Travel Photos — China

July 1987:
I entered China at the south, coming up from Macau into Guangzhou.
China is huge. I saw very little, but the places I got to, I saw well: Guangzhou (aka Canton), Guilin, Xi'an, Beijing.

These 2 pics are from a walk I took with a friend the first day or two.

My friend was the center of attention as she took out her camera. The woman in this doorway came to see the commotion and I captured her amused expression as she looked out.

I thought this was interesting. The scaffolding is bamboo.

The woman and boy were walking by this building.

July 12 1987 — The Li River: the most frequently painted area of China.

The people on the boats are cormorant fishing.
You can see a cormorant (a bird with a long beak) in the air between the bamboo rafts. The cormorant catches the fish but cannot swallow it, due to a lose ring around its neck. The fish are collected in the basket.

Above you see 4 boats. Here are a couple up close.

This is the typical scenery we saw from our boat, all along the trip. If I recall corectly, those are houseboats in the photo on the right.

That's just me on the boat, below.

Here's a typical street scene. I don't recall exactly where but it's in the south.

On the left side of this photo you may notice a red fish. That's actually a trash can (rubbish bin). There was a big push on by the government to get people to stop littering (and spitting), so the bins were all sorts of cute things.

Bicycles are (or at least were) the major transportation as you can see.

Below is a bike repair shop.

And of course, no trip to China would be complete without a visit to the Great Wall Of China. The typical place to visit from is Beijing.

The tourist trips took you by for a short visit and I wanted more. I'd befriended a Dutch traveller who spoke the fluently. We arranged a day-rental deal with a bus driver. Back in the Qiaoyuan hotel, I signed on enough people to pay for the rental. We had an excellent full day tour. Unlimted time at the wall and several other stops that our driver felt worthwhile.

While staying at the Qiaoyuan hotel, I answered an ad on the board that called for movie extras. The project was a major motion picture called Capitol Football Hero (English translation) about a turn of the century romance between a Chinese girl and a European Football (soccer) star. I'm the gal in the pink at the left in the visitors' viewing stands.
(I'm still hoping for a video of this film.)

Here I am a the star of the film.
Great outfit, eh?

And here's the Chinese team.

From Beijing I took a train (soft sleeper) down to Guangzhan to get back to Hong Kong.

At the left here is my very own Chinese name stamp. It actually says Zhe-bei-la. It was hard to tell whether it was a literal translation because the man who made it couldn't pronounce the English letters. After all these years I now know David Feng of the Beijing Mac Users Group and he was able to tell me it's a very close translation.

All photos on this page are © Deborah Shadovitz 1987.
They may not be used without written permission.
This page was last updated at 9:32 PM on Monday, October 8, 2007