Well, as it turns out I'm a REALLY crap blogger. And apologies that I will not be doing a post entitled: A Hong Kong Christmas Part 2 because Christmas was so long ago I can barely remember what happened!! But luckily for all those curious people out there, I did write a bit while I was travelling around South East Asia during Chunjie (that's Spring Festival). So here goes!!
07/01/12When we arrived at Guangzhou bus station at 11:00 am on 7th January, we were by no means the only ones. The weeks leading up to Chinese New Year are the busiest time to travel in China and Guangzhou, I heard, was the worst city in China for ticket-grabbing. Before venturing into the madness we decided we ought to get some lunch since we were about to sit on a bus for 7 hours. Lunch was had at a Chinese fast food chain called the Bruce Lee restaurant, since the alternative was KFC. At gate 53 there were hundreds of people and I was just thinking - "oh my god." It was 12:30 and the bus boarding when we arrived was the 12:15. Bus after bus arrived going to any place but Yangshuo. We kept hearing Chinese people saying "Guilin" and the woman on the gate saying "mei you" (it's not here). Eventually, only 20 minutes late, the Guilin bus arrived.
It was an uneventful journey, but striking how obvious it was when we had left Guangdong province and entered Guangxi. The villages seemed to have a different character - for a start they were villages and not the odd, built-up but small and empty 'city-villages' of Guangdong. We drove deeper into the province, with a seemingly unnecessary stop in one of these villages so people could get food. Back on the bus we had a man sitting near us who took the Chinese habit of spitting to a whole new level, spitting into a napkin every five minutes, with an awful lot of hocking.
As twilight descended, I was staring out of the window, when ahead a giant shape loomed. It was hard in the dark to make out what it was, but I soon realised that it was just a huge rock, the size of a sky-scraper and it seemed so out-of-place in among the flat fields which surrounded it. From that point on, these shapes kept appearing out of nowhere, until we arrived in Yangshuo, which was completely surrounded by them.
On arrival in Yangshuo, we got off the bus and I remembered then that I had neglected to actually write down the address of the hostel. I knew it was near Xi Jie (West street), but without a map had absolutely no idea where that was or how to get there. We wandered aimlessly for a while, following signs which claimed to point to Xi Jie, but everywhere was shrouded in complete darkness. We walked half way in the right direction - all the little shops along the way were candle-lit and I was thinking this is incredibly quaint - and then we decided that we were probably going in the wrong direction because of the lack of lights so turned around. Then we realised that there had been a power-cut, but did not have the energy to walk all the way back down the street carrying our backpacks so we hailed the first cab we could find - which took a surprisingly long time in a supposedly tourist area. The taxi driver spoke no English, so I explained in my best Chinese that we wanted to go to the En Attendant Godot Youth Hostel which was probably near Xi Jie. We drove to an information point on Xi Jie, where after some searching the woman managed to find an address for us. But tired as we were we had neglected to ask the driver the price before getting in the taxi, so when we got to the hostel he tried to charge us 40 kuai, when we should have been paying 10 at the most. As soon as we were inside, the hostel owner, Zak (who I had had some email contact with previously about booking onward buses) said "You must be Amy!" And managed to negotiate the price down to 20 kuai for us.
When we first entered the hostel, we were in a breezy and narrow corridor, where the front desk was and where Nana the dog lived (a very friendly black mutt) and where the bar was (which just consisted of a fridge behind the reception with beers in it!). Through the door, we came to a very warm, snug common room, with a tea table, a book shelf, two computers and sofas round a table where there were other guests reading or chatting, wrapped in blankets. We were on the third floor in a six-bed dorm and were the first guests in there. Later that evening we were joined by two German girls who were on holiday here.
That evening, we asked the hostel for a recommendation of somewhere Chinese to eat nearby. They pointed us in the direction of a typical noodle-shop of the type we have in Shishan and we ate Guilin Noodles with beef for a negligible amount of money.
08/01/12
I was so exhausted that I didn't plan on waking up early the next morning. Around 10am or so, Zak appeared in the room with another guest, a Dutch fellow called Stan. When we eventually got up, we wandered around the town for a while, getting our bearings and familiarising ourselves with the windy streets of food-sellers, touts and hawkers, musical-instrument sellers and tourists. Everywhere people were squatting around wok-fires to ward off the icy cold biting wind which was sweeping through the town. We found a bakery which did wonderful danta (egg tarts) for 1 kuai a piece and took in the stunning karst scenery which surrounded us. We hired bikes that afternoon and cycled out of Yangshuo to a Karst called Moon Hill. The hills were breathtakingly beautiful and like nothing I had ever seen before. The ride warmed us up no end and got our limbs moving.
When we got to Moon Hill we were greeted by an ancient looking woman with leathery wrinkled and weathered skin (clearly a farmer) and a woman who I can only assume was her daughter. They offered to take us up the hill at a cheaper rate that the official one, and the old woman showed us a little black book full of recommendations for her tour. So we agreed and left our bikes with the daughter, surprised that it was the old woman who was taking us up. She said she was 70, but I would have believed her if she's claimed to be 90. We followed her away from the official entrance to the hill, off the road and she deftly hopped over the wall. I was chuckling to myself about how wrong this seemed, but followed her anyway. She sprinted with the energy of someone twenty years younger through the bamboo and we followed her, until she turned and told us to wait. She ran up to the path to make sure there was no one watching the path and then beckoned to us to follow. Once we were on the path we paid her and she said goodbye. We continued up the path and the hundreds of winding steps, through the bamboo forest on either side, until, huffing and puffing and red in the face we reached the top. And there, who should we find, but Mama Moon herself, smiling and offering us some coca cola. She must have been magic I decided. We climbed the last little bit and reached a stony platform, from which we could clearly see Moon Hill, a karst, the centre of which had worn away to leave a natural arch which looked like a crescent moon on its side. All around us the karst hills were veiled in mist and I felt like one of Tolkein's hobbits! When we had wound our way back down to the bottom, who should we find crouched around a fire, but Mama Moon! She had beat us back down as well as up!
We cycled back to Yangshuo, stopping to buy some strawberries on the way, dropped our bikes off (we had rented them for 10 kuai a day!) and then headed out to get some dinner.
We had spotted a German restaurant as we had been walking around the town earlier and Chris had set his heart on some kasespatzle - and the place also claimed to have a proper fire inside. So in we went. It turned out however that very little heat was coming off the fire and we almost froze. We ordered some beer and some food, which tasted ok, but as ever in China, wasn't exactly what it was supposed to be and was pretty pricey. We then had a drink in a Chinese bar called MC Blues and played a bit of pool before heading back to the hostel. At the hostel, we found the German girls and Stan playing cards and drinking beer, so we joined them without hesitation and drank ourselves into a nice deep sleep.
