XIAMEN – Friday

I stayed at Denice and Jen’s place in Shantou Thursday night to avoid a ridiculously early rise, as they live right next to the bus station. We had planned to get the 8am bus to Xiamen, but ended up getting the 8.30. The trip itself wasn’t too bad. Being the National Day holiday, basically everyone in China goes somewhere else, so the bus was packed. It was pretty comfortable but, and for only 100 RMB turned out to be a pretty good way to travel. The journey, which we had expected to take five hours, ended up only taking three, and they even showed an English movie (Faceoff)! What a start..

We pulled into Xiamen at about 1pm, I didn’t see a whole lot as I was in an aisle seat. We jumped off and caught a taxi to the ferry terminal, where we could get across to Gulang Yu (the island). After trying to figure out which ticket we were after, and which ferry we needed to get on for about five minutes, we took a punt. It paid off, sort of. We got on a ferry that was to go around the island, which at first had us cursing as we thought that would mean it would take us back to the Xiamen city side, and not to the island itself. It ended up docking on the island though, so it all worked out fairly well, and it was nice to see Gulang Yu from the sea. One of the problems with quite a few places is China is pollution. The sea around Xiamen, and Gulang Yu is quite polluted, not something I’d like to take a dip in.

The trip round the island took about half an hour and before long we were on the island trying to find the hotel. Unfortunately the only thing we knew about the hotel was that it’s name was written on a bit of paper we had, in Chinese. After hunting around for a good 40 minutes we found it, and upon checking in, snuck up to the room (we hadn’t let them know the number of people had increased slightly from 2 to 3). The room was nothing special, two beds, bathroom, TV (with a wide selection of local channels). I claimed a spot on the floor near the window. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around, not wanting to see too much as we had a guide booked for Saturday, and wanted to get our money’s worth. We hit up a few of the small shop-lined streets, being a destination for predominantly Chinese tourists, the prices hadn’t been hiked up to white-person levels. I didn’t buy anything, figuring I’d wait to see how I was doing financially by Sunday.

Gulang Yu was quite a spot. True to it’s word it had a lot of the architecture from the previous 400 years, and the winding newly re-cobbled roads were quite cozy. The shops contained mainly antiques and souvenirs, and the shopkeepers were your typical aggressive Chinese salespeople. There were also a number of small restaurants, obviously specializing in seafood (if you don’t like seafood, Xiamen is not for you!), with up to 20 red buckets full of live fish, prawns, lobster, sea cucumber, sea snails, and a ton more. If it lives in the ocean, and you can eat it without dying, you could get it in Xiamen. It was really something.

We decided to eat at the restaurant attached to our hotel, which was one of the “red bucket” restaurants. The food was fantastic. If there was any criticism to be given to the food in Xiamen, it was that if the seafood itself wasn’t really flavoursome, then your meal wouldn’t be all that tasty. They don’t do a whole lot to the food other than cook it. You ask for crab, you get crab. Our food was all pretty good, and after all was said and done we were spent. Up to the room, shower, bed.