Yantai - The Middle of Nowhere

There are never train tickets available on any of the national holidays in China. You can’t book them in advance (that would be too easy), so you are left queuing for days the week before you travel if you actually want to take the train. So, when May Day came along, my American friend and I opted to fly to Shandong Province. Flying is great because there are always tickets available and you never have to wait for them and there are English-language sales agents (usually) and you can book them online (usually). Furthermore, Chinese airports are all spotless and quiet and pleasant, and no one can smoke on planes, which means that airline travel is really living the high life.  

Shandong is a peninsular province located in coastal northern China, just south of Beijing. Really, we went to Shandong to visit Qingdao , since all of my Chinese coworkers had told me so much about the beauty of that city – the coastal air and fresh sunshine. Not to mention the queen of Chinese beer breweries is also located there, so I couldn’t resist.  

Our first actual stop was the city of Yantai, a place I knew nothing about before we went there. Yantai is located north of Qingdao, along Shandong’s northerly peninsular coast. It was one of the few places with hostel vacancies at that time, so I figured it couldn't be all bad. I used an online site to book the hostel in advance, knowing little more than an address and a few photos I’d seen of the place. 
 
Our plane actually came into Qingdao because Yantai has no airport, so we were left to find transport to up there. We first took a bus from the airport that dropped us off in the middle of nowhere (first of several middles of nowhere of several on this trip), and so we did what any seasoned laowai would do and grabbed a taxi to the bus station. Once there, a tout came along offering a minibus to Yantai and, not feeling like pricing around, we just grabbed seats and hoped for the best.  

It turned out to be one of those minibuses that drives around searching for roadside passengers to fill empty seats, so we basically circled the ugly, polluted section of Qingdao for an hour looking for straggler passengers trying to hitch a ride. When the bus was finally full, we set of for Yantai at breakneck speed, which got us there in about 2.5 hours.  
 
The arrival was strange – Yantai’s bus station was right downtown near the waterfront. It was a massive bustling noisy, insane place with tons of busses, taxis, not to mention people. We had no idea where the hostel was, and the guidebook map was useless for finding anything, and it turned out there was a reason why.  

We hailed yet another taxi and this time the driver, whose lisp and northern accent made him nearly unintelligible, was utterly confused about our destination. We kept telling him that we had no idea where the hostel was located because we'd never been there before. Frustrated, he got on his radio and asked his dispatch where it was, and they were no more help than we were. Finally, I managed to fish a phone number scrawled on a ratty slip of paper out of my pack and called the hostel. A sweet young Chinese voice on the other end informed me she spoke no English, but after putting our taxi driver on with her, we managed to eek out the directions.  

This hostel, as it turned out, was actually in a kind of... suburb of Yantai, if it could be called that. It was about 10 km west of the city, along the coast. There were no other people there to be seen except the same sweet receptionist we’d phoned earlier, and her lack of English (rare for hostel staff) meant we had to deal entirely in Chinese. Luckily, I managed to make myself understood fairly well – thank god for laowai zhongwen. 
 
After a short walk around, we discovered we were very near a kind of recently built-up beach and boardwalk that was home to loads of Korean restaurants. Because of its northeasterly locale, Yantai is a port city with huge numbers of Korean immigrants (and supposedly Russians, although we didn't see any), and we were able to procure excellent Korean and Japanese dinners there. My friend surmised that that particular suburb of Yantai had been purposely built during the bidding for Olympic host cities. Apparently, Yantai was vying to host the 2008 sailing events but lost the bid to its bigger, smarter, prettier, more famous brother, Qingdao. Anyway, it sort of stood to reason that the hostel, which is entirely misplaced there, was probably a forethought for Olympic hosting. Nonetheless, it turned out to be quite pleasant and quiet, and there was an easily-accessible public bus to the city center. 
 
Our second day in the strange city, we walked all around Yantai proper, including the waterfront area where we bought Japanese crepes. Lunch was had in a moderately upscale local restaurant and included a beautiful spread of squid (youyu). We were also served what seemed like some kind of weird sea snake, which was not bad if you could get around the skeleton. Later, we enjoyed outdoor pitchers of Yantai beer at a seaside restaurant under big red umbrellas. 
 
I sort of expected Yantai to be more... historical, but I suppose it lost a lot of its old world port city charm during the Cultural Revolution. Either that, or it never had any to begin with (seems unlikely). A few architectural relics still stand down around the seaside/port, and a few cozy streets in the same area house interesting old buildings and foreigner restaurants. Certainly, Yantai is not a big tourist spot, which alone made it an enjoyable place to be, at least for a couple of days.