Traveling Again — Myriad Misadventures

Obviously 2020 wasn’t a great year. For pretty much anyone. Except...companies that make PPE maybe? To be honest I didn’t have it all that bad. Although COVID-19 started in China and it looked like maybe a bad place to be at the beginning of the year, China locked down awfully quick and was, as long as you weren’t in Wuhan during the initial outbreak, a pretty safe place to be. The biggest hit for me was traveling. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts I’m used to traveling a couple of times a year. Having so much time to travel is half the reason I teach here. But the last two travel times (summer 2020 and Chinese New Year 2021) were kind of lost. Summer 2020 we only spent a couple of days in Huizhou, a nearby city in Guangdong Province, and we did even less during Chinese New Year 2021, just dong a staycation at a nice hotel here in Shenzhen for a couple of nights.

So this summer I was determined to make up for lost time. Or at least try to do a normal amount of summer traveling. So far so good. My summer vacation started the first week of July and we planned out first trip for the second, taking a week to go to the beach in the Guangxi, the province to the west of Guangdong. I had wanted to go to Hainan Island, which is China’s largest island, because I’ve heard China’s best beaches are there but Max really doesn’t want to go there (I’ll win her over eventually) so she found a small island off the coast of Beihai that we could go to. We decided on some places and planned our weeklong trip.

First we took the high speed train to Beihai, which took about 5 and a half hours for the 400-ish mile trip. We spent a night in Beihai then took the ferry to Weizhou Island the next day. We stayed there for 2 nights before taking the ferry back to Beihai and spending 4 more nights there. Then unfortunately it was back to Shenzhen. Nothing against Shenzhen (as a city I definitely prefer it to Beihai) but during the trip we could get to the beach really fast. But in Shenzhen? Not so much.

For the rest of the summer (another month) we had initially planned to go to Shanghai for a couple of days. Even though I’ve been in China for some 5 years I’ve still never been. But tickets to get there were more expensive than we had anticipated so now we’re not sure. We might see if we can find some cheaper last minute tickets or look into spending a couple of days in another city I haven’t been to yet, like Chengdu or Dali. Then near the end of the summer we’re going to head back to the beach. Shenzhen, the city proper, is kind of next to the ocean but there aren’t really any beaches. But there are some beaches farther away from the city that are still technically in Shenzhen. I’ve been to a couple of the closer ones but there are two that are pretty far that are considered pretty nice. So we might head out to one of those towards the end of the summer to wind the summer down.

The summer started out pretty strong and is looking good going forward. Still no international but all things considered I’m pretty happy with where we’re going.

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