Shekou Shenanigans
Sep 24th, 2006 by Andrew
On Saturday Gail & I were looking to get out of the house so we took our first trip out to Shekou. We weren’t looking for grandiose adventures, just to get out of the house and chill out for a bit. Shekou is on the far western side of Shenzhen and it juts out into the sea. It took us about 1 1/4 hours on the “express” bus to get there, well beyond the reach of the metro system.
Shekou also the area in Shenzhen where most of it’s 20,000 expats live. It’s queter and cleaner than the centre of the city, where we live. The high expat concentration means that it’s the area in Shenzhen were there’s the most foreign food places. We went to a fairly central square and we could choose practically whatever we wanted to eat from all over the world. Korean, French, American, Italian, Russian, … most major countries had food representation. We chose to eat at Papa John’s pizza and had one of the best tasting pizzas I’ve ever had. You could actually taste each of the raw ingredients used (the dough, the tomatoes, the basil, etc), it wasn’t dripping in fat and was really yummy!
We wandered around a bit. There’s supposed to be some kind of Seaworld here but it wasn’t really obvious. We didn’t care much. There’s a ship there called the Ming Hua. The most intriguing thing about the Ming Hua is that it’s entirely land-locked! Years ago it became part of the Seaworld attraction and when land was re-claimed from the sea they simply buldozed the soil right up to the hull! The ship is now a few hundred metres from the water in all directions and serves as a hotel, a bar, a restaurant, a shop, etc. Quite strange. Still, better than a one way trip to the scrapyard. Adjacent the ship was someone selling the biggest puffer fish I’d ever seen. These suckers were over a foot long!
We wandered out beyond the ship, past the mermaid (statue of Nu Wa) and out to the shoreline. Here there was a brace of traditional fishing boats, still in active service. Here, a bunch of more traditional people were making a traditional living from a traditional trade. The peacefulness of the activites combined with the fresh, if slightly fishy, sea air meant that we stayed here for a little while and just watched the world go by.
On the clunky bus ride home we went past the 1,301-apartment Mangrove West Coast complex which is significant because I was there during the week for work. Each apartment in the 3-building complex is C-Bus controlled and is guaranteed to have a view of the sea. One apartment could be yours for the princely sum of RMB 30,000 per square metre of floor area. Given that some of these apartments are up to 200 sq. m you’ll be looking at AU$1M to buy one. Who says everything in China is cheap!
Google Earth coordinates for the Ming Hua are:
- 22° 29′ 10.83″ North
- 113° 54′ 42.23″ East