World China Guangxi Yangshuo

Where am I now?

Yangshuo Sep 18, 2009

The first day in Yangshuo was the most tiring and hot i've had in China. We decided to walk upto 'Dragon Bridge'which is some old 600 year old Bridge. It turned out that the reason most people bike this trip is because its miles away! If i was on my own this would have been very difficult, however, because there was two of us we managed to catch a lift with a chinese man in a Honda to some villege. This was actually a village. You see, China doesn't do small so when Lonely Planet calls something small it is often HUGE but this really was small, just one road, maybe a couple of restaurants and shops. From here we started walking toward Dragon Bridge, i think it dawned on us that the map was very very poor. The direction and map was right but the scale was totally wrong, i think it would have taken many hours to reach this bridge. This is when we managed to hitch a ride with a farmer on some kind of tractor? as the photo suggests it was very primitive and probably had a top speed of 20mph but it was better than walking. We made it to the bridge and decided to try and get a bamboo raft down the river. Maria [the woman i met] attempted to bargain hard but they would not budge from 150. I was quite willing to pay but i ended up having to wait for about 30 minutes. We later found out that the boatman has to pay Y130 to the government for a ticket to take us down the river. This is why he would not move from this price. Originally he quoted us 200 which i think was too much but i would have been happy paying 160 [80 each]. You have to remember that 80 each is only 8 pounds and, although i try to think in local prices, it was cheap for me and a good wage for him.

We were alone for the whole boat ride apart from local farmers and the wedding couple. It was a great experience and one that i imagine is much better than one had on the LI River (from the HSBC advert). You see, this river was a smaller and less popular although the the scenery is just as good and it has the added bonus of having no Chinese tourists. Approaching the end up the boat trip we could see a mass of umbrellas and boats in the distance. The trip ended where the tourists began so this was a stroke of luck, we successfully managed to avoid the floating barges selling drinks and calenders with photos of you on the raft. From this point, the map suggested that it was a 1 or 2 hour walk back to Yangshuo so we set off and turned down a Y40 offer of a lift back [i think i would have just paid]. In the end Yangshuo was miles away and it was, again, fortunate that as darkness fell a taxi heading back to Yangshuo stopped and asked for Y5 each to take us back. I think if we had walked it would have taken 4 hours and we wouldn't have been back untill very late. The Chinese country side is not a place for foreigners at night, not that it is dangerous but no one can speak english and no one can offer you much help. If you managed to get your message across there is no guarantee you will understand their help anyway.

So it was an eventful, fairly adventurous, day but depite this i would prefer to be more organised, at least as far as knowing how to get back from a place.

Today i went to a place called Moonhill, i will add the photos later. There is not much interesting to write about this place and will let the photos "do the talking". Many small women work on this hill/mountain, they walk up and down all day trying to sell tourists drinks [coke, beer, water]. They must be very fit and know a good amount of english, at least in the context of their business on the mountain. I bought some water off one of them, only to discover that it was not sealed. They must just refill bottles and sell them on. I made her swap it for a sprite which wasn't really what i needed right then but probably better than water from a country well!

Last night i decided to try and sign up for a cooking course. I didnt ring untill 6pm so it was fairly last minute. Luckily, they had one space left in the morning session and also in the afternoon session - an advantage of travelling alone is that there is often one space left for many things. The course cost 120RMB and was well worth it. The fee includes pick-up from your hotel/hostel, a quick market tour, the class itself and a lift back to your hotel. I opted for the morning session which meant what you cook you eat for lunch. An advantage of this class is that you do the cooking, you do not just stand around watching someone else cook! The first three meals were what i would class as actual meals; a spicy eggplant dish with oyster sause, beer fish (a local speciality) and a chicken dish similar to Kung Po chicken. The final dish was essentially just one kind of chinese veg stir fried with garlic. It all worked out delicious but especially the beer fish; you can buy a recipe book for Y30 with all the schools recipes or you can just keep a free computer print out with just the dishes you have cooked. If you opt to take a twoday course you get the decent book free. I may yet sign up for the second day because it was such a good class. The cook who lead the class, Leo, was also excellent. He was quite young looking but then Chinese people generally are - i would guess he was around 22-26 but i could be wildly off target. I think i must have been doing okay because during cooking he came up to me and said "do you cook a lot at home?" which i hope implies i was doing good and not that i am terrible!! The experience was made even better because i was cooking near a fairly young couple who were good company, i think they are travelling for around 14 months all over the world.

I dont know what im doing for the next few days, i had planned to try and go to Longsheng which is a base from which to explore hills and hills or rice terraces...may not sound too interesting but i hear its very impressive.

So in the end i opted against the rice terraces and spent another night in Yangshuo. I ended up meeting three British guys from Cornwall who are on a massive trip and had already driven through Europe, travelled through Russia and seen Mongolia before entering China. I have abit of man-flu so have just been taking it easy. I went for a walk along the Li River and i am glad i didnt go on a boat ride down there; really busy and really touristy. The walk was nice though, i encountered many small farms and even smaller old ladies carries large loads over, probably, quite a big distance. At the moment i'm back in Guilin - i have booked a flight to Kunming for tomorrow from here - at the Wada hostel. When i first came to Guilin there was a very nice, very popular bun shop [big bamboo steamers with buns of all types] right across the road. In the space of just 4 days it has disappeared - maybe it was an illegal shop [i say shop, i meant 'stand'] and the government has cracked down for the October celebrations. Who knows?! The reason i decided to book a flight was purely to give myself more time seeing things in China. The train journey between Guilin and Kunming is hard to get tickets for and often requires 4 hour trip to Nanning. The train journey - if you get a ticket - is 20 hours whereas the flight is 1 hour 20 minutes. Even though the train costs 20 pounds and the flight 75 it still seems like the way to go!

i will now attempt to upload more photos...