Beihai, Hepu - July 7-9, 2004
Click here to see more photos taken around Beihai and Hepu
Yaodong's student and ex-students continue their amazing kindness to me. The morning after my last posting, Mary and her father called for me at 10:00 at the luxury hotel they had found for me in central Beihai. I threw a towel around myself and scrambled to the door obviously freshly wakened and disheveled. At my feet were the bedclothes which I'd been sleeping on, half in the bathroom and half in the hallway. The explanation was simply: I'd been at the Internet cafe to 1:00 a.m. and hadn't got to sleep till 2:00. At 7:00 construction got started on the tower being erected outside my window. I wasn't ready to get up so I switched the fan on in the bathroom and continued my sleep with my head under the bathroom sink. I'd pulled the luxury bedclothes in for that purpose and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, which weren't even disturbed by my alarm which must have gone off at 9:20 blissfully drowned out by the fan and the pillow over my head. Hence my total unpreparedness when the knock came at my doorat 10:00, and the funny looks on Mary's and her father's face when they saw my condition at that late hour of the morning.
If I lost any face because of this neither of them let on when I met them downstairs with my backpack. They had informed me that we were moving to Mary's hometown of Hepu, 30 km up the road, so I checked out and left my bags in yet another of Mr. Lee's cars, and Mr. Lee drove his daughter and I to the bike rental place where we selected two sturdy bicycles and commenced a pleasant journey in the 35 degree heat through the congestion of Beihai's variously powered street vehicles, bikes and pedicabs, mopeds and motorbikes, cars and trucks ... and then out the long beach road, ten kms to Silver Beach, the famous strand on the south side of the penninsula. This being one of the southern most beaches in China, Beihai is somewhat counter-intutively named 'North Sea' (Bei Hai).
Biking with Mary was a lot of fun. She was captain of her volleyball team and a healthy sports lady. When we reached the beach we parked our bikes in supervised parking and had lunch of oysters in garlic (for me) with noodles and vegetables (us). Then we had a walk on the beach and took a few photos. You could rent a table with 4 chairs and an umbrella on the beach for 20 or 30 Yuan which I thought was quite expensive considering you'd then feel constrained to sit in the shade at your table. Neither of us had brought cards or mah zhong board so that didn't seem too attractive a way to spend the day. You could also rent a seat in a sort of swing set without umbrella which I figured must be for making photos of you against the waves. The waves were rough some ways out to sea and the water was brown. Boats tossed at sea coming to and from the harbor jetties. The jetties protected the harbor backwaters which housed a community of boat people with a lot of derelict boats at angles to their keels and rotting wood baking in the sun and salt breeze.
We wandered a bit on the strand and finally retreated to an open-air shop with shade and a barrier against the wind where I had a beer and Mary had iced green tea. There is a kind of sweet green tea you can buy in China that is quite delicious and I usually carried a bottle in my day pack. In fact it's just the thing for thirst so I bought some for the bike ride home. I had GPS'd the route and that's how I knew it was ten km one way.
Mr. Lee was wating for us at the bike shop when we returned, and Mary and I both dozed in the somnulant a/c comfort of Mr. Lee's sedan as we headed up the highway for Hepu, a small but bustling town about 30 km from Beihai. Like many towns in Guanxi this one had new public squares where at night people danced, or sat at tables drinking beer and soft drinks provided by rows of street vendors. But I experienced that later. First we stopped by the Lee's house where I met Mrs. Lee and sat to rest in the dining room chairs of their receiving room (parlor), which was neat and clean and with a motorcycle parked inside. The visit lasted only twenty minutes, including photos, and then Mr. Lee and Mary drove me to the bus station, opposite which was a hotel, where they arranged for me to take a room. It was more expensive than any I'd had so far, 138 yuan, but this included a huge dim sum breakfast and a complimentary bottle of wine which I discovered at the dept store downstairs cost 38 yuan.
I went to the department store to locate the source of the loud music that was making it pointless to rest in my hotel room. The dept store was right outside the relatively quiet market and had huge speakers just outside the front door playing soppy music to attract customers (you never know when potential customers might be rousted out of their hotel rooms just to check out the source of all the noise). I had a wander around the market while I was there. I was awed by the rough life of the fishmongers, women squatting before piles of shell fish, extracting the morsels with knives weilded in gloved hands, shell after shell, presumably day after day, year after year. The older ladies must have been doing it a long time.
