Day 3 - Onto Shantou

So the third day we travelled down to Shantou city from the resort. The journey took us about 2hours, and (despite the wet weather) the road trip view was pretty nice!

The east coast of China was recently formed (in the past thousand years) from sand deposits on costal area. Shantou is one of the places formed in this manner. When we travel seawards, we are actually going downwards towards the sea, and we can see the rock formations steadily getting smaller as we go toward the town.

We checked into Golden Gulf Hotel. It's an average hotel in Shantou, not one of the newest in town. Here's how the grand hall behind the reception looks like.

The hotel has a swimming pool and the interior is decorated in a classic manner. Overall, it feels like a business hotel rather than a family hotel. But we do see many families staying here.

Two beds and a couch (above), plus reading table and TV (not shown in picutre). Pretty classic business room.

Swimming pool on level 2. We didn't enter as it didn't look that clean. Pools are difficult to maintain properly.

Miniature wine for sale in the room.

View from the hotel room. This view faces the back of the hotel. Shantou is very built up, but it's only the third tier city. Wonder how the first tier city looks like now.

Perhaps the only big shopping mall left here.

Yup, the area surrounding the mall is empty. There were a few other shopping malls but they've been torn down and are relocated to a new shopping district about 15mins away from the hotel. Google Maps is outdated. I'm not sure which mobile phone maps are useful for use in China now.

We took a stroll from the hotel down a couple of streets and came across a shop selling seafood porridge.

Many many prawns!!

There were three of us sharing the seafood porridge pot, they gave us a crab each!! Grandma had fish porridge.

And fried oyster with eggs. Superb taste.

Shop name..

Cutlery wrapped in plastic. They try to show us it's sterilised but we found a cockroach in one of them. So keep your eyes open on what you eat here.

Fresh seafood.

We got ripped by the shop anyways. They charged us RMB400 for the meal. Though in Singapore dollars it's cheap (down to S$20 per pax), they probably earned RMB300 extra. I am interested to know how much they charge the locals.

We visit the mall and had dinner back at the hotel. Buffet dinner was cool, and came with rice and abalone.

 

And there actually isn't much to do after nightfall. Since we don't go nightclubs and don't know where the night markets are, we slept early.