Yangshuo rocks
Trip Start
Feb 29, 2004
1
31
33
Trip End
Nov 24, 2004
Yangshuo,
China
Friday, November 19, 2004
GUILIN & YANGSHUO
After two days of incessant rain in Shanghai, I got a soft sleeper berth on the train to Guilin, 1700km southwest of Shanghai for about 500 yuan; a journey of 28 hours, the longest I've been in a train. I could have flown, but would have landed in equally foul weather and would have been confined to a hotel room for a day... so I used the time to sleep long and proofread my writing job.
On arrival in Guilin, I hopped on the bus to Yangshuo, one hour south, which lies in the middle of China's most typically Chinese landscape. Look at any old bit of kitschy Chinese pottery and you'll see a farmer with a funny hat holding a bamboo pole and standing in a boat in a river, surrounded by rounded, tall mountains sticking up from the otherwise flat landscape. That's what Yangshuo is all about, and it has dome such a good job of attracting foreigners that its one main street (coincidentally called Xi Jie - 'West Street') is lined with cheap guesthouses, bars and shops with silