The Island of my mind was not this dirty

We went to Qi'ao Island last week. It was actually pretty nice considering we were able to get there by bus. A side note on the buses here: they are very frequent, cheap, and efficient, and you thank your lucky stars if you are able to get an air conditioned one; they usually aren't too crowded except during rush hour; and absolutely nothing is in English (shocking I know). Anyway, we took a bus (including a detour where we went about 20 minutes beyond our stop and ended up in a Chinese office/industrial park) and were able to escape the throngs of people for a few hours.

Qi'ao Island is just off the coast of Tangjiawan on the northeastern tip of Zhuhai, and is accessible by a nice bridge via bus #85. Qi'ao isn't super exotic or anything, though I guess "exotic" is relative to whatever you know and expect. On a sliding scale, Qi'ao Island is more exotic than Rhode Island, Fire Island, and Staten Island. Actually it is more built up than I would have expected. There are several university affiliate branches out there, as well as some smallish factories, an international school, some restaurants (more on that later), and a few oldish fishing villages. I read that there are also old ruins and temples, but I didn't find any. It was about 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,000 Celsius) and we underestimated how much water a couple of gringos would need to stay strong, so our hike was perhaps not as awesomely awesome to the awesomest power as it could have been. That is to say that we cut it a little shorter than we would have liked. Oh well.

In any case, I'll let the pictures do the talking. Also, I'm still waiting on more suggestions for Snake Whiskey...

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Here's the entrance to the mountainous "area" in which we went hiking...let's just call the "area" a park, because the actual name of the place is both long winded and completely nonsensical, as you can see by the writing above the archway:


I have no idea what "ollywood [sic] International Film and Television Culture City" is, as the park does not in any way involve "ollywood", "International", "Film", "Television", "Culture", or "City" (it may involve "and", and nature's inherent complexity probably requires a conjunction or two to keep on keepin' on). Side note: it's like the joke my highschool European history teacher used to tell about the Holy Roman Empire - "It was neither 'Holy' nor 'Roman' nor an 'Empire'." When Mr. Jackson said that, we just laughed and laughed and laughed.

Perhaps there was once a movie filmed there...as far as I could tell, there were just a few beat up little concrete huts, a giant radar tower on the mountaintop, some fishermen's shacks, a couple hard-to-access beaches, dead frogs, and menacing giant spiders on their equally menacing webs. Not sure what the scenery would give you cinematically, but clearly someone from the crew stole the "H" on the entrance sign when they found out that their contract didn't carry into post production.

Here's one of those dilapidated concrete huts I was talking about.


Here's a view of the coastline, taken as we were walking down a little dirt path.


After our hike, we found a beach a few miles away that had a really wonderful, quiet restaurant. We had some sort of pork dish (or maybe it was duck)...


...and the best tofu dish I've eaten in my entire life, cooked with noodle-thin mushrooms...


Also, out front was a guy raising and lowering a giant fishing net into the water using pedal power. You can see the net being raised on the giant harness, as well as the fisherman in the small covered area on the right.


Also, I'd like to note that we survived our first typhoon, which made landfall here on Tuesday afternoon and night. After staying up all night at a friend's apartment (typhoon party), we went out and took come shots of the destruction. I'll get those photos up this weekend.