Posts from an Australian lost in the Middle Kingdom
The province is popular for it’s year round temperate climate, it’s coastal cities and beaches, and it’s historic sites including the well known earth buildings of the Hakka people.
These hotels in Xiamen are picked based on their visitor reviews, location, suitability for a foreign guest and value.
Xiamen is a beautiful coastal city in Fujian Province, a city I really enjoyed especially the island, Gulangyu, and also heading inland to Yongding to visit the Hakka Tulou buildings.
In China there seems to be plenty of privately run bus services running here, there and everywhere but for a foreigner it’s usually much easier and simpler to just buy a train ticket. But in some cases the going via bus can provide huge time savings.
Less than a 20RMB taxi ride from the center of Xiamen is one of the areas popular beaches, which also features a wooden boardwalk which stretches along the beachfront.
I’m glad I left the Xiamen Huaqiao Hotel to come here, whilst the room is not quite as nice, the service at the V Inn makes all the difference.
Xiamen, or Amoy as some call it, is a small city by Chinese standards being home to only around 600,000 people but it can still get pretty busy being a popular tourist destination for many Chinese. It’s an attractive coastal city, clean and has a certain charm about it not seen in other Chinese cities I have been.
I thought I’d have to travel back to Yongding to get a bus to Xiamen but lucky for me there’s a bus running direct from Hukeng.
Just outside the main gate to ‘Yongding Hakka Earth Building Folk Cultural Village is a bus station, well, it’s a small shop on the corner with a few chairs on the footpath, but it’s where the bus going to Xiamen stops and that’s where I’m off to.
After a full day tour of the tulou buildings it was back to the Fuyulou Changdi Inn just in time for a tea drinking session with the owner and guests. Here they grow there own tea, and it’s good gear, so good, I made sure to take some home. After an hour of solid tea drinking it was time for dinner, and fortunately they have english menu, and even a French menu too!
The south-east region of Fujian Province in China is a quite picturesque green mountainous landscape that has long been a home to many of one of Chinas minority groups the Hakkas. The Hakkas are probably most well known for cuisine, culture but mostly for their very unique homes of which many still standing today date back over 700 years old.
Yongding is a rural county within Chinas Fujian Province, the city of Yongding itself is small, minute by Chinese terms in that it probably has a population of less than 10,000, but I’m only guessing. This is the place where I to go on and see the famous tulou buildings.