Day fifteen

The hotel is set back from the street, in a little courtyard, and used to be an old apartment building. This gives a very local feel when waking up and looking directly at your neighbors.

Breakfast was great, no buffet, but a "bento" style breakfast, which is my preference since I don't have to make any choices :P

After breakfast, I took the metro to the Botanical Gardens.

Xiamen is an island, and a large part of it is covered by these botanical gardens. It's huge and has a capacity of over 50 thousand people. This is not a garden you can cover in an hour.

There's a bus system to take you around, but I walked instead. I tried to avoid the main road and attempted to cross the garden by using little back-alleys between the different areas. (Think Jungle area, desert area, etc.).

I wanted to take a different exit to a nearby temple (and the beach), but somehow, I managed to take the exact route of trails that didn't have warning signs the exit was closed.

That was an hour wasted, so I had to return to the main entrance. I made a detour to the garden's border and climbed a hill where I had a view of the city.

From the exit, I took a DiDi to an old fort for no other reason than some of the guns were Dutch! (taken from Taiwan).

It was around sunset, and most of the tour groups had left, leaving a nice and quiet fort.

There was a beach next door, where I stopped for a while to take in the sunset.

Then, I continued along the beach to a "hip" part of town for dinner.

(Korean, Bibimbap!, and some egg tarts as dessert)