Shen Zhen - Lian Hua Shan Park

Not expecting to be getting my China visa so quickly, I had no real solid plan on what to do throughout my Christmas holiday. When I received the visa I had a very brief plan where basically I would visit the greenest looking areas located around Shen Zhen. I had a local Chinese friend who was my school mate from back when I was taking a post grad course that I had dropped out from years ago. He accompanied me during my trip, and he was the only person between us who could speak Mandarin, and he was also the only one who had access to the internet between us. Basically I was pretty dependent on him during this trip. 😅

Unlike my trip to Japan, Shen Zhen was not as tourist friendly. Lets say they did not have dedicated tourist centers or city maps that were available throughout the city. This was my first reason to why I was dependent on my friend, because without any kind of map I felt completely lost. To add to our difficulties his Google maps app was not functioning very well, at the least until we realized his apple map worked better. The map was also crucial because unlike the cities that I was used to such as Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul or Hong Kong, Shen Zhen was not very tightly packed, and things were very well spread out. It made me realize why the people here biked so much. 

The place that we had decided to visit was a place called Lian Hua Shan Park. It was located near the main business district of Shen Zhen, but we had underestimated the distance between where we were and the actual location, so it took us about 30 minutes to walk there. 

When we arrived at the park we were not expecting much, because the weather was really poor on this day, so we did not look forward to much of a view. Honestly speaking what I captured on camera was fine, but I was a little disappointed when we got to the area where we could get a nice view of the city. It was either way too foggy, or too polluted, or just both. Maybe I can come back on another day to get a better experience on the view.