The Hawaiian beach I visited

Hawai'i

The trip across the Pacific was the longest we've ever gone on the ship.  We were at sea for twelve days straight.  Fortunately we had very good weather for almost the whole trip, but I was still very ready to get off the ship when we finally arrived in Hawaii.  We stopped in Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii for two days.  While we were there I got to go horseback riding. It was a lot of fun, and we got to ride around a ranch up in the hills, which was really pretty.
Hawaii is a volcanic island chain, and there are volcanoes on the Big Island that are still active.  One of them, Kilauea is the most active volcano on earth and is almost continuously erupting.  Because the islands are all volcanic, the beaches are mostly sharp, black lava rocks.  One day I went to the beach with my friends and we climbed all over the rocks, but we had to be very careful not to slip because they are so sharp.  We also walked from our ship into the center of Hilo, which is a small town.  We found a market and some small shops before we had to return to the ship.
Hawaii is a very beautiful island, and I enjoyed getting to visit it.  I would like to go back and see other parts of it as well, hopefully some day I'll get to!

The streets of Taipei, Taiwan

Yeliou Geological Park rock formations

Taiwan

After China we had originally planned to stop in Japan, but because of the recent disasters, we had to change course and visited Taiwan instead.  Taiwan is an island south of Japan that has always had a strong Chinese and Japanese influence.  The Chinese claim Taiwan as part of China, but the Taiwanese want to be independent.  It is very controversial, and both sides feel very strongly about the issue.  When Chang Kai Check, a leader of China before Mao and the Communists took over, lost the civil war to Mao he fled to Taiwan, and brought many of China’s historical objects with him, and they are still in Taiwan today. 

Our boat docked in Keelung, a port city in the north of the island, but I spent most of my time in Taipei, the capital city, which is about an hour inland of Keelung.  The National Palace Museum is in Taipei, which is where all the historical artifacts that were taken out of China are on display.  It is a very important collection of Chinese art, and although the Chinese want it back very badly, the Taiwanese are very proud to have so many important Chinese objects.  I also visited the Chaing Kai Check memorial, and the president’s house, and other sites around Taipei.  At night we went to a night market and looked at all the stalls selling lots of food and souvenirs.

The next day my friends and I went up to Yeliou Geological Park, which is on the north coast of Taiwan.  It had lots of rocks that had weathered into strange shapes.  Some looked like mushrooms, and one was supposed to look like an Egyptian Pharaoh queen, called the Queen’s Head.  We went for a hike along the peninsula and looked at the sea and all the different rock formations.  It was a little bit hard to get around since we didn’t speak any Chinese, but we managed to get where we wanted to go by pointing at maps or gesturing.  It was tricky to work out getting around, but it was also kind or fun having to work around not speaking the same language.

Shanghai

At the end of the day we flew from Beijing to Shanghai, a city in southern China where our boat was now docked.  While I was in Beijing it had sailed from Hong Kong to Shanghai, and I met it in another part of China.  Shanghai is an amazing city, with lots of skyscrapers that light up at night.  I got to go up to the top of one of the tallest and see the whole city at night.  It was a beautiful sight, but a little scary being so high up because the floor of the top storey was made of glass, so I could see all the way down to the street 100 floors below me!

While I was in Shanghai I went of a day-trip to Suzhou, a very old city near Shanghai that is famous for its gardens. There used to be hundreds of private gardens all over Suzhou, but now some of them have been opened up to the public.  The ones I got to see had lots of limestone rocks that had weathered into interesting shapes, and they were combined with water features and lots of trees to make a beautiful garden.  All through the gardens were lots of little paths, and some buildings where the family who lived there could spend time.  There were not lots of open spaces or flowerbeds like there usually are in American gardens, because the Chinese have a different idea of how a garden should look.  While in Suzhou we also got to see the Grand Canal, which was built thousands of years ago by one of the Chinese emperors who wanted to create a waterway between southern China and Beijing in the north.  I was very impressed that they could have dug such a large canal by hand such a long time ago, and that it lasted and is still in use today.

Beijing and the Great Wall

The next morning I went with a large group to the Hong Kong airport and we flew to Beijing for a three-day trip that involved hiking along the Great Wall of China. The first day we had a long hike along a section of the Great Wall. Competing Chinese warlords to protect their individual kingdoms originally built the wall. Later all of the smaller walls were joined together by an emperor who unified all of China and wanted to protect it against invasion by the Mongols to the north. It was 8,000 miles long, and there are watchtowers every 300 meters where guards would look out for attackers and light a smoke signal warning if they saw anything. If the wall were transferred to America, it would reach from Texas to Rhode Island.

The part of the wall we were on the first day was one of the oldest sections, and has not been restored like some other parts of the wall have been, so it was dangerous hiking and the wall was overgrown. It was still very impressive, the wall runs through mountains separating the rest of China from Inner Mongolia, and I could see it along the top of the ridges. When we finished the first hike we went to our hotel, which was in the outskirts of Beijing. We went to dinner at a restaurant where we got to try lots of different types of Chinese food. Instead of each person ordering a meal, we all sat around a big round table with a spinning disk in the center and they brought us lots of different small dishes that we could all try. If anyone wanted more of anything they just had to spin the disk in the center until that dish was in front of them.

The second day of hiking we picked up from where we had left on the first day. A bus took us from the hotel to the wall, and we had another, shorter, hike along the next bit of wall. This section had been more restored, and although the steps and paving stones were still uneven, this part of the wall had sides and the guard towers were more intact. The second day of hiking had a lot of stairs, and it was a lot of work to climb up all of them.

On our last day in Beijing we toured the city. We visited Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is a huge open space in the center of Beijing that is in front of the main gate to the Forbidden City. Many important government buildings line the square, and Chairman Mao, a former leader of China, is also buried in a building on one side of the Square. Mao made China into a communist country and led it through the Cultural Revolution, an attempt to change China’s very strict social structure. Unfortunately, his plans were not very successful, and the Great Leap Forward, a plan to bring China into the 20th century, resulted in the deaths of millions of people. However, Mao is still a national hero in China, and there was a huge line waiting to see his coffin. We didn’t get to see it, but we went straight into the Forbidden City, which is where the emperors of China lived until 1925 when the last emperor was thrown out of the city and it was opened to the public. It is a huge area of Beijing, and there used to be certain rooms that only the emperor could go in. I couldn’t believe how big it was, and what a luxurious life the emperor must have led.

Hong Kong

After we left Vietnam, we sailed to Hong Kong.  Hong Kong is an island just off the coast of mainland China, and an autonomous region of China.  It is a very modern city with lots of very tall skyscrapers. Sailing into the harbor was very impressive because there are so many new buildings.  I only had one day in Hong Kong, because the morning after I arrived I left on a trip to Beijing and the Great Wall of China.  I spent my one day wandering around with one of my friends.  Hong Kong used to be owned by the British before it was handed over to China, and so many people there speak English.  This was very helpful to trying to get around, because it was much harder to find my way around in Mainland China when all the signs were in Chinese, and very few people spoke English.  I visited a jade market, where there were many different things made out of jade, and we had to bargain a lot to get good prices on the things we bought.  Hong Kong is divided into Kowloon, an island closer to Mainland China, and Hong Kong Island.  The ship docked on the Kowloon side, and I spent most of the day there, but I took the ferry over to the Hong Kong side and went up to The Peak, a hill above the city from where you can see all of Hong Kong and the harbor.  The view from the top of the hill was amazing!  It was a beautiful city, and it was interesting to see a place that was similar to China in many ways, but also had some differences.