The road to Kaiping

Is filled with gas stations and lots of toll booths.
The joke goes: An ABC goes back to visit the village with his family. He sees the squlid conditions and meets the distant relatives, staying overnight in the town for one night because the buses leave twice a day for Hong Kong where you really want to be. When he gets back to the Ewe-ess of aay, he kowtows to grandpa and dad, thanking them for fleeing to America and a better life for the generations that follow. In short, glad I didn’t grow up and have to live there!
That’s the joke anyway. The reality is always a touch more complex. Grandpa passed away in 1995 and Dad passed in 2005. Before he died, he spoke of wanting to visit the village, making it a “family trip” of some kind. It was the few times that he would ask me for advice and took what I had to say seriously. So I began to plan out a rough idea of how a trip back to Hoiping would take place and what kind of logistics were involved.
When my dad passed, I had a brief chat with my Uncle Bill. He gave me some pictures of his visit to the village in 1999 and gave me the address of the family “estate”. Two years pass with lots of issues. Eventually, I passed this info to my friend (and fellow backpacker) April (native HKer and VERY multi-lingual), who was able to determine exactly where in Guangzhou it was, how to get there (basi!!) and had it mapped out on Google Maps. Amazing! And suddenly looks so “do-able”. We decide to leave on Thursday AM after both of us arrive in HKG on the previous night.
After a brief hiccup involving a delayed flight to HKG (her) and some total blurness about basi tickets (me), we set out for Kaiping City from Tsuen Wan on the 0740 basi on Friday AM.

The basi to Kaiping
When we arrived 3.5 hours later, it was just like taking Greyhound in the states. It was all freeway travel, we had one rest stop at a gas station with gross bathrooms and we got stuck in traffic briefly in Dongguan. Might as well call that Fresno.

Looks just like a I-5 rest stop except it’s bigger…

This was the view for 3.5 hours
There are only two hotels that come up on search engines when you type in “Kaiping” and “hotel” into your favorite search engine. There’s the Everjoint and the Sanya.

View of Kaiping, includes free pollution!
The Everjoint (now called the Pan Tower, sounds like a video game) is a tall “5 star” hotel that’s about 15 years old And boy is it showing its age. Decent lodgings though.
About that rating. Hotels in the PRC are ranked by the government (!!) Officially, the ranking is based on the amount of services that are offered by said hotel. Everjoint has a lot of services including: Bowling alley. “Chess” rooms. Beauty Salon. Western and Chinese restaurant. And bellboys that can help arrange hiring a taxi for a few hours. In reality, any hotel that’s clean and in an area where foreigners go magically become “5 star”. When I stayed at the Grand Hyatt Shanghai a few years back, it had a “7 star” rating. I’m sure its gotten some more over the years.
What is Kaiping’s claim to fame besides being the ancestral homeland for so many Overseas Chinese? Well, they make pipes. And fixtures. Anything related to plumbing, they make it here.

The Kaiping Convention Center. What do they use it for? Note the sky and the stuff in it
The actual village is about 30 minutes away from Kaiping City. In the country. Where there’s mud and chickens and fields that get plowed. More on that later…