It was interesting to be in Hepu for one night and to become familiar with a part of China that has no amenities for western tourists. I got back to my hotel right at 7:00 and found Mary and her brother looking for me to take me to a restaurant where we were ushered to a private anteroom with tea and nuts and pickled vegetables and literally interviewd by restaurant staff regarding our dinner requirements (the waitress made herself comfortable on the couch and took notes as we discussed the various options available). We waited in the anteroom until the meal was brought to the private room and there we were served beer and a delicious sliced beef, and a shell fish Mary ordered because she'd seen I liked that kind of food, and a another huge more conventional fish, and sweet-textured pumpkin bread, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but all quite delicious. In the end we got up and left and I realized they'd snatched the bil and treated me to this. Wonderful.
Mary had to run into Beihai after dinner for an interview where she succeeded in getting a job at a secondary school as an English teacher starting in July. For this purpose she signed up for Webheads when we ended up at a cybercafe after she got back later in the evening. Meanwhile she found a friend named Wang who agreed to take me off her hands so to speak so she could run nto Beihai. Wang turned out to be an articulate and perspicatious conversatonlist, a student of Chinese traditional medicine, and he continued my exercise regimen by walkng me around town discussing this and other topics, ending up at one of those parks where we indulged in the beers I mentioned, until Mary arrived to relieve Wang and conduct me to the cybercafe.
Mary left before I did. I stayed on to 'close' the place, because at 12:30 they did something very unusual at Chinese cybercafes, I was the last one there and they were actually closing down. This must be a really small town, I thought (joke). I was in bed asleep by one.
Next morning Mary came around, joined me for breakfast (my treat this time), and saw me off on the bus to Nanning.
Yaodong's student and ex-students continue their amazing kindness to me. The morning after my last posting, Mary and her father called for me at 10:00 at the luxury hotel they had found for me in central Beihai. I threw a towel around myself and scrambled to the door obviously freshly wakened and disheveled. At my feet were the bedclothes which I'd been sleeping on, half in the bathroom and half in the hallway. The explanation was simply: I'd been at the Internet cafe to 1:00 a.m. and hadn't got to sleep till 2:00. At 7:00 construction got started on the tower being erected outside my window. I wasn't ready to get up so I switched the fan on in the bathroom and continued my sleep with my head under the bathroom sink. I'd pulled the luxury bedclothes in for that purpose and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, which weren't even disturbed by my alarm which must have gone off at 9:20 blissfully drowned out by the fan and the pillow over my head. Hence my total unpreparedness when the knock came at my doorat 10:00, and the funny looks on Mary's and her father's face when they saw my condition at that late hour of the morning.
If I lost any face because of this neither of them let on when I met them downstairs with my backpack. They had informed me that we were moving to Mary's hometown of Hepu, 30 km up the road, so I checked out and left my bags in yet another of Mr. Lee's cars, and Mr. Lee drove his daughter and I to the bike rental place where we selected two sturdy bicycles and commenced a pleasant journey in the 35 degree heat through the congestion of Beihai's variously powered street vehicles, bikes and pedicabs, mopeds and motorbikes, cars and trucks ... and then out the long beach road, ten kms to Silver Beach, the famous strand on the south side of the penninsula. This being one of the southern most beaches in China, Beihai is somewhat counter-intutively named 'North Sea' (Bei Hai).
Biking with Mary was a lot of fun. She was captain of her volleyball team and a healthy sports lady. When we reached the beach we parked our bikes in supervised parking and had lunch of oysters in garlic (for me) with noodles and vegetables (us). Then we had a walk on the beach and took a few photos. You could rent a table with 4 chairs and an umbrella on the beach for 20 or 30 Yuan which I thought was quite expensive considering you'd then feel constrained to sit in the shade at your table. Neither of us had brought cards or mah zhong board so that didn't seem too attractive a way to spend the day. You could also rent a seat in a sort of swing set without umbrella which I figured must be for making photos of you against the waves. The waves were rough some ways out to sea and the water was brown. Boats tossed at sea coming to and from the harbor jetties. The jetties protected the harbor backwaters which housed a community of boat people with a lot of derelict boats at angles to their keels and rotting wood baking in the sun and salt breeze.
