tdaxp

The worst thing about Canton

Is leaving. How can one not miss the beauty, sun, warmth, cleanliness, liveliness, and happiness of China's most prosperous province?



On the last day we took a drive and went for a swim, but first...

Our last full day in Canton.

Zhuhai (Pearl Ocean -- the meeting point between the Pearl River Delta and the South China Sea) is gorgeous. Our hotel spot was gorgeous. A trip back would be gorgeous.

The beach:



But wait until you check the view from the room...

"I'm ----ing tired." That's how the normally polite & well mannered, to say nothing of educated & well spoken, Lady of tdaxp suggests to begin this post.

I agree. I'm ----ing tired.

The picture you see above is not particularly amazing. Indeed, it looks just like the first-class rail cabin that it is. But the story of this rail cabin, and how we came to occupy it is --- as one might say, ----ing amazing.

Lady of tdaxp and I were sitting in King Coffee (a/k/a Kentucky Fried Chicken Cafe) when I said I would explore. A short trip revealed the most amazing and romantic -- inexplicably so -- route to a lavatory in coffee shop / fast food history. King Coffee is Old City Xi'an sends user up a stairwell -- which opens to a balcony above a rain-soaked boulevard -- before you re-enter the KFC building.

Jump ahead three minutes. Lady of tdaxp is frantically -- and fantastically -- searching for me. "I misread the train tickets! It's not 9:30! They're for 8:15!"

Lady of tdaxp had to take the camera for her own adventures during our morning in Zhnongshan (formerly called "Chungshan" before the pinyin reforms), so the morning's adventures must be told without pictures. You can, however, use the encyclopedia entry for Zhongshan for generic photos of what I saw.

I decided to look for Apple chips (having had some delicious ones on the plane), and took a taxi to supermarket. The driver overcharged me for a total of 10 RMB ($1.30), and -- worse -- the store didn't have apple chips.

I looked around and thought I knew where I was, because I saw a KFC similar to one I had seen the day before. So I began walking, and after a few blocks I realized that that was in fact a different KFC. I back-tracked, and saw a pink tower in the French quarte,r and began walking to it.

This was quite a walk, but the oxygen high made it a breeze. I got to the Sunwen Road West and took this sideroad and that, as I felt quite good. I was thirsty so I ducked into the McDonalds, asked for a "Fanta," nearly got an Orange Juice, pointed to the Fanta, and the manager said "Ah -- Fanta." So I got my Fanta.

Full of energy, I walked up the hill at Zhongshan Park and saw the Fufeng Pagoda. Generally older women and a few men were practicing tiji, though somehow I missed the largest bronze sculpture of San Yatsen in the world, which apparently was feet from me. (D'oh!)

I accidentally took the wrong way down, and walked into part of the unimproved (actually, literally smashed) section of the French quarter. Part of the wall of the steps contained mortor and with still-embedded glass shards. The old road was sub-divded into houses.

Following my re-emergence on Sunwen, I walked back to the river. I saw the elevated pedestrian bridge over the river I eyed yesterday, so I went out of my way to take that. It was very cool -- neat staircase, and I was the only one on it. (Being alone in a public corridor is an unusual experience during midmorning in a country of 1.6 billion people.) The bridge ends at a mad-gorgeous park, with fountains, statues, game-playing stations, flowers, an artificial lake -- you name it.

Finally, I took a new road back to the hotel. While on the street a guy approached me to buy the watch -- owning a knockoff would have been a neat sovernier, but I that he only had one made me think it may be stolen, so I refused. At last, I was outside my hotel. I bought a Vanilla Coke (China -- a country where they still have this most delicious of colas!) and a Gatorade, and walked inside.

Anyway, enough of my rambling -- photos of move from Chonghsan to Chuahi are below the fold
.

Zhongshan is gorgeous. The photo that I'm using to headline my travels to Canton

is from that city's Sunwen West Road pedestrian shopping mall. The town is named after Sun Yatsen, a Christian medical doctor who sidelined as an anti-Qing revolutionary, President of the Republic of China, and Founder of the KMT.

But that is the past. Nowadays Zhongshan is a busy hub city, but one that's still very walkable (more than any other city in China's I've visited)



Compared to the smogginess of northern China, everything is embarrassingly beautiful...

Let's go to Canton!

The trip started unauspiciously... The bus ride to the airport (which won't be needed next year because of the Beijing Subway expansion!!) was packed and slow, though the chairs themselves were comfortable



The bus ride was doubly uncomfortable because the Beijing haze was thicker than usual, though not as bad as some days...

Our engagement called for celebration, and what better way to celebrate that visiting Canton -- no, not Canton, South Dakota (which we visited just prior to this year's China trip), but the Eastern Vastness of the People's Republic of China.

Canton was previously in the French sphere of influence, and is the richest province in the country. While immigration is a political question -- other Chinese keep trying to move here -- the country has long been open to the outside world. The two most recent revolutionary movements with strong Western influence -- the Taiping and the KMT -- both got their start here.

Lady of tdaxp and I are off to another adventure involving train travel, so I am not sure how often new material will be posted. Until then... enjoy!

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Canton, a tdaxp travelogue
1. Peking to Chungshan
2. Yatsen City
3. Chunshan to Chuhai
4. Pearl Ocean
5. Chuhai to Peking

How often do you get to go to a lake known as the Thirteen Tombs (Shisanling)? As the Minb Tombs are known as the Thirteen Tombs in Chinese, that's where we ended our great day at the Tombs of the Ming:

The drive from Dingling to Shisanling Resevoir was short, and very pretty. The ground was shockingly green and the sky was unexpectedly (for a place near Beijing) blue.

The Thirteen Tombs of the Ming Dynasty are, like most dynastic things, huge. We explored one of the thirtteen tombs (Ding Ling) after walking through the two-mile-long entrance known as Spirit Way.

As we walked along Spirit Way, presumably re-created statues lined the path. There were four specimens of each type, two kneeling on either side, and two at attention on either side. This was true for statues of generals as it was for statues of animals



After spirit way, we drove to Dingling. Yes, the park is so huge you drive from one location to another. Along the way I kept thinking visiting imperial graves would have been a lot of work...

The Mings ("Brights") were arguably the last ethnic Chinese dynasty before the Communist Party. Preceded by the Mongolian Yuan and succeeded by the Manchu Qing, the Ming found themselves surrounded by a world that was growing hostile to China. Attempting to reclaim their country's former glory, the Ming bureaucratized much of traditional Chinese religion and, along the way, created a gorgeous series of imperial tombs just to the north of Beijing. There was a lot to see, and rather than pushing everything into a single post I'll break up the photos, focusing first on the drive from our location (near Baiwangshan) to the Thirteen Tombs.

Wind had blown away the smog of the day before, and the ride up was beautiful.

Read more, and join the tdaxp motoring adventure!