China's Southwest: Yangshuo

After spending so much time in Asia, I've realized that most of it has been visiting large cities, following that modern-day Hitchhiker's Guide, the Lonely Planet. It hasn't exactly steered me wrong, but it does put you in the same place as every other Western traveler. So, I decided that my last days in China (for 2008) must be spent in natural and rural splendor.

Step one: purchase Lonely Planet's China's Southwest.

Sigh.

But really, what else could I do?

I took some time to decide between Yunnan province and the areas surrounding Guilin. I settled on the Guilin area because it seems that the interesting stuff was all clustered within a few hour's bus ride of Guilin, whereas Yunnan is rather spread out. I booked a flight a week ahead of time, and booked my first hotel the day before I left. This trip was going to be one where I shoot from the hip, with the Planet only providing maps and advice on accommodations.

I arrived at Guilin and wanted to go directly to Yangshuo. I stopped by the travel service desk at the airport to find out how to get there, and there I met two others who were trying to do the same. One was David, a Chinese oncologist living in Houston, the other was Florian aka Flo, a German journalist taking the long way back after covering the Olympics in Beijing. We decided to split the 300 kuai taxi ride into Yangshuo.

I knew this trip would be interesting when we discovered that the road to the airport was unpaved and full of potholes. David (who speaks fluent Chinese) negotiated with the taxi driver so that we could take a bamboo raft down the Li river for a price not too much more than we were going to pay anyway. So we agreed.

As with every other travel plan in China, we would find out that we had not asked the right questions beforehand.

The bamboo boat doesn't quite start from Guilin. It starts at Xiangping, a good distance downriver. Ok, whatever. But by the time we get there, we're hungry. So we make our second mistake and go to a restaurant recommended by the taxi driver. Inside I had my first experience actually picking out a chicken to slaughter for our lunch. I went with a server into the back next to the kitchen, where a number of caged animals, including snakes and rabbits, awaited their fate. I selected the smallest chicken, which the server pulled out from the cage and rather preposterously tried to weigh it using a peasant-style scale, literally a stick and some weights. Preposterous, because the chicken was flailing wildly, making any decent measurement impossible. In the process the chicken escaped, and the server ran in circles trying to recapture it. As feathers flew mere feet away from the kitchen, my thoughts couldn't help turning to bird flu. Eh, whatever. If it happens, it happens.

The meal was quite good, but when the bill arrived we found that the chicken and the fish both were priced per jin, a chinese unit equal to 0.5kg. Our lunch ended up costing over 400 kuai (almost USD $60), which is absurdly expensive.

I brushed this classic tourist trap off and we got onto our "bamboo" raft.  The boat was made by lashing several painted PVC pipes together and attaching a lawnmower engine on the top with a prop at the end. The float down the river was very pleasant. The place had a unique beauty to it, with a very Chinese quality. We even stopped to take some pictures standing in the river after the raft ran onto a sandbar.

The raft trip didn't quite end at Yangshuo as we expected. Instead it arrives somewhere approximately in the middle of nowhere, with someone who owns a double-sized tuk-tuk waiting to drive you to the bus station for 30 kuai. The Yangshuo bust station? Hah, of course not ... it's the local bus station in the middle of nowhere that takes you to Yangshuo in a brisk hour. We opted for the tuk-tuk ride, given that we had no alternative.

Basically it took us 8 hours to go about 100km, having traveled by taxi, raft, tuk-tuk, and bus, with an overpriced tourist lunch for good measure. I wasn't too put off by this, because I've become used to it, but Flo was fairly annoyed. This was one of the few times when I have traveled with someone more irritated by circumstances than myself.

Yangshuo is a very strange tourist oasis ... it attracts mostly Chinese tourists but enough Westerners visit that there is a thriving trade in stupid hats and ridiculous clothing appealing to 22 year old spoiled hippie backpackers. On the plus side, coffee is readily available, as well as bars. The bottom line is Yangshuo is not a village in China, it is a tourist attraction in and of itself, and quite comfy.

So, we wanted to get away. Flo and I decided to rent mountain bikes and explore the villages and countryside outside the city. We left with only a vague notion of what was where; we only knew that it might be nice to see the Yulong Dragon Bridge. We biked through dirt-poor villages, the kind built of mud and stone, with chickens and other farm animals wandering around. We got lost a number of times, but anyway the point was to get lost. We biked through villages and rice paddies, marveling at the scenery and the fact that we were actually passing through it.

We had gone a while in the direction we thought the bridge was in, but we were sure we'd passed it. Eventually someone drove by on a motorcycle, and I flagged him down. I was glad that my Chinese had progressed to the point where I could explain where we were trying to go and understand his answer for how to get there. I'm not really good at Chinese, but I guess I can survive with it.

We reached the bridge and chilled out there for a while. The bridge was built in 1401. We decided to bike back on the other side of the river. Again, we got lost and ended up on the other side of the mountains (hills, really). The road really sucked, it was a gravel road meandering beneath and next to a brand new highway. After a rather long time on this really poor road, we came upon a house where some people were digging a well in the front yard, and I stopped to ask them how to get back to Yangshuo. It was not an easy conversation but we did establish that it would be faster to keep going rather than double back.

So, we kept going on the gravel by the highway, which was about 10m above us on an embankment. We noticed that only one car every few minutes was passing by. We decided it would be better to bike on the highway. We carried our bikes up the embankment, over the rails, and onto the highway. It was brand new, and had not even opened yet. It was wonderful. We biked for probably a half an hour on the best conditions you could imagine: a newly paved highway with beautiful scenery and no other car or bike in sight. It was really fantastic. We could have never planned it and after that highway opens no one can do it again. This is what we had come for.

Eventually we came to the not-yet-opened toll plaza and the highway became populated with cars and trucks. It took much longer riding back on the highway than I expected, and it was probably the hardest exercise I had in the past six months. But we made it back to Yangshuo just before dusk, which was a great relief as I didn't want to be biking on an active highway at night.

Back in Yangshuo, we went on two different occasions to a bar owned by an Englishman, the primary attraction being one of the only billiards tables in the city. Flo was particularly interested in playing pool. The Englishman told us he loved living here; that he'd lived here for ten years and was never going back. He did mention that the financial side of things was not so great; he was barely breaking even on his bar and renting out a few rooms upstairs. But he had a pretty girlfriend who cooked delicious dishes for him, and so I guess there wasn't a lot to complain about.

We ended up finding another billiards table at a different bar, and played a few matches there. A group showed up, a westerner who taught English and a few of his Chinese students. The westerner struck me as a kind of creepy guy. Another group of young Chinese showed up, eager to play pool. One girl, who brought her own cue, had an extremely serious air about her. She won a few matches, and then Flo's turn came. The match was very competitive, both were pretty good amateurs. At one point the girl sank a ball which was clearly not intentional, aka "slop." She started to set up her next shot when both Flo and I objected -- slop doesn't count, your turn is over. She tried to argue something about "Yangshuo rules" but we overruled her. She was clearly embittered by this. The match continued, and Flo managed to eke out a victory, at which point the girl began to storm off without saying a word. Again we both objected - "Hey ... HEY! Good match!" She looked at us with a mix of confusion and resentment, spat out "good match" and left.

Altogether Yangshuo was a lot of fun. It felt nice to get out of the cities after spending months in ones with 10m+ populations. Where I went next, Ping'An, was even more remote, though I couldn't quite escape touristy things there, either.