We wandered a bit on the strand and finally retreated to an open-air shop with shade and a barrier against the wind where I had a beer and Mary had iced green tea. There is a kind of sweet green tea you can buy in China that is quite delicious and I usually carried a bottle in my day pack. In fact it's just the thing for thirst so I bought some for the bike ride home. I had GPS'd the route and that's how I knew it was ten km one way.
Mr. Lee was wating for us at the bike shop when we returned, and Mary and I both dozed in the somnulant a/c comfort of Mr. Lee's sedan as we headed up the highway for Hepu, a small but bustling town about 30 km from Beihai. Like many towns in Guanxi this one had new public squares where at night people danced, or sat at tables drinking beer and soft drinks provided by rows of street vendors. But I experienced that later. First we stopped by the Lee's house where I met Mrs. Lee and sat to rest in the dining room chairs of their receiving room (parlor), which was neat and clean and with a motorcycle parked inside. The visit lasted only twenty minutes, including photos, and then Mr. Lee and Mary drove me to the bus station, opposite which was a hotel, where they arranged for me to take a room. It was more expensive than any I'd had so far, 138 yuan, but this included a huge dim sum breakfast and a complimentary bottle of wine which I discovered at the dept store downstairs cost 38 yuan.
I went to the department store to locate the source of the loud music that was making it pointless to rest in my hotel room. The dept store was right outside the relatively quiet market and had huge speakers just outside the front door playing soppy music to attract customers (you never know when potential customers might be rousted out of their hotel rooms just to check out the source of all the noise). I had a wander around the market while I was there. I was awed by the rough life of the fishmongers, women squatting before piles of shell fish, extracting the morsels with knives weilded in gloved hands, shell after shell, presumably day after day, year after year. The older ladies must have been doing it a long time.
It was interesting to be in Hepu for one night and to become familiar with a part of China that has no amenities for western tourists. I got back to my hotel right at 7:00 and found Mary and her brother looking for me to take me to a restaurant where we were ushered to a private anteroom with tea and nuts and pickled vegetables and literally interviewd by restaurant staff regarding our dinner requirements (the waitress made herself comfortable on the couch and took notes as we discussed the various options available). We waited in the anteroom until the meal was brought to the private room and there we were served beer and a delicious sliced beef, and a shell fish Mary ordered because she'd seen I liked that kind of food, and a another huge more conventional fish, and sweet-textured pumpkin bread, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but all quite delicious. In the end we got up and left and I realized they'd snatched the bil and treated me to this. Wonderful.
Mary had to run into Beihai after dinner for an interview where she succeeded in getting a job at a secondary school as an English teacher starting in July. For this purpose she signed up for Webheads when we ended up at a cybercafe after she got back later in the evening. Meanwhile she found a friend named Wang who agreed to take me off her hands so to speak so she could run nto Beihai. Wang turned out to be an articulate and perspicatious conversatonlist, a student of Chinese traditional medicine, and he continued my exercise regimen by walkng me around town discussing this and other topics, ending up at one of those parks where we indulged in the beers I mentioned, until Mary arrived to relieve Wang and conduct me to the cybercafe.
Mary left before I did. I stayed on to 'close' the place, because at 12:30 they did something very unusual at Chinese cybercafes, I was the last one there and they were actually closing down. This must be a really small town, I thought (joke). I was in bed asleep by one.
Next morning Mary came around, joined me for breakfast (my treat this time), and saw me off on the bus to Nanning.
So you spent one hour in the cybercafe in Nanning writing your travlogue above? You forgot that you would not have time in Liuzhou ^O^.
Now it is 1:20 in the afternoon and I have called Catherine ,Mary's classmate in Nanning,in hope of getting the time and number of the bus which will be taking you to Liuzhou.But she didn't seem to get my call. I am getting a bit worried. Where are you at this moment? Hope you wouldn't be sitting in another cybercafe half way to Liuzhou.You are a really netizen.
What shall I do now? Go to the bus station without knowing exactly the time of your arrival? Let me call Mary or Catherin again.
Cya in one ,two, or three hours in Liuzhou?
take care!
Vance's coach was more punctual than an airplane yesterday. Catherin had told me he would arrive in Liuzhou at 7 p.m. and so I was there at 7 sharp in order to see my long-awaited friend. I grew a bit restless when it was 7:05,thinking that his coach might have arrived before I was there.To my great relief, the coach was pulling in exactly at 7:10...
Now listen to Vance's story about his trip to Yangmei with Catherin and the stories of his meeting with my friends and students in Liuzhou...