🇨🇳/🇭🇰 Mini-Sabbatical Part 3: Chengdu to Hong Kong

This is part of the mini-sabbatical series. Read more here.

Qingchengshan #

Before leaving Chengdu (where I unfortunately missed out on my chance to see Pandas thanks to illness ☹️), we were recommended to visit a nearby resort town called Qingchengshan.

Transport links were good (a short train from Chengdu) and the hotels seemed nice and quite cheap, so why not!

Upon arrival, it seems this was one of those towns that had been through a “boom” and “bust” period and never quite made it made it on the other side.

All of the buildings must have been less than 20-30 years old, so quite modern by resort standards, but many had fallen into disrepair.

Still, more for us! Our hotel (like many in the area) was a hot springs resort hotel, and we were lucky enough to have pretty much the entire place to ourselves, so we inevitably spent most of our time relaxing around the hot springs. At least Feiyang did, my weak British genes kept me out of the hottest pools for the most part.

We were also staying opposite to a fantastic traditional style restaurant, where all food was prepared in the same fashion as an ancient village would have done.

This was my first experience of so many dried meats in one place, and we only wished we found out about it earlier, as by the time we got around to visiting, they were only 30 minutes before closing.

One of the days we stayed, we went for a couple hours of walking to a nearby tourist village, past the Sichuan University. I think they were having exams that day, as hundreds of students meandered about looking mildly stressed, munching on some sausages and snacks from the food carts that stopped enterprisingly outside of the entrance. We grabbed a 20p spicy processed sausage as we passed, though I’m fairly sure that gave us some digestive issues later on.

In the village, we found a cute-but-not-quite-Gubei traditional village. It was clearly not quite as affluent as some other areas we had been to, but that made it all the more interesting! Passing by shops with more traditional food, tea houses with Koi fish, local farmers markets or bamboo woodworking shops, the place felt much more “real” than the cities we had become accustomed to.

Whilst I probably wouldn’t recommend Qingchengshan for the first time visitor, if you had more time than us it seemed like a good entrance to the nearby National Park, and I suppose you could always spend a bit more time in the hot springs! We had spent long enough in the region where I had high expectations of Pandas and Sichuan Peppers, and ended up being ill for most of it. We are as fast West as we were going to get on our trip, and we are now looking at having to race down to Hong Kong in one week’s time, to make sure Feiyang gets back to England for her Accountancy exams!

Yangshuo #

Leaving Qingchengshan, we make sure to enjoy the £1 train station massage chairs while we wait! The scenery so far has been fairly flat all the way from Beijing to Chengdu, though you can sometimes see mountains in the distance. Yangshuo however greeted us with a completely different, slightly alien landscape. Perhaps that’s why this region is famous for inspiring Avatar’s imagination-capturing floating cloud forests.

For those unaware, Yangshuo lies on the Li river, near the larger town of Guilin. It’s at roughly the same latitude as Taiwan, the same Longitude as Hainan, and has a similarly tropical climate to both.

It’s claim to fame is obviously the jaw dropping scenery afforded by the smooth surrounding mountains, rice fields and bamboo sheltered river. Though quite strangely it appears the town was not much of a tourist hotspot until the foreigners arrived. Supposedly, an American bought up some land by the river in the 80s, and opened a very fancy hotel that is still fully booked out months into the future. Many have tried to capitalise on this success, and our own hotel was owned by a Belgian couple who live on/off in the village, with tales of dozens more airbnb’s popping up.

I think we may have timed this trip quite well, being slightly out of peak season, and so soon after the lifting of COVID restrictions, we were mostly alone in the hotels we stayed. This one was clearly catering for western tourists, yet it was only us and another Russian couple who were staying. No complaints from us though, as we could reserve the best view every morning!

Bamboo rafts #

We had a couple days around town, and decided to spend one of them doing the classic bamboo raft trip down the river. Anticipating lots of sun and some great photos opportunities, we made sure to pick up some nice cheap straw hats before getting on a raft.

This was probably the single most memorable thing we did on this trip. A 2 hour float down the Li river, in fantastic weather, with some of the most spectacular views in this corner of the world. You’d struggle to find anything else more relaxing than this!

