Guangzhou

Day 291 (April 15, 2019) – Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China

Guangzhou was our first destination in mainland China. I admit that we were feeling a bit nervous. We didn’t know what to expect. We were afraid that we wouldn’t be able to communicate. The five phrases we picked up were not going to help us order food or train tickets. We also knew that we were entering China’s Great Firewall, their massive effort at internet censorship. Not being able to access Facebook or Instagram was not our concern. We were more concerned with our ability to access the internet for maps and navigation, hotel and travel websites, and translation apps. Usually, most fears never come true, but our fears of travelling in China did. But our fears were only challenges and we got better at navigating them over time. Guangzhou, however, was our first stop and it was trial by fire.

The G-class high-speed train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. These trains feel like they're from the future. Capable of traveling at over 200 miles-per-hour they link all major cities in China and can take you just about anywhere. They ended up being our primary mode of long-distance transportation. They were cheaper and far more comfortable than flights.

Our introduction to Guangzhou was a bit depressing. We left Hong Kong’s Kowloon Station on a high-speed train headed to Guangzhou. It was a beautifully sunny day in Hong Kong, but as soon as we came barreling out of the Hong Kong train tunnel traveling at 180 miles-per-hour, we flew into mainland China, where it was dreary, gray, and rainy. The rain never stopped. We were in Guangzhou for five days and we never saw the sun until the day we left. On the best of days, it was cloudy and gray and on the worst days it was a downpour.

On one of our walks around Guangzhou.

We arrived after dark, which is always a little disorienting, but we managed to navigate the subway system and check into our hotel. We were quite hungry for dinner, so we decided to browse the handful of restaurants that were on our street. Nothing was really speaking to us. They all looked like noodle shops. We didn’t see any English, so we chose the one that at least had some pictures of food on the wall. We pointed to what looked like some sort of beef noodle soup and took our seats. It was quite tasty, but we think the beef wasn’t the beef we expected but rather beef liver. I still thought it was pretty good, but Travis couldn’t stomach the thought of it. He managed to eat the noodles and soup but left the beef liver behind.

Travis and his leftover beef liver.

Our introduction to Guangzhou: pouring rain.

After dinner we left to pick up a jug of water (it’s not advisable to drink the tap water in China without boiling it first). We were walking towards a 7-Eleven that we found on Google Maps when the rain worsened. In the dark and in the rain, we took a wrong turn and were walking down the wrong street when the rain got even worse, to the point where it seemed like someone was pouring buckets of water out of the sky. We gave up on our 7-Eleven plans and stopped at a tiny convenience store on the street we happened to be on. We took shelter under an overhang and waited for the rain to slow down. The streets flooded and it seemed like the rain was never going to stop so we made a run for it. We were only a few blocks from our hotel, but we arrived completely soaked, shoes and all. We went to bed that night with our wet clothes hanging out to dry from every corner of the room.

One of the pedestrian streets.

We tried to spend our time in Guangzhou exploring the city, but it felt like most of our time was spent figuring out how to get by in China without the ability to speak Chinese. We learned many lessons very quickly. The first small lesson was that the little exclamation point next to the wifi symbol on our phone, which normally indicates you don’t have internet, doesn’t really mean anything in China. It never went away the whole time we were there. I think our phones were having issues connecting, updating, and syncing with Google, hence the exclamation point. Once we connected through a VPN the exclamation mark didn’t go away, but the internet seemed to work.

Dinner at a vegetarian restaurant. Even with a picture menu we're never quite sure what we're getting. We were usually pretty happy with the small victory of successfully having food arrive at the table, and at a vegetarian place we knew we wouldn't be encountering anything too exotic. Ordering food was always a stressful experience. It was made worse by the Chinese custom of the waiter literally waiting for you to place your order. They hand you a menu and then wait at your table as you browse and pick out a dish. I always felt like we were taking way too long as we tried to decipher the menu.

We also learned that visiting foreigners do not have access to China’s mobile payment systems. Travis spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but he came to the unfortunate conclusion that it was never going to. (He even tried opening a Chinese bank account, which would have allowed him to sign up, but the banks  turned him away.) Mobile payments may seem like a novelty at home, but in China this is how everyone pays for everything. Everyone from hotels to grocery stores to public buses to people selling water on the side of the road will accept mobile payments. Furthermore, Visa and Mastercard are not accepted anywhere, so our credit cards were useless. (The only exception to the use of credit cards are online for hotel and travel booking websites and some of the high-end tourist restaurants in big cities.) This left us with cash as our only way to pay for things. We generally don’t like doing that because you end up having to walk around with giant wads of money in your pocket, but it was our only option. We also felt like the odd people out having to use cash everywhere. We came across a few instances of people struggling to give us the right change, not because they were trying to short-change us (as in many places around the world) but because they’re simply not used to giving change. We might have been one of only a few customers that day to pay with cash.

This old white building in Liuhua Lake Park used to be a fancy restaurant.

Public ping-pong tables in a park.

We quickly learned to stop trusting Google Maps. Google services are blocked in China and that’s unfortunate when you have an Android phone where everything runs through Google software. You can use Google Maps through a VPN, which we did, and it works and shows where all the streets and subway stations are but there isn’t too much information when it comes to finding things like restaurants and services. There were hundreds of restaurants all around us but only a few would show up on Google. We eventually learned that if a few restaurants all popped up on Google Maps around the same location there were likely to be a dozen more restaurants around the same area. For example, we were trying to figure out dinner one night and I saw a street corner that had three restaurant pins on it. This was a lot compared to other street corners, so we went over there. It turned out to be a huge shopping plaza along a pedestrian street with well over 30 dining options to chose from. There is a solution to this problem, however, and that is to use the Chinese version of street maps, an app called Baidu. Everything is on there including up-to-date information and restaurant reviews, but the whole thing is in Chinese. We used it often to navigate but could only get so far with it when it came to finding specific shops and restaurants.

A few restaurant pins in a map led us to a bustling pedestrian street.

We also went on a wild goose chase to find a mobile phone store from which to buy a SIM card. It all came back to Google Maps telling us to go to the wrong place or to stores that didn’t actually exist. We asked people for directions, but something always seemed to get lost in translation. We eventually ended up back at our hotel and they gave us some easier to understand directions, but it was to a store that was a good hike across the city. We did manage to find it and we finally picked up a SIM card. Picking up a SIM card is something we do in almost every country we visit, and it normally takes an hour or two at most. In China this took us the better part of a day. This was foretelling of how the rest of our trip in China was going to go. Compared to everywhere else we’d been, navigating around China was going to be more difficult and much more time consuming.

A temple in Foshan.

Guangzhou was also the first place where we had to buy high-speed train tickets to get us to our next destination. Locals can use their China ID card to buy train tickets online or from kiosks, but we had to use the traditional ticket lines. We came prepared though. Travis translated all the information for the train ticket we needed and had it typed out in Chinese on his phone. When we got up to the window, he simply handed his phone over to them and they had all the information they needed to book the tickets for us. We used this method a dozen times throughout our travels and it always worked perfectly.

At the Guangzhou train station to buy train tickets.

Various translation apps made our travel around China possible. Our favorites being Waygo and Dear Translate. Both have the capability to translate words in an image so we could “read” menus that were in Chinese by using the cameras on our phones. Unfortunately, not all restaurants in China have a traditional hand-held menu. Most of the cheaper shops have their menu posted on the wall. We learned quickly that translation apps struggle with wall menus, while at the same time we make quite the scene by holding our phones up to the wall for 5 minutes. We did that in a small dumpling soup restaurant and everyone who was working there came walking up to us to figure out what we were looking at through our phones. No one was able to speak English to us, but I think they figured out what we were trying to do. They were still extremely curious. It was a bit awkward, but we managed to order some food. We learned to keep our eyes out for restaurants with hand-held menus in the future, knowing that it usually made things easier.

The tomb of Zhao Ma. You could walk through the different chambers and there was a museum that displayed all the artifacts that were found inside.

Besides all these travel lessons we learned, we did have a chance to explore the city of Guangzhou. We walked through many of the city’s parks and shopping areas. It’s an enormous city with an expansive metro system that makes it easy to get around. We visited the tomb of Zhao Mo, the king of the Nanyue Kingdom from way back in 200 BC. It was cool to see something so old, but things of that age and even older can be found all over China. They only discovered the tomb in the 1980s when they started to build a hotel on top of it.

Travis at the Ip Man Museum.

Our most memorable trip was when we took the train to Foshan for the day, the hometown of Ip Man and other Kung Fu masters. Ip Man is also known for being the teacher of Bruce Lee. When we were in Hong Kong, we watched the really excellent Ip Man movies on Netflix, so we were excited to visit the place where he came from. Although Foshan is a very modern city and bears little resemblance to what it must have looked like back in the day, there are a few museums dedicated to the Kung Fu masters and a couple Buddhist temples in the area. There is a small section of the city where parts of the old town were preserved and buildings were built in the same style as in the olden days, but really it was just a high-end shopping and dining area. It was a very quant area to walk around but it’s hard to feel like you’re in the past as you stroll past Starbucks, fancy restaurants, and luxury goods shops. Regardless, it was still a fun way to spend the day.

Walking around the "old city" of Foshan.

Truth be told, Guangzhou was a bit of a blur. We were just trying to get things figured out, but we learned fast. This was only the beginning of our time in China, but Guangzhou was a chance to get our bearings. When our time in Guangzhou was up, we were moving on to Yangshuo, where we would get to spend some time in what was claimed to be one of the most picturesque areas in all of China.