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YangshuoOct 7, 2009
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Our chicken dinner
Yum Yum
Cooking school
We finished our boat cruise in Lichang where we spent the night before boarding an overnight train the next day headed to Liuzhou before a bus trip to the picturesque town of Yangshuo. We had a great dinner in Lichang - we ended up with a whole chicken (including head, feet, neck and everything else) tossed in a big bowl with a spicy sauce. We avoided the parts we didn't want to eat but the meat was very tasty. Our train trip was the worst yet. We had soft sleeper rooms which meant 4 bunks per room with a door and everything so we were all excited. However, due to the national holidays, they had to put on extra trains to accommodate everyone traveling so we got a train carriage that looked like it hadn't been used in 60 years. There was no air-conditioning, the window was stuck shut and the fan made a sound like an aeroplane engine taking off. On top of that the train was not overly clean. Anyway, we made the best of it (after all it was only 15 hours....). Macgyver, aka MS, ended up dismantled the fan with a cable tie and leatherman so that its noise was reduced to that of a small scooter instead and he jammed the window up as far as he could with the aid of a chip packet so the heat was bearable.
The train trip was forgotten as soon as we arrived in Yangshuo - what a beautiful area. The river Li runs through the middle of limestone castes (like Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland but about a hundred of them). It is truly a beautiful area with so much to see and do.
Our first afternoon was spent in cooking classes which started off with a trip to the local market to see the produce on offer which included lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, then the interesting things like eels, snails, frogs to the things we wished we hadn't seen, rabbits, dogs, etc. It was an eye-opener. But the cooking school was fabulous - right on the banks of the river Li with a superb view. We made 5 dishes - steamed chicken and mushroom, egg dumplings with pork, pork and vegetables, spicy auberinge and garlic vegetables. We got lots of interesting tips and hints and we will definitely we heading to China Town once we get home to stock up. We then finished off the night eating our creations (which were delicious - even mine) and washing it down with a few beers. MS was the only male on the course - I wanted him to come along because let's face it, I am not going to be the one cooking these dishes at home.
The next day we hired bikes for a countryside ride to Moon Hill. It took most of the day cycling through town out on to small country lanes and through fields to reach Moon Hill. The scenery was beautiful and it was a relaxing way to see the countryside. We climbed to a lookout point at Moon Hill (800 steps) to get a better view and then had lunch at a local farmer's house where they cooked the local specialty for us - beer fish. It was a wonderful afternoon and we even stopped on the way back on our bikes to dip our feet in the cooling waters of the river as it was a really hot day. H and several others did not do the bike ride but they got chauffeured around during the day to Moon Hill and joined us for lunch which was lovely.
That night we had tickets for the Li River Lightshow which was choreographed by the man who did the opening ceremony of the Olympic games so we were expecting big things. The performance was undertaken on the river with the mountains as a backdrop. There were 1,000 of people involved in the performance, with lots of local fisherman on their bamboo rafts. China does large scale productions so well and we were mesmerized for an hour watching performance after performance.
Our tour is sadly almost over - we have an overnight train to Shenzhen and then on to Hong Kong - our last stop on this tour.
