When I woke up this morning, we were starting the long trip into the port city of Xiamen. The Captain had told us yesterday that we would not be getting there before 8:00 AM, and that the harbor was still closed as of yesterday’s announcement, but they hoped to have it open by the time we arrived this morning. I guess it was open since we were heading there. The actual port is quite a distance inland from the ocean, and we were in the channel heading toward the port when I woke up at about 6:15 AM.
The tour was scheduled to start at 8:30 AM, and we wanted to have enough time to have breakfast and be ready to go. I showered and then woke up Stephanie, and after she was dressed, we headed up to the World Cafe for breakfast at the buffet. We enjoyed the breakfast, knowing we had enough time to eat and not be rushed to make the tour.
After breakfast, we headed to the room to get everything ready for the 8.5-hour tour. It was a little cloudy outside, and there was a chance of rain so we packed up our heavy raincoats for the day, not knowing how much rain we might get from the Typhoon. It was really moving slowly over Taiwan, but it was also forecast to head back out over the Taiwan Straights in a few days, and that was where we were currently located.
We met in Manfredi’s restaurant with the tour group, there were two bus loads of people going on this tour, and we were assigned the second bus, and our Viking Guide was Michael, who we had not had on a tour yet. He is the “Michael” that is on the ship, not to be confused with “Michael”, our guide for the land tour days
In about ten minutes, bus Number 1 was called to load, and about 5 minutes after that our bus, Number 2, was called to load. We headed out through security and then down the gangway to the ground level. We were getting off the ship on deck 2, so it was several ramps winding down back and forth before we got to the ground level and headed to our bus.
We had a local guide in addition to Michael, but she did not speak much English, so Michael was really the main guide for this excursion. Once we were loaded onto the bus, we departed for the 1.5 hour drive to Quanzhou. Michael was a great guide, his English was very good, and he had been a guide in China for over 20 years, and it showed. He was full of information that he gave us on our long drive.
About an hour into the drive, we stopped at a rest station, Michael called it a Service Station, on the highway so we could go to the restroom. It was really large, there were many shops and several gas station all in the Service Station area.
After about 15 minutes, we all loaded back onto the bus to continue to the city of Quanzhou.
It was amazing to see all of the Highrise condos built here, many of them were built exactly the same as the adjacent ones, and most were a reddish brown color. The condos were in sets of about 8-10 buildings, all the same. Michael kiddingly told us that you could not drink to much here because you would have a hard time finding your condo building since many of them were exactly the same. We could see they were numbered on the outside, but it was amazing to see so many together that were identical, I guess that saves on construction costs.
We finally made it to the old city area of Quanzhou, and it was packed with people. This was the third day of the National Holiday week, and everyone was taking advantage of being off for the week. The traffic was really heavy and it took us a long time to get to our first stop, a Buddhist Temple.
We all got off the bus and had to walk down a very busy pedestrian street packed with people. It was tough to keep up with our guide, she was moving through all of the people, and we were having a difficult time maneuvering through the crowds. Plus, we were trying to take some photos along the way. Our local guide was in front with a Viking sign, and Michael was in the rear trying to keep us all together. We were using the audio vox system, so we could hear him giving us directions, but sometimes it was just hard to keep up with the guide in the front. Quanzhou was not going to be easy with all of the crowds, and having people in our group that were walking slowly did not help.
We were amazed at how crowded it was today. We finally made it to the temple and got in line to go in. First, Michael counted us all to make sure were all here, and that was the first of many counts he did for the day.
We headed into the temple and there were about 5 different Buddha statues inside, all with different hand and face gestures.
The one big difference with this temple was that there was only one major building devoted to Buddha at this temple, most of the other Buddhist temples we had been to had at least five different temple buildings on the grounds, with the last one being the most important. Here, there was only the one for some reason. However, there were some large stone pagodas in the gardens and some other smaller buildings on the grounds.
We did not stay long, we needed to leave to head for our lunch, about a half-mile walk away. Of course, we had to walk down another very busy pedestrian street, and people were everywhere. All along both sides of the street were places to eat, and it was amazing to see the different foods, There were tanks of fresh live fish to choose from to eat, and many places serving skewers of different meats, or what looked like meats.
It was a long walk, mostly because of the crowded streets, but we finally made it to the restaurant and headed up to the second floor. There were three tables set up for our group, and we all sat down and had some refreshments. There was beer, water, and cokes.
It was not long before they brought out the food, It was hard to serve because they set all of the food into the middle of the table, and we were seated on the end. It was family-style, so we had to pass all of the dishes around to eat them. They did not bring all the food out at once, it was one dish at a time. It was just harder to eat that way. The food was good, and we will add more details on what we ate later, I hope. I think Stephanie took a picture of the menu.
After we finished lunch, we had to walk about three blocks to the pick-up point for the bus, Unfortunately, we had to wait about thirty minutes for the bus to get through all of the traffic. It was fun waiting there, we had a couple of families also waiting nearby and they wanted pictures with us,
There was one family that had three fairly young children and they could all speak great English. The children had been taught English since they were one year old. Stephanie shared some of her stickers with them, and they really enjoyed that. At first, the children were shy and would not speak any English, but after they got stickers, they were talking non-stop.
The traffic was really heavy and it took at least 25 minutes before our bus finally arrived and we were able to board.
The next stop was the Taoist Temple. Taoism, also known as Daoism, is different form of religion in China, it is based on the balance of life, the yin and yang. Here is an excerpt from National Geographic defining this religion.
Taoism has been connected to the philosopher Lao Tzu, who, around 500 B.C.E., wrote the main book of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching. Taoism holds that humans and animals should live in balance with the Tao, or the universe. Taoists believe in spiritual immortality, where the spirit of the body joins the universe after death.
It took about 30 minutes in the traffic to arrive at the temple, and of course, it was crowded. Luckily, there was some road construction going on out front and one of the lanes was blocked for that, so that gave the buses a place to park nearby to the temple.
There was only one main building here, but t was divided into different sections. Our guide Michael took us over to the side of the main building and gave us some information on the temple before releasing us to explore on our own. There was a big area for burning incense out front, and then an even larger area for placing the partially burned incense sticks into to burn them the rest of the way. There must have been something else besides just incense sticks burning in that cauldron, it had a large, continuous fire in it, and there was an attendant nearby to occasionally stir it up. Needless to say, there was a lot of smoke in that area. It was in front of the main section of the building.
There was also a table with baskets and bins on it and people were placing bags full of items inside the plastic bins. We asked Michael later what this was and it was offerings to the gods, and any food left here would later be distributed to the elderly.
We tried to walk through the building, starting on the far end. It was difficult to figure out what exactly some of the smaller areas inside the building were for, but people were praying inside each area, and in one, there were some wooden sticks and red items painted on the side that people were getting to place on the altars.
Each section was connected, and we went through each one, coming out at the end near to where we had initially left from, and we connected back up with Michael there. While we were waiting for everyone else to finish and meet back here, we walked to a couple of stores nearby. They were specifically stocked with items for sale that were being used at the temple, such as all of the different sizes and types of incense stick. There were several statues inside, and outside were racks holding the various sized incense sticks, some of them were really large, about 3-4 feet long and about ½ inch in diameter. They were decorated and sold in a bundle of three, which is how most of the incense is burned when people are praying, they burn three at a time.
Once everyone was back together in our group, and Michael verified no one was missing, we started to walk toward the Grand Mosque, which I believe Michael said was the oldest mosque in China. There was a long line of people waiting to get inside, but we were able to skip that line and go inside without waiting.
Once inside, we headed to an old section of the original structure, some of which was supposed to be original, but some of it was rebuilt. It was an open grassed area inside. Then we headed over to the current mosque, which was just a small plain building.
The entire mosque was very unimpressive, and Stephanie and I wondered why we had even visited here, other than it was supposed to be “old”. To us, it had been a waste of walking and time to see it, and were surprised at the long line of people who were waiting to pay to get inside.
We had to walk back to the temple to get to our bus that was still parked outside.
Once on the bus, we started the drive to The Luoyang Bridge, also known as Wan’an Bridge. The bridge was made out of stone, and is situated at the mouth of Luoyang River near the ocean. It was completed in 1069. Of course, there was still a lot of traffic. It took about 45 minutes to drive there, and then about 20 more minutes to get into a parking lot to park the bus. It was really cloudy by now, and it was getting late in the afternoon, so there was no sunshine at all.
We had to walk about 200 meters to the bridge from the parking lot, stopping off at a restroom on the way. Once everyone was at the bridge, they let us go on our own for 20 minutes to walk on some of the bridge and to visit some of the local artisans selling their goods nearby. Of course, there were a lot of people here just like everywhere else we went today.
We only walked about 1/3 of the way across the bridge to an area with a building. From there, the bridge continued on to the other side. It looked like this area was a small island. The tide was low, and there were a few women out in the marsh mud flats gathering something up from the mud, and we assumed it was clams. The mud was alt least 2.5 feet deep, and this one woman walked through it like it was nothing special, I don’t think she was wearing anything on her legs, just shoes on her feet.
We had seen some people shucking raw oysters at one of the vendors on the way walking to the bridge, the oysters were extremely small and I am sure they would make us sick if we even tried to eat one, I guess these people are used to the bacteria.
Next we spent a few minutes looking at the items being sold by the various vendors. There was one street lined with vendors selling all kinds of items from food to jewelry.
We were out of time and did not want to be late, so we headed back to the bus, making one last stop at the restroom since we had about a 90-minute drive to get back to the ship. Everyone got back on time but one man, he had forgotten to use the restroom, and now had to walk quite a distance there and back, so that took over 10 minutes, people just don’t pay attention to instructions.
It was getting dark by now as we started the drive back to the ship in Xiamen. We did make one stop after driving about 40 minutes. We stopped at the same service station on the highway for a restroom break. Once that was done we still had over an hour to drive to get back to the ship.
It was a quiet drive since it was dark outside and everyone was tired. Michael did fill us on a few things about China and the cities we visited today as we drove back. We finally arrived at the ship and it was around 7:30 PM. Our 8.5-hour excursion had lasted almost 11 hours and we were sure it was due to all of the delays for traffic and the crowds from it being the National Holiday week.
Once we were back on the ship, we dropped off our gear and then had a glass of wine at the Library Bar to relax after the long day. After the wine, we headed up to the World Cafe for dinner at the buffet, too tired to do anything else.
After dinner, we headed to the pool deck area, they were having a dancing under the stars event. We did not stay long, it was a little loud. We did walk up on the outside decks to take pictures of all of the lighted buildings in
Xiamen and ran into a couple we had met before on this cruise that were also on our tour today and are from Bluffton, SC. We talked with them a bit as we watched some type of event going on at the port terminal on an outside deck just across the dock from the ship. It was some type of event for the National Holiday.
Afterward, we headed back to the Library Bar and met up with Mel, someone we had talked with several times before while at the bar. He was talking with a younger couple from Romania. We spent about an hour there having a fun discussion about nothing in particular.
We headed back to the cabin. The ship was scheduled to leave around 11:00PM, so we spent some time out on the balcony watching us leave port. It was a long way out to the ocean, longer than our glass of wine was lasting. Stephanie headed up one deck up from our cabin to the Explorer’s Bar to get us another glass of wine to enjoy as we continued to head out to the ocean. We could see a lot of the shoreline as we sailed out the fairly narrow inlet. It was easy to spot several large power plants built along the water. There was also a lot of ship activity around us, and it was amazing to see how many side channels there were branching out from the main channel we were sailing through. We did not last much longer outside, it had been a long and tiring day, so we headed to bed.
At least we have a sea day tomorrow to rest.
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