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Practicalities
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Shantou's
long-distance bus station
is in the north of town, at the southern end of Chaoshan Lu.
Minibuses from Chaozhou
drop off a couple of kilometres farther north on Chaoshan Lu, near the TV tower - buses #4 or #7 run down to the bus station. The
train station
is 10km away on the eastern side of the new city, connected to the bus station by buses #11 or #4. Shantou's plentiful
taxis
also prowl arrival points; watch out for pickpockets on local buses. The huge
Bank of China
is in the new city on Jinsha Dong Lu (foreign exchange Mon-Fri 9am-5pm) - bus #2 from Zhongshan Lu stops outside.
Shantou's cooking style is derived from Chaozhou's distinctive cuisine, and the city has a good reputation for seafood and rice-flour dumplings. Cheap stalls and canteens fill the old quarter's back lanes; make sure you eat at Piaoxiang Xiaocidian, a wonderful, inexpensive dumpling house serving local snacks and light meals from inside a former temple just north off the Shengping Lu roundabout (oyster omelettes are a speciality); and Hai Ba Wang, in an unmissable warehouse-sized building by the Huilan Bridge on Minzu Lu - their hotplate buffet 11am-2pm (?35 per person) lets you loose to cook unlimited piles of fresh vegetables, meats, seafood and dumplings.
Moving on
, the long-distance bus station has departures at least as far afield as Xiamen, Guangzhou and Meizhou; for Chaozhou minibuses (?10), you'll have to head up Chaoshou Lu on bus #4 to the TV tower depot.
Train tickets
are best organized through your accommodation, rather than making the long haul out to the station. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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China,
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