Xiamen and Gulang Yu

After the grueling 22 hour bus ride, we arrived in Xiamen. Our hostel was incredible - - much better than in Hong Kong (and cheaper). We went to a Buddhist temple that was close to our place. It was literally a mountain : we walked through some buildings and found that the temple had trails that went up the mountain. We kept walking and walking, getting higher and higher. On the mountain there were various little caves in which Buddhists used to meditate. These caves were awesome because they had thousands of little figurines of various gods. Have you ever seen the movie "Carrie"? The room in which she was locked, with those weird Jesus statues. It was a little like that only there were thousands of tiny statues.

Gulang Yu was nice: colonial style buildings, decent enough beaches - decent enough for me to fall asleep. Our hostel on this small island was also very excellent. We've concluded that Hong Kong hostels are complete crap. After walking around we went back to our hostel and hung out with the owners in their bar. I fell asleep in the common area while watching a bootlegged copy of Transformers (someone took a camcorder into the movie theatre). Trevor is having a hard time eating the food at this point. Not quite adjusting to China just yet. "I miss burgers," he said.

Hong Kong

We made it to Hong Kong - stayed in the Kowloon New Hostel which was a hole. We stayed with various backpackers in a 6 bed doorm room - at night sometimes a woman would put a bed on the floor and sleep there which we found kind of odd. I guess it was a decent place for 10 bucks a night though.

Trevor met a lady outside of a seven eleven - he just wanted to be friendly and nodded to her - - turned out that she was a prostitute.......a very very very large prostitute, and followed him around for a bit. Good times.

We hit up Lamma Island - did the Peak Tram - and did a lot of walking. We hung out with the people that were staying in our room with us: Felicity (Australia), Donald (Scotland), and John (Norway). We had a merry old time destroying our room.

Next up is Xiamen in the Fujian province (by bus).