Post Holiday Blues

We’ve been home for about 5 weeks now from our rather too short a trip to China. If the truth be told we are still suffering from those dreaded holiday blues. I’m still down and I don’t want to be here, I want to be back in China. I really do. I’ve never been affected like before after a trip.

This holiday was never going to be a wondrous culinary adventure as most trips to China are, no this was just going to be about the people and the places.

We both had our own agendas for this jaunt around China. I wanted to see some old villages that probably would not be around in a few years time. Lina wanted to see the minority tribes that she hadn’t visited before. Strangely enough 9 times out of ten these two wishes both went together. We were both winners.

This trip was going to be kept to a small area, mainly because we only had 3 weeks. I wanted 3 months, but sadly my company wouldn’t pay me for 3 months paid leave. Damn them.

After weeks of us toing and froing between different regions of China. We finally made a decision and narrowed it down to Hunan, Guizhou and Guangxi provinces, plus a start and finish in Guangzhou to see if the city is similar to Hong Kong.

Amazingly it had been 7 years since our last visit to the Mainland, and I missed it so. I cannot count Hong Kong really, as that is a whole different kettle of fish altogether. But 7 years, that is too long a time. Why did we wait so long?

So after a long China Southern flight into Guangzhou and a quick transfer to one of the high speed railway stations we were on a T Class train hurtling at just over 300 kilometres an hour north to Changsha. The capital of Hunan province.

I’ve only ever been on a train that can go this fast a few times before and they were in Japan. It’s amazing how smooth they run. Certainly beats the British Rail.

I’m not sure how many Guizi or Gweilo travel to Changsha, but I’m sure it’s not many. Unlike in the city of Guangzhou with its countless migrant workers from small rural areas, we were not met with stares of mistrust. Instead we were met with smiles of welcome. This carried all the way through our trip until we hit Guangzhou, where as in all big cities the population are far too busy to even think about smiling.

So this is going to be a long drawn out process of me waffling on about a fantastic trip that we had to China, and hopefully it will make you plan a trip there and enjoy it as much as we did.

More on Hunan next time.