Our captain(?) kept calling me “Hello” as the white guy on board, but he made sure to take some nice photos of us!

I recognised the river on one of the banknotes, and found that the 20 yuan banknote denotes a location not too far from where we were!

You could visit it if you have time, but you basically have to take the ferry from Yangshuo to Guilin, so we made do with a near-enough shot. I have this hobby where for each country I visit, I keep a denomination of the local currency and hang it on my wall at home as a souvenir. It turns out to be a bit more manageable than fridge magnets, but having bank notes represent famous places from the country is certainly more interesting than a random politician!

Further down the stream you begin to notice that we are on a bit of a man-made ride though. Aside from the hundreds of bamboo rafts, and sheer abundance of electric mopeds about, you notice that the river banks themselves have been shaped by concrete, and planted with bamboo. Not that I’m complaining, I do like some bamboo.

E-Scootering #

Despite the fact that this town is in the middle of the countryside, it’s not quite rural enough to feel like it has been untouched by technology.

Again, every car you see (aside from the tour buses) are electric, and you lose count of the seemingly self-replicating electric mopeds that litter the streets. I think it only cost us ~£15 to rent an e-scooter for the day, and nobody checked our licenses or asked for a deposit, they just let us go out on our own adventure.

Without ever having ridden a moped before, we set out for the rest of the day on the bike.

A 20 minute drive from our hotel was the start of a riverside drive that was supposed to be dotted with cafes and other shops. To be honest, we didn’t have enough time to fully explore the area, but we had fun zipping about from one area to the next, stopping to admire the views and get away from other people for a while.

Along the way we stopped at an old lady’s stall by the river where Feiyang introduced me to a “bean drink”. Whilst I can’t remember the name of it, it came in a little tub, and you drink from a spoon. The gritty, bland-but-sweet taste wasn’t really to my liking, but it took Feiyang back to her childhood.

We also stopped by a western style cafe amongst the rice fields, where you can hardly tell where the rice ends and the instagram models begin, due to sheer number of photo-shoots taking place.

As the sun set, we booked a full body massage (my first!) at the hotel, and drove back to the scooter rental place.

Touristy, but deservedly so. 10/10 recommend you visit Guilin/Yangshuo, if only for the nature rather than the cities.

Hong Kong #

I’ll spare you a recap of the ~8 hours it took us to get from Yangshuo to Hong Kong, but it was something like “train-train-3(!)-immigration-borders-train-hotel”. Around this time it was Feiyang’s turn to get ill, so once we checked in to our hotel, she stayed behind to rest while I went out to try and get some laundry done.

I had bought some e-sims using MobiMatter (use the code JJHAS96592 if you feel the need 😉), and for the most part it had worked fine throughout South East Asia, and even China. However, Hong Kong is a bit of a strange place.

Once I had found a laundrette, it was completely automatic. No worries, I had a card for contactless. Ok, Hong Kong has some strange Octopus payment scheme, so not contactless… No worries, I have WeChat pay. There’s no WiFi, but I have an e-sim right? Well, turns out you need to register your identity via a passport scan before using any sim in Hong Kong, so they can explicitly match up any internet traffic to your identity. WTF?

Anyway, after a quick jaunt back to the hotel to set this up, I finally pay for my laundry and have enough time to quickly check out the view from Kowloon point before I needed to go to sleep.

On the way back, I suddenly got a Deja Vu of some of the scenes from one of my favourite cheesy films, Rush Hour 2. In that, Jackie Chan is seen crawling up and fighting on some of the famous Bamboo scaffolding surrounding the cities buildings. I was afraid that 22 years of health and safety regulations would have put an end to this scaffolding practise, or that it was a strange stereotype and bamboo scaffolding didn’t actually exist, but no! The bamboo scaffolding is real!

We had two days in Hong Kong, so split it roughly into a day around Hong Kong Island, and a day around Lantau Island.

Victoria Peak #

Starting out early, we looked up the top things to do in Hong Kong, and chose to travel up to Victoria Peak to get some good views of the city.

I didn’t quite appreciate this from the night before, but Hong Kong is incredibly hilly. We took the Peak Funicular up to the top, and I’d recommend this to anyone visiting, despite the fact we got lost a few times trying to find the start of it!

Since Hong Kong is so hilly, and was kind of built by whoever was in charge at the time, the roads are a bit all over the place as they follow the contours of the land. We were stuck in Hong Kong park for a good 30 minutes before we could find the right exit, and made sure to swear our way through our clothes running up and down the same hills.

Once on the funicular, you get another dose of how steep Hong Kong can be, as you climb well over a 30% gradient up to the top.

At the top, you get another glimpse at the density of Hong Kong.

You would have been able to see the infamous Kowloon Walled City were it still standing, but regardless, Hong Kong is still one of the most densely inhabited places you can visit. Almost every building that can be built, has been built as a high rise apartment block.

There’s a certain beauty to it, and it does remind me of a denser, hillier Singapore, but we’ll get to that later.

The rest of the day we spent pretty much just walking around, shopping and eating.

I don’t have any pictures, but we explored some of the famous night markets, where you can buy ay designer bag you want, for £5! We also managed to get apparently the best Dim Sum Feiyang has ever tried, but you’ll have to ask her for the restaurant as I’m quite frankly useless when it comes to food.

Lantau Island #

Hong Kong is made up of over 200 islands, of which the bulk of what you might think of as “Hong Kong” is just contained within the Kowloon Peninsula, and Hong Kong Island. Outside of this, are the New Territories, a collection of landmass that were originally inhaled by the British as part of the now-expired 99 year lease, which actually makes up more than 86% of Hong Kong’s total territory.

Lantau Island is the location where you would find Disneyland, Hong Kong Airport (technically reclaimed land), and some beautiful beaches.

We decided to visit because it is also the location of a large Buddha statue that seemed quite interesting to us.

To get there, we took the Ngong Ping 360 cable car all the way to the top. This offers a “crystal” cabin (basically double the price) where you can see through the floor to the passers by below. Not sure it is worth the price delta, but it’s certainly fun to see others in your cabin freak out!

Arriving at the top, we found ourselves intruding on a kind of race event. There were 5k/10k/other races going on around the island, with each of them having to run up and down all of the stairs to the main Buddha statue. My hat goes off to some of these people, who are clearly double my age and twice as fit, so that put some things into perspective at least. They also had to contend with an already crowded staircase swarming with Aunties and clueless tourists alike, so I’m sorry if I got in the way of anyone’s PB.

I wish we had more time on this island, and others, as there are supposedly some amazing hikes you could do!

Lama Island to the South is apparently a bit like Pulau Ubin from Singapore, in that it has mostly been left untouched by technological progress, being kept in a stasis of dirt roads, no internet and simple housing. Whilst I don’t know if this is true or not, the islands still hold some secrets that beg to be explored!

Leaving #

Feiyang left Hong Kong early in the morning, and I gave her most of my cash so she could get a taxi straight to the airport. Her flight was at 7am, mine not until 2pm, so we parted ways as she head back to England. My own flight back to England is booked 20 days later, departing from Changi airport, so I now have ~3 weeks to get from Hong Kong to Singapore on my own.

I spent some time down by the Kowloon peninsula to think about what I wanted to get up to over the next few weeks. Also, I wanted to reflect on my time in Hong Kong.

After spending some time in Singapore, and having known both were ex-British colonies, I was fully expecting Hong Kong to feel the same as Singapore.

Yet, it felt different.

Hong Kong was much more chaotic, feeling less safe. Despite it also being independent for less time than Singapore, it felt less “Westernised”. Over 90% of the population of Hong Kong are Chinese according to the latest figures, so you don’t get quite the same international mix as you do with Singapore.

Whilst I can’t speak for the population, some citizens we talked to did express some concerns about the new governance. Free speech is no longer as free as it once was, and some inhabitants are struggling to adapt to this power shift. Though the British lease ended over 20 years ago, I feel the nation is still struggling to find it’s own place. Or, struggling to lose it.

I would imagine that the working culture in Hong Kong is very similar to Singapore, but the living conditions appear to be less favourable by most metrics. It is a place I would like to experience fully, but not one that I would readily choose over a similar location, such as Singapore.

That being said, the biggest similarity I felt was the airports. Both were absolutely marvellous.