After leaving Shenzhen at the end of 2010 I began 2011 in a state of limbo, living somewhere between temporary accommodation in London and Hong Kong airport, while I was working on a fairly dull project. After an unexpected turn of events (getting a new job) I ended up doing something completely different and far more exciting.
As part of my job I need to visit Guangzhou in south China every so often (2 hours from Hong Kong by train) and on my last trip there I took the opportunity to venture further inland to Wuhan (武汉). Sitting slap bang at the intersection of many transport routes in the middle of Hubei province its an easy place to reach, and indeed I first visited back in 2007.
After visiting more than my fair share of Chinese temples over the past five years I have become somewhat jaded to write about yet another (as one might become with churches in Europe also). They usually have the same layouts containing similarly styled statues which makes them a bit predictable but nevertheless good places for spending a relaxing hour or so.
While the dragon has historically served as China’s national emblem, in recent decades the panda has also come to serve as a symbol for the country; seemingly docile yet vicious if irritated. Due to farming, deforestation and other developments, the Giant Pandas natural habitat has significantly diminished and there are less than ~2000 pandas in the wild and ~200 in captivity.
A few weeks ago my younger brother visited me in Hong Kong and given it was his first time to China I decided to take him into the mainland and visit somewhere a little off the usual tourist trail. Our destination was Chengdu (成都), the capital of Sichuan province in Southwest China, for no other reason than it was somewhere I hadn’t been before!
It’s been over a month now since my last trip to Korea but I wanted to share a few photos from Busan (부산) which I visited for the second time since the first in 2008. Busan (or Pusan) is the second largest city in South Korea, located on the southeasternmost tip of the Korean peninsula.
The words ‘art deco’, ‘abattoir’, and ‘Shanghai’ are not ones you usually find in the same sentence but on a hot summers morning in China’s second most populous city I found myself in one of the most curious architectural relics you could imagine; a 1930′s former slaughterhouse beautifully crafted from concrete in a style most unbecoming of China’s usual mausoleums to the uncouth.
One of the most enjoyable parts of travelling is experiencing a moment of serendipity, that is to say coming across something unexpected, or in other words a “happy accident”. During my most recent trip to South Korea the weather was pretty miserable but pausing for shelter on a bridge during a hard downpour yielded a particularly memorable scene…
Ankle deep in stagnant water the rancid air magnified the sense of claustrophobia I felt as me and 5 other Indian-Jones wannabes trudged through the 70-year-old tunnels the Japanese Imperial Navy forced locals to dig during WWII (1941-45) on Lamma Island (南丫島) in Hong Kong.
At the end of my visit to Atlanta (USA) I managed to find a couple of spare hours to visit Georgia Aquarium, which happens to be the world’s largest with more than 8.5 million gallons of water housing more than 120,000 animals of 500 different species.