! |
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| Guangji Bridge |
On the other side of the bridge we went to a temple built on a steep hill with lots of steps leading up to it. Unfortunately by this point I was feeling really rotten and ended up throwing up so didn't enjoy it too much!
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| Lots of steps |
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| Alex inside the temple |
Overall it wasn't the best of trips but I wouldn't disuade people from going there. If you do, just avoid the seafood...
