Oh gosh I forgot that I had this lying about, was writing as I was actually travelling, just forgot to post it up.
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26th August - Singapore - Macau
Arrived in Macau near the evening, to realise how smoggy everything looked. The taxi driver brought us past the new Cotai Strip, and we saw the Venetian from the outside. After checking into the hotel, we took the hotel's shuttle into town and walked about a bit before having dinner. I did not like dinner. Throughout, I felt a bit nauseous as I smelt the water of the nearby fish tanks, splashing their dirty water everywhere. My appetite was not helped by the fact that I kept seeing a promfet fish swimming upside down, righted only when it drifted into the air pump - shooting it across the fish tank - and then flopping upside down only moment later.
After dinner we walked around Macao, looking for the ruins of St. Pauls. When we went there, we were disappointed to find it in darkness, usually it's lit up at night. However it turned out we had arrived on the first day of a special annual light show. After waiting around for about 20 minutes, the crowds came en masse, and the light show began. It was a trippy light show. Quite cool, but trippy, and not very useful at all. Then we had a meal of dandan/shuang pei lai.
The highlight of the night however was wandering into the various casinos. The first casino was the original one, by Stanley Lai, the . Then we went to . Finally we went to two random small crappy casinos, all because I was looking for those old school slots machines where you pull the lever. There were none. Instead everyone was playing baccarat, to my disappointment. No recognisable poker or blackjack. It was also smoky like hell. Then, we went back to the hotel for the night.
27th August - Macau - Zhuhai - Kaiping
Kaiping is home of the Diaolous, a UNESCO world heritage site. Diaolous are essentially houses-cum-fortresses built in Southern villages around the early 1900s, when the Qing Dynasty fell apart/the Warlord era began and there was no law and order and banditry was rife. It was funded by money sent from overseas relatives who had dispersed all over the world. This made for some really strange buildings, who had semi-Western features, in addition to being towering blocks amongst the other small village buildings. I'd first known about them when I watched Let the Bullets Fly earlier in the year.
We first had breakfast on the Macao side, and then crossed the border into China. Looking at the hordes of Chinese trying to cross the border into Macao, we thanked our stars that it wasn't us. The queue had at least over a thousand people squeezed in under the hot sun. Sometimes it's easy to forget that China just has so many damn people. Opportunists sold their places in the queue for sums of money.
We took the coach from Zhuhai to Kaiping and arrived there at about 1pm. At the coach station, we were met by a singular tout, and we ended up hiring him. He drove us to the incongruously named Milan Hotel, which was a nice place and waited for us as we checked in. Then he brought us to eat claypot rice, a speciality of the area, in a small local store. The first sight we visited, an entire diaolou village, was closed as they were apparently filming a new movie there. Still, we walked about and saw a small museum of the area.
The next sight we went to was another small cluster of diaolous in Zili Village. Amongst the diaolous there was the one they used as a facade for the movie, Let the Bullets Fly. My parents and I poked around, but after a while the heat started to get to us, plus the interiors of the diaolous were the same after a while. The next stop was the Li Garden, yet another cluster of diaolous by one extremely rich family. These diaolous had marble staircases and special tiles. Finally we went to a diaolou that was more like a fortress than a house. It was also the location of the last stand by 7 brothers/relatives during the Sino-Japanese War. Shell and bullet holes lined the exterior of the tower.
The driver the dropped us in the middle of town, to walk around a bit before we took a taxi nearby our hotel for dinner. Dinner again wasn't very good, and I remember not being particularly happy about it. Went to a supermarket on the way back to buy some bread and drinks for the next day.
28th August - Kaiping - Wuzhou - Guilin
Spent a total of 8 hours on board the bus(es), most of it sleeping. The first bus was a local bus. Felt frustrated when the driver, who smoked while driving, kept blasting his music while the guy behind me blasted his own music. It eventually turned out as expected: a volume war, with me caught between. Somehow I managed to sleep and woke up to find the driver had (naturally) won the battle. The bus kept making random stops to pick up villagers along the way who had flagged down the bus, charging arbitrary prices. The sole bathroom stop the bus made revealed old skool toilets with no doors. After 5 hours, we ended up in Wuzhou only to find that there was no bus to Yangshuo as planned. Instead we booked tickets for Guilin and then had lunch, where we ate a really tasty chicken soup.
Then we took the bus to Guilin, where I fell asleep again. Driving into Guilin, I was reminded of Hangzhou. For dinner none of us were really hungry, but due to sheer greed I ordered a ton of meat for the hotpot, partly due to the fact that I was thrilled that I could read the menu properly. As I ate, watching how annoyed my father looked, I kept thinking about the tumblr blog "this is why you're fat".
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