The Hill

Behind the East railway station is a hill, and I've been wanting to climb it since I got here. I made an abortive foray once before, but this time I enlisted some moral support from one of the teachers and we jointly summitted. Which is a somewhat grandiose claim, although the hill was sufficiently steep to make me realise that it's not enough to give up smoking. You also have to exercise.

Regular readers will recognise the top of the Communications Bank building - this picture is taken looking south, on New Year's day. It's still hazy.

There's a kind of feeling that Guangzhou ends at the railway line - mainly because from where I live in Tian He, you can't actually see past the hill that I am now standing on. Here is some of the northwest unseen Guangzhou - if the day was clear you could probably see across to the foothills of the Baiyun mountain - they're over there somewhere. The green building in the middle foreground is actually a shell under construction, wrapped in green gauze to minimise the dust escaping out from the construction. It's not so easy to tell from this shot, but the trees/undergrowth are almost indistinguishable from the Sydney surrounds.

Just for orientation with other photographs, this is the view south again, at a wider angle. Low to the right rear you can see the railway forecourt - looks different during the day, doesn't it? The IKEA building is under the yellow cupolas. The buildings towards the left rear are the rear building in the Concordia compound where I live. The large building to the right of that (behind the pinkish thing) is the Westin Hotel. Note the eucalypt in the extreme right foreground.

This is the view directly North - it is actually possible in reality, maybe not so much in this picture, to see that human habitation is thinning in this direction as you finally reach the outer edges of the city. 

There is a building on top of the hill (actually I'm standing on it), which has been demolished in the not too distant past, but also a few signs of other, older buildings/constructions that have fallen into decay over time, rather than through direct intervention. Something that was probably a water tank. Maybe some old fortifications - although if they were of historical military significance, they'd probably be signposted, and they weren't. The most common sign was "Don't dispose of lighted cigarette butts or firecrackers" - good advice, because in summer it would be a tinderbox.