Leaving Monday for 6 weeks in China. This years New Year is being spent in ZhuHai. Normally we are in Beijing or some other place. Mary’s sister HaiYan and daughter Yuki are coming to spend the week so a Zhuhai New Year it will be. During the discussion of what to do there were suggestions of going to Hong Kong and Macau. Or going to the local hot springs and sit in hot water with a bunch of other people or one suggestion that got me thinking, that being go to the wilderness. Now the locals apparently call it the wilderness but that is a relative term I think.
The wilderness is an area on a local island that is, as near as I can tell, a wetland preserve. If you leave our apartment and turn right about a half mile up you come to a big bridge that leads to this island.
There seems too be a small village and some other stuff and some open land. Total it is about 10 times the land area of Central Park. But it is not what I would call wilderness of course.
The pearl River delta which Zhuhai is located is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
Starting at the bottom left is Macau at 73350 per square mile, which is just nuts, then Zhuhai which to my surprise is relatively deserted at 2320 then Guangzhou at 17161 (I don’t count Fosan and Donguan but they are about the same, all looks like the same place to me) and on the lower right Shenzhen at at 19425 and Hong Kong at 17273. The estimates of this areas population is 120 million.
With that kind of population the term wilderness by our standards is meaningless but I guess makes perfect sense there. For people that have not been there that level of population density is hard to have a concept of. If I take the density of most of the region of 17500 people per square mile and convert that to more familiar places that might help.
To put that density within the city limits of Portland Indiana the population would be 81375. The current is 6261.
La Veta Co. population of 800 would grow to 21000.
The metro Phoenix area with a population of 3.2 million ( 2 counties of the Phoenix area) becomes 254 million or 80% of the US population. Not much room for wilderness there.
So as we spend the new year in the Pearl River Delta amongst all those people it could be worse. Most of them will be on transportation going somewhere else .