A grand day out

Now that we are down to our last few months as bonafide employees of this country we've suddenly realised we have lots left that we want to do but not very much time to fit it all in. So therefore we took a day trip to the nearby city of Kaiping. Kaiping is noteable because it is home to over 1800 UNESCO protected Diaolou (watchtowers). With that kind of prestige we thought it had to be worth a visit.

We gave ourselves an early Sunday morning Foshan departure time of 8am to give us enough time to see the sights and still manage to be back in-time to catch the last bus home (the perils of public transport). We didn't make any solid plans for the day, as we kind of had our fingers crossed that it would be easy to spot tese diaolou dotted about the city. Needless to say we were wrong.

After a quick walk around the city, nothing spectacular to report, we hired ourselves a friendly, and very helpful, mini bus driver for the day to take us to the 5 most notable visitor spots.

The diaolou are unlike any other buildings in China - they date from the late 1800  early 1900s - and, like their residents at the time, are heavily influenced by western architecture. This is because the ornate buildings were built by Chinese people who had been living and working in overseas and had therefore been exposed to different building styles and materials - the diaolous are all made from reinforced European concrete.

Our first stop on our chauffeured trip was to Zili village, which I think had the best towers of the day.

Next up was a visit to Li gardens, named after the family who built it. This was even more western than the Diaolou and made for a lovely tranquil visit. The architecture of the gardens and buildings was very quite impressive and if the opulence of it all didn't tell you these people had money then the baby pink Bentley on arrival certainly would.

  Zili Village 

Li Garden

Our third stop was to to the town of Chikan to admire the riverside architecture and also try out the local cuisine. The option of dog on the menu was too good a tasting opportunity to pass up. Dog meat isn't at all what I thought it would be like, ours was served in a soup with noodles and chinese greens. The meat has a red meat texture, and colour (it's quite dark) but is softer than beef when you bite it. It also doesn't really have a flavour, which is didn't expect at all, the accompanying soup had more of the dog-like taste I expected (sort of like venison). I was a bit disappointed though, dog meat was much, much fattier than I expected, for that reason alone I wouldn't order it again.

 Chikan

Dog meat and noodles

Tom, Kat, John and I

After our adventurous lunch our next stop was to Majianglong village to see some more Diaolou. Nice but I have to day once you've seen a one diaolou you feel like you've seen them all. Our final stop was to Jinjiangli village which was home to the most ornate Diaolou we had seen all day - it cost 30,000 HKD to build in 1923! Strangely we were the only visitors there, its obviously not the most popular one on the tourist trail.

Majianglong 

Jinjiangli

I'm really glad we went to Kaiping but I feel I've definitely filled my Diaolou sightseeing quota for the foreseeable future! Saying that though, yesterday wins the award for the most foreigners I've seen in one day in this country, I think that definitely speaks volumes for the tourism market in Kaiping.

G x