Yangshuo
Pictures: First Day, Second Day
Yangshuo was one of the most naturally beautiful places I've ever been.
Jenn and I got there Friday morning around 7:30AM, off of a sleeper bus from Shenzhen. Niether one of us had slept very much on the bus, and we mainly wanted to find a cheap place to stay and a bed for the next couple of hours. However, we ended up going in the opposite direction from where the hostel was, ironically, just down the street and wandered in a loop in the opposite direction. Along the way we stopped in at various hotels to compare prices, found the Bank of China, and generally just stared around at the shops, the people on bicycles, motorbikes, carrying loads of various things hanging off either ends of a bamboo stick, etc. It was a view of a more rural Chinese life than what I'd seen in Beijing.
Eventually, right after we'd come back and passed the place where the bus dropped us off, we spotted the words "Youth hostel" on a building across the square. It turned out to be what we'd been looking for, $15RMB($1.80US) a night for each of us for a double room with a private bathroom with a western toilet. The room smelled a little funny, but it didn't bother me. Did I mention the western toilet?
While we were registering we also booked a boat tour for 2PM later that day, at $50 each, and then went to our room to get a couple hours of sleep. Around 12PM we emerged again and went to find some money and some food. I cashed a travelors check at the Bank of China we saw earlier and we stopped at one of the many little noodle soup restaurants around Yangshuo for $3($.35US) miantang that was quite good.
We returned to the hostel around 1PM, and the guy who had booked us for the tour told us how to reach the small village where we were going to take our boat tour from, Xingjing. We took a minibus there for $5 each and when we got off a woman was there asking if we were from the hostel, and then she took us to the boat (after she finished her noodles and we had some tea).
The tour itself was pretty cool, I've never seen mountains like they have in that area. They're more like huge, stone fingers pointing up to the sky and covered in trees than any mountains I've seen before. The river was also very nice, peaceful and calm, and the reflection of the mountains in the water was just beautiful. It was also interesting to see the local people along the rivers, cleaning clothes, shoveling dirt, gathering seaweed from the river on bamboo rafts, etc. It felt like a completely different world.
Once we were back in Xingjing we stopped for coffee, then were guided back to the mini-bus to return to Yangshuo. An hour later we started shopping on Xijie (West Street), which is the main shopping market/foreigner area/bar area. It's not very long, as Yangshuo really isn't that big, but it took us a few hours to look at everything and buy what we wanted. We stopped at the 7th Heaven Cafe (and hostel) for dinner, which was decent western food, before returning to the hostel and going to bed early, after we had booked a bike tour ($50 each) for the following day at around 9AM.
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I felt like a little kid again the next day when I rode my rented ten-speed behind our tour guide on his rickety, old bike through town and into the countryside. Yet though the dirt roads and cultivated fields of this part of rural China seemed very similar to where I grew up in the Catskills of New York, there were some noticeable differences. The fields were cultivated as far as the eye could see, with workers dotting the fields in the distance, tending to their crop. They had old mud-brick houses instead of modern American houses with shingled roofs and it was very odd to see so many people within just a mile in such a rural area, which gave me some comprehension of just what it meant for China to have a population of 1.3 billion. It also clarified why the Chinese had not upgraded the technology of their farming; they had no need or desire to. With so many hands available to work the fields, and in need of a job, they had no need for tractors and other such machines our farmers here use as a necessity.
After our guide unsuccessfully tried to talk us into a separate cave tour at some local caves we stopped for lunch at a little hut by a side road off the major highway and enjoyed freshly cooked food. I don't remember what the dishes were, only that they were delicious and we had far too much food for three people. When lunch was finished, we continued biking, though on the highway now back to town, with one stop at some butterfly cave/garden place (that I wouldn’t recommend you see if you ever visit Yangshuo and take the bike tour). Overall the trip took about four hours, and my sore backside was more than happy for me to give my rented bike back to the nice lady who owned it. From there we picked up our stuff and headed to the mini-buses that went to Guilin.
A couple hours and $20RMB later we were dropped off, well, somewhere in Guilin. We hadn’t thought to bring a map of the area, but with my limited Mandarin skills (and about two hours of wandering around), we managed to make it to the bus station that had buses back to Shenzhen where we go over the border back to Hong Kong. We didn’t explore Guilin any more due to our heavy bags and the fact that we hadn’t see anything interesting during our lost wandering, just bought our tickets and waited until our sleeper bus arrived to take us back to Shenzhen.
Posted by blablues at November 24, 2002 05:18 PM
