For May Day the gf and I took a short holiday to some nearby cities. Our destinations were the Diaolous of Kaiping (a UNESCO World Heritage site) and a mountain in Taishan to do some hiking. We bought the combo tickets for the Diaolous, 144rmb each and admission to about 5 different places. We arrived at about 4pm on May 1st at the Li Gardens and so had an hour and a half.
You can read the intro here.
The first places after you go through the entrance are pretty boring, a bunch of museum type things. But once you get into the Diaolou and garden area it’s quite beautiful and very peaceful (as long as there isn’t tons of other people presumably). An hour and a half is plenty of time, and I recommend (as with everything in SEA) going in the morning or later afternoon and avoiding noon.
DINNER WAS Typical Cantonese food, some boiled vegetables and fried short ribs. The servers’ dialect made their Cantonese very difficult for my gf to understand. The food was half-hearted at best. The design was open, so we could look at these buildings while we ate.
We stayed in “Chikan-movie city” for the night. Apparently it was featured in ‘Let the Bullets Fly’. The whole place would be improved by a good bulldozing. Dirty, decrepit, derelict are some of the words that come to mind. There was a dirty diaper on the ground in front of the hotel for the duration of our stay. In the evening we walked around. In a central park area there were a few boys playing basketball, some people hitting a badminton birdie, and some aunties performing a hilarious version of Cantonese opera (hilarious because the dancers could never remember their moves). Since the only ‘bar’ in the vicinity had no customers and prohibited smoking, cards and dice we turned in early.
The next day we visited two different villages of diaolous (it just means watchtower). These were constructed by returned overseas Chinese who’d made their fortune in the US and elsewhere. They date mostly from the 1870s-1930s. China at that time was quite chaotic, and huge bands or thieves and bandits were commonly roving about, so these we built to withstand attack. The windows all have iron shutters, the walls often have narrow gunports, and the top floor typically overhangs and has some sparrow nests, enabling the occupants to shoot downward.
Unlike, say Lijiang and other “historic villages” these were actually villages, in the sense that real people still live there. That's why they’re surrounded by rice paddies and why theres so many dogs and chickens about. That made it much more authentic for me, and since we came on a weekday, there were very few people (you can see how few in the pictures). Overall highly recommended if you’re into, as lonelybox puts it, “piles of rocks”.
We drove to Taishan to stay the night. In spite of being a city, while Chikan is a “town” it nearly matches it for boredom. There’s really nothing to do. We were in the city center, but the only bars were more than 10km away (some nearer ones had closed down). We weren’t the only people who thought it was boring-in the afternoon hundreds of people were sitting in the city square doing nothing (and not just old people).
I was glad to put taishan behind me. It has none of the charm or cultural interest of a village and none of the fun things to do of an actual city. We drove about an hour outside of town to the village at the foot of the mountain. You won’t find this in any tourist guides, and especially not in English. There are no signs anywhere to mark the way. You take a road by the bridge up into the foothills (soon turns to a dirt road). We parked at an old disused power station (you can see in the first photo). A heavy layer of mist hung over the mountains, which only intensified by the day went on.
I had been here two years previously, and I thought I remembered how to get to the waterfall in a previous picture. However, with no signs and a maddening number of trails and switchbacks we never did find it. We did swim some in the stream, but I was extremely disappointed not to find the actual goal. We were hardly the first ones here, some had left those little tape markers you’re supposed to use when hiking to mark where you’ve been. Next time I’d like to go back with that, a machete and no women to actually find it. May need to make a map, as I haven’t found an actual one yet.