Xiamen (Amoy)

Trip Start Mar 13, 2007

Trip End May 08, 2007

Loading Map

Map your own trip!

Map Options

Show trip route

Hide lines

Flag of China Xiamen, China
Tuesday, March 27, 2007

We've spent the last couple of days in Xiamen, formerly Amoy. Had a 15 hour sleeper train journey first to get here. It wasn't bad really, even in hard sleeper class - quite comfortable and relatively clean, even though the toilets weren't up to much. We have the prospect 24 hours on a train tomorrow and the day after on the way to Hangzhou, but I'm sure we'll be fine, at least we're in the soft sleeper category this time. Xiamen is a really nice, clean city. It has a famous university that causes people to stop off in Xiamen on their travels so they can have a look. We're staying about 5 minutes walk from the university and the neighbouring Buddhist temple, and are going to spend this afternoon having a wander round and taking photos. Yesterday we spent the day in the most attractive part of the City, the islet Gulangyu which was formerly the location of several European officials and still has some of the most attractive architecture in the region. We were blessed with nice weather and great views all over the island, though it was very busy with Chinese tourists and various pushy street vendors selling rubbish. Par for the course.

We really liked staying in this city - it made a pleasant and refreshing change from Guangzhou. We met some Chinese people whilst waiting for our sleeper train who were keen to talk to us - they told us Guangzhou is business-orientated and nothing more, which I would agree with! We were lucky to have met our new 'friends' - they were very keen to talk to us and helped us out when our train was delayed, which was only displayed as delayed in Chinese characters! On getting off the train we also got help from a guy travelling to Cambodia via Xiamen and Bangkok - he was a Shanghai student and gave up some of his time to asking for directions to our hostel in Mandarin. Very nice of him. Yesterday we were stopped to have our photo taken by a random Chinese couple, which made us feel famous, haha. We have stocked up on provisions for our sleeper train to Hangzhou (including milk and peanut protein drinks - seem to be a very popular choice here), which hopefully will be as easy an experience as getting the train from Guangzhou - it was far easier than we expected and had an excellent waiting area with the train times and numbers in English.

Weird Chinese fact for this part of the trip: you can buy toothpaste in both honey and green tea flavour. Yeuch.