Luxury travel

• J3ssie's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Liuzhou

Trip Start Aug 12, 2006 Previous
Entry Trip End Sep 11, 2006 Next
Entry

  Liuzhou, China
Friday, September 1, 2006

We had an early start from our beautiful guesthouse to the local bus station, where we would continue our journey to Liuzhou. We were thinking we'd be travelling rough, as we had started using local public buses rather than private minivans, and we weren't sure of what the standard would be.

The first bus journey was about 2 hours, a normal standard coach, clean, air-conditioned and pretty OK. We stopped at the bus station to catch some lunch and change buses. And then the luxury began! This coach was like travelling business class on an aeroplane (OK, a bit extreme, but you get my drift). Large leather seats, two television screens in the aisle with Rush Hour 2 playing (albeit in Mandarin), and a 'bus hostess' serving water and newspapers! Crazy! But really nice, the journey was comfortable and went quickly. Before long we were in Liuzhou.

Dinner time

I was expecting it to be a small town, but it was in fact a small city with a population of 1.4 million people. It was quite developed and advanced. Our hotel was of a high standard, no pesky ants running around for a change!

We dumped our stuff and then went wandering. We spent ages in the Bank of China while one of our group exchanged some money. We then went to find an internet cafe, and went across the road to the 3rd floor of the Century Mart. It was a strange place, we took the lift at the side of the building, a bit run down and gloomy.

When we got out, we walked through an open but empty bowling alley, through a dimly lit corridor, to find a huge floor with rows and rows of computers in this so-called cafe. More of an internet restaurant! There were about four or five 'rooms', all open-plan, with loads of young girls and boys playing online games or watching movies, with their headsets on, so it was fairly quiet.

We had to get a User ID card to get started, luckily Angeline knew enough Mandarin to get us by. I wanted to upload some photos, but had to go into a separate 'USB' room where all the computers had USB access

Internet cafe - a whole floor!

. Then it made sense, each room had a separate function - those for watching movies, those for gaming, those for uploads/downloads etc. So advanced and it was really cheap too! The Windows operating system was in Chinese characters though which made it a bit difficult. I tried to change the settings in Control Panel but got a bit lost so managed without.

The internet was really fast, even so 2 hours sped by and it hit evening time, time for dinner. We opted out of a group dinner, and decided to head down town to explore. The city was big and well-developed, with lots of neon lights and bright city stores, the locals all dressed up and ready to party.

We ate in an open food market, where they give you a 'hot pot' with a fish in it hidden amongst the vegetables, cooking on hot coals on your table. They also had loads of stalls of fresh fruit, vegetables and various meats, on skewers which they fry or barbeque (after coating in chilli sauce) and bring to your table. There wasn't a great deal of choice being vegetarian (in terms of getting a wholesome meal). I had a cake from the bakery and a chilli corn on the cob for dinner.

We walked around the main street after dinner, just taking a look around. We went into an upmarket bar which was mentioned in Lonely Planet and our local tour group guide. We weren't really dressed up for a night out, and soon left when they told us they had a minimum charge, having gone in and sat down amongst the dressy boys and girls feeling slightly out of place.

On the way home we stopped in an open air bar/restaurant place, and had a quick drink and a game of cards before reaching the hotel.

Post your own travel photos for friends and family More Pictures

Luxury bus

Slideshow Print this entry Share Liuzhou hotels

Previous Entry Next Entry