Day 71 – March 27 – Xiamen, China

It started out as a gray, cold and rainy day as we sailed into Xiamen, China.  This is the smallest city we have visited in China, only about 2.5 million people.  It was one of the first ports to open to westerners so there are some colonial sites to be seen.   The tour we selected was Charming Island of Gulangyu.  Fred decided to skip the tour and rest today.  Pepper called me to say they tours were leaving early so Jan ran down the stairs to join her since Jim was not going either.

It was a short bus ride to the ferry terminal where we had a dedicated ferry to take us the short 8 minute ride across the water to the island.  We had 4 buses that were broken into two groups going to each place at different times.  Our group first did the

Panoramic Drive

on the electric vehicles used on the island for transport.  They are essentially oversize golf carts.  They did take us around the island but they drove so fast that it was impossible to take any pictures or really see very much.  The carts left us at the Haoyue Gardens.  There are some small vacation cabins there but the main attraction is a very large statue of Zheng Chenggong, a famous Chinese General.  It was 51.5 feet tall.  We had seen it from the ferry boat before we docked.

We then walked a short way to a spot that had some benches and were given a Tai Chi demonstration.  The gentleman was introduced as the 20^th generation of the founder of Tai Chi.  He was very graceful and used a combination of the smooth movements we had seen before of Tai Chi and also some of the martial arts abrupt movements of self-defense.  Then a young girl demonstrated Tai Chi movements with a sword; she was very cute.

We walked up a small hill to an area that had been built on an overseas Chinese family.  It was called the Haitian Tanggou Villa.  It was a combination of European and Chinese architecture.  After visiting one of the main buildings, we were shown into a small theatre for a puppet show.  They had monitors with the story line in both Chinese and English so we could at last have an idea of what was going on.  They puppeteers were amazing in how they manipulated these small hand puppets including passing items between puppets, juggling, twirling plates on sticks and several other tricks commonly seen in Chinese Acrobat shows.  At the end of the performance, each puppeteer came out with one of their puppets and demonstrated how they performed some of the movements. It was a fun interesting show.

We then walked across the street to a special events center where we had tea and small snacks and a “family concert”.  Our guide said the most of the Chinese families who would have used these villas for vacations would have entertained visitors with music.  We had a very good pianist who played several selections and a fair viola player who also did a couple of songs.

Then it was back to the dock and our private ferry ride and bus ride back to the ship.

The Island of Gulangyu is a national park that is trying to preserve some of the buildings built by the European consulates.  At one time Gulangyu had two more consulates than Shanghai.  There are a few of those buildings still in use today, but the more basic use of most of the buildings are for holiday homes, apartments and hotels.  It was a pretty island and had the weather not been cold and windy, it would have been even prettier.

After the tour was completed, Jan was glad that Fred decided not to go because there had been a lot more walking that the description indicated.