Entering China: Guangzhou

Swimming in the Pearl River, Guangzhou. Not for the chemical-sensitive.

I mentioned a little bit about Guangzhou's history in a previous post. Over the centuries it has served as one of the main (and, sometimes, one of the only) gateways for foreigners visiting China. A short drive up the Guang-Shen Expressway from Hong Kong, it continues to be a popular first stop for international tourists like us.

It certainly makes for an easy landing. We had a nice room at the Riverside International Youth Hostel (YHA: the secret to successful budget travel in China), right by the Pearl River on a street full of outdoor bars and restaurants. Just across the river was the old foreign concession on Shamian Island, with leafy car-free streets lined by French and British colonial architecture. Beyond Shamian stretches a big and vibrant city with beautiful parks and great historical sights, from the ancient through the 20th century. Getting around is easy, too, on the city's brand-new, shiny metro - which turns out to be in many respects a copy of Shanghai's system.

I'm sounding like a spokesman for the Guangzhou Booster Committee. The place was just nicer and more user-friendly than I was expecting, and we ended up staying an extra night, taking the city as a place worth seeing in its own right as opposed to just a stopover. A little bit of Guangzhou came with us when we left: our next two destinations were filled with tourists from the city and its surrounding province.

Neon sign right outside our hostel (but thankfully not outside our window), Baietan Bar Street.

Waiters lined up to receive their daily briefing, Shamian Island. We saw this at a number of places, and I couldn't help wondering if it was a holdover from the old danwei work-unit system. But I don't really know. Photo by Rachel.

Cargo by the river. Pic by Rachel.

Bust of a young Mao, Peasant Movement Institute. Guangzhou was the shared base of the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party and the Communists during their brief period of cooperation in the early 1920s. The Communists, including Mao and Zhou Enlai, used a former Confucian temple as a place to train cadres. Now it's a museum, fairly interesting despite the lack of English captions on most of the exhibits.

More Guangzhou photos here.