Back on the mainland road

After a week and a half in Hong Kong, I'm finally back on the road in mainland China. Right now I'm in Guilin, killing time before I catch a bus north on to Sanjiang then hopefully on to Chenyang, which is close to the border with Guizhou. I won't write much about Guilin, because I think we covered it pretty well five years ago when Durrell and I came here for spring break. The only thing I'll say is that it is quite warm, shorts weather, warmer than it was in Hong Kong. Since it is November, and it was already snowing in Beijing this time last year, I fully expected it to be cold already, but there seems to be some sort of heat wave in effect, so at least for the next few days we have some good weather.

Hong Kong was quite nice. After my parents left I met up with my friend Conor, who is joining me for the next part of the trip. We stayed at an apartment that Conor's coworker's friend's wife's aunt or something owns, I could never quite remember the connection. The place was mostly unfurnished, except for a couple of small mattresses, had no hot water and was so far out in the New Territories that I was close enough to China to get cell phone reception from the 22nd floor of the building. But it was free accommodation in Hong Kong, which was pretty nice, and it was fun to see a part of Hong Kong that is totally local. In Hong Kong I basically did all the Hong Kong stuff I've done before, so I won't go into that here.

The one thing we did that was new to me was go to Macau, an hour ferry ride from Hong Kong. Besides knowing that it is a former Portuguese colony and that there are a bunch of casinos, I knew little about the place and expected just a slightly less visited version of Hong Kong. But it is totally different. First of all, it's tiny, less than a million people and occupies a much smaller bit of land. Also, besides the casinos and some new residential areas, it has little new flashy development. There's nothing like the office towers of Central on Hong Kong Island on Macau. Basically, the whole place lacks the kind of energy that exists in Hong Kong. On the flip side, Macau does have a much more European feel, in terms of the style of buildings and the feel on the streets, some of which in the old town are actually cobblestones. Hopefully when I get to put some pictures up you'll see what I mean. Otherwise, the casinos are more or less what you'd see in Nevada, but at least in the ones I went in didn't really feel as big or as full of people (granted it was a Monday night). The one major difference is that baccarat is extremely popular. There were also a couple of other games that I didn't recognize, one of which seemed to consist of betting on rolls of dice.

Looking ahead, I probably won't have much of an opportunity to post over the next week, since we'll be in some pretty rural areas. We'll be hopping through Guizhou and Hunan, eventually ending up in Wuhan to catch a cruise up the river through the Three Gorges to Chongqing. In Wuhan definitely I'll be able to post again. So in the meantime watch the Twitter feed, which seems to be still working.