This day was dedicated to preparing the China-part of my trip and this took me 8 or 9 hours (including eating and the like). The procedure was, to divide the tour from the Vietnamese border to Zhuhai (where I visit Conny) in parts that I can do in one day, then look for a place to stay, check if it is doable and adapt the tour to that. The same with the second part to Xiamen. If I would try to find hotels from 50-150$ per night, this part would have been done faster, but for 3 day-tours, I didn’t even find an expensive hotel. That doesn’t mean there will not be any, but just not to find with my means. Some places, I had booked earlier, because I needed bookings to get my China visa easier, and now the dates didn’t fit anymore, because I must enter China 2 days earlier and leave 1 week earlier. And in three cases, these hostels had no free bed (at least on platforms like booking.com) on the new dates and I had to cancel and to find something new. (And to change the route that I also had planned in advance.) Then I bookmarked the accommodations in “maps.me” on my phone to have it offline and tried to find them in the route-planner. This was “interesting”, because the same places can have totally different names, e.g. Xangxi on the map of the booking is called Zhigong on maps.me.
The second problem was/is that the streets and the route don’t fit together in “google roads”, so you cannot mark the places where they seem to be on the map, you have to mark them, where the route runs – in most cases impossible.
You can use another map-option, but they are less precise and sometimes, they streets you need (and see on “google roads”) are not plotted. Again a problem, because for working properly, the route planner wants street.
I don’t know how the GPS will work in China, I just know that it is sometimes really hard to find places, even with good planning and correct material, as if the owner of hotels didn’t want to be found.
I hope, my preparation was not useless…
In the evening, I made a fast round to get dinner, to buy bananas for my muesli and to visit the night market. This was a depressing place, too far from everything except some empty hotels and too big to be filled with at least some life. I thought I would get food there, but you only could buy souvenirs. I made the mistake to look at a box with green bean cakes and the seller nearly pleadingly told me a cheap price. And I took that box, although I would have enough of these green bean cakes now.
I had the camera with me, as always but there was nothing urging me to take a photo today.