Log in
Join travelers community
Your Profile
Logout
1997
Around the world via China (CHINA - Guangzhou)
Bec2004-09-19 15:42:00
Displayed times (last time: )
Guangzhou
First thing I had to do upon arriving in Canton (the western name of this place), was to find a bed. I was lucky, for there was room at the Guangzhou Youth Hostel which is hard to beat at 10 US$ a night!
It is just next to the five star White Swan Hotel in Shamian Island where I went to rent an internet connected computer to receive and send e-mail. I managed to find access to the internet almost everywhere. When I could not connect through the friends that I had met on the web before coming, I searched for a cybercafe, I tried the local University or went to the biggest hotel in town.
Good cheap food, clean inexpensive accommodations and beautiful parks are powerful attractions for shoestring travellers. I'm showing this picture of my room in the Guangzhou Youth Hostel to demonstrate that shoestring travel is no hardship in China. Young or old, alone or in a group, anyone can do it and a lot do. It certainly beats watching TV or playing golf in Florida when you are retired.
With the lodgings problem behind me, I called James Mok, a computer expert I had met on the internet and began to explore my surroundings. Shamian Dajie, close to the hostel, is a park lined avenue of old colonial buildings bisecting Shamian Island where foreign traders were allowed to settle in the 18th century. The island must have been a hectic scene at that time. Now it has become an oasis of peace and quiet with the Pearl River on one side and busy, noisy Guangzhou on the other.
Guangzhou Park on Shamian Island's river front is a haven of tranquility where people stroll and come to play Mahjong. A good place for me to relax and study my Chinese phrase book. I found Chinese very hard to learn. No one understood me even when I carefully read a phase from my book because I could never get the tones right. It took a lot of practice with patient friends to acquire the most basic elements of the language.
...
See photographs from:
China Gallery
