It takes a few hours by train to get to Dandong. I had heard so much about this place as it is on the border between China and North Korea so I was looking forward to seeing the famous bridge in the center of the city.
I got out of the train station around 9 A.M. and I had a quick look at Baidu maps. It told me that the famous bridge was less than 1 km from the station so I decided to walk straight to the station. As I got out of the station, I did notice one of the biggest statues of Mao that I had ever seen.
I thought to myself that I should have a quick look at the Yalu river before trying to fins a hotel.
As I was casually walking towards the edge of the bridge, a woman came up to me and asked if I wanted to have dinner in North Korea. I was wondering how this was even possible but she did say there was a boat cruise not far from there and they would show us North Korea from the Chinese side. As it was a Sunday morning, I thought it might be a once a week kind of cruise so I signed up and waited for the bus to take me to the pier (码头).
The woman left me off at the entrance to the tourist shop whereupon 4 guys started asking the usual questions..... "Where are you from? When did you enter China? Have you been here continuously for all that time? How much money do you earn in a month? "
Anyway, about 8 of us joined the tour which took us by bus to a shop which sold North Korean goods. That lasted 2 hours. People were starting to get restless and one of the women on the tour started shouting at the tour guide to just take us to the pier to see North Korea. This seemed to make the tour guide very upset but it worked as she brought us to the boat At this point , the boat took us between China and North Korea.
It was nice to go on the boat cruise but it did look like there were not many people living across the border. I guess there would not be too many people living on these border regions anyway.
On the way back into town, I did notice the barbed wire that seemed to be planted on the Chinese side of the river just beside the road.
By the time I got back into town, I remembered that I still had all my belongings and I needed to find a place to stay so I used 美团 to try and find a hotel/hostel in the area. I heard that it might be tricky to find a place to stay and so it proved. I must have asked 6 hotels if I could stay there. The answers ranged from " foriegners cannot stay here. It's against the rules" to "This is only a ** hotel. Foreigners have to stay at a **** by law. " One woman told me that I had two choices, a. Stay at a top quality hotel at a top quality price or b. sleep on the street (but please leave this hotel!) I did contemplate sleeping in the tent that I brought but I tried a few more place and eventually found a place where the owner was happy to have someone stay over.
Actually, one odd thing happened here in Dandong. A guy came up to me and started telling me in English how evil the c.c.p were and he was getting out of here as fast as he could . He had both a brother and a sister in Australia and he will eventually follow them out. This seemed like a very odd thing to tell me but it was an isolated event. In Shenyang, another guy cycled past me and asked if I was a foreigner. I should go back to my country and tell them what has happened to the ordinary people over here. I had never experienced this type of thing in China before and for two people to come up to me in 2 towns in the same province and say this made me a bit anxious.
I decided to head on to WulongShan 五龙山. It is always nice to walk up a mountain but this place had an extra thing associated with it.....flies. The flies accompanied me the whole way up the mountain (up to the point where it was difficult to breathe with the amount of them.)
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