Alicia's Blog

I was interested to visit this country for myself and really tried to immerse myself in the culture, language and history of the place.

  The first thing I realized was that China is a huge country, bigger in land mass than Australia and just a few more people too!  First up on our itinerary was a boat cruise down the Yangtze River.   (Actually when we came home, we saw the documentary Up the Yangtze which profiles the boat company we took for our cruise).  My favourite part was entering the Gorges, although the pollution does consume the area, when you take the smaller boats into the tighter areas of the gorges it became a lot cleaner.

Then we flew to Xian, an old capital of China, to see the Terracotta Warriors.   Xian and the Terracotta Warriors were amazing – I loved the sense of community in Xian.  People are out exercising or playing games on the street constantly.  We were even lucky enough to go to the most famous dumpling restaurant in Xian and experience a range of steamed dumplings!  The Terracotta Warriors was awe-inspiring.  It was great to understand the history of the Warriors too.  

The first emperor to rule the whole of China, Emperor Qin Shi Huang, ordered his people to build thousands of warriors to protect his afterlife. Said to have been built 210 BC, the warriors were only found int 1974 by local farmers!  Can you imagine that! Wow, I wonder what else China has hidden underground!

We then travelled to Beijing and the highlights would have to be visiting the Great Wall and Tienamnen , shopping at the Chinese wholesalers and seeing the Birds Nest and Water Cube!  Unfortunately we missed the closing ceremony of the Paralympics by one day – otherwise we would have tried to get tickets.

Hong Kong was our final stop of our trip away.   We visited many areas of the city – Soho, Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.  We went up the Victoria Peak both at day and at night to see over the city. We tried most of the transport methods of Hong Kong – bus, boat, train, tram and taxi! We were amazed at the speed and efficiency of the trains. (Wish we had something like that in Perth!).  Our last activity before catching a plane back to Perth was joining in on the Tai Chi class on the Kowloon Peninsula overlooking Hong Kong Island!

So that was our trip.  Enhanced further by reading the Wild Swans (a must read) and the Lonely Planet guide – we found out both books were actually banned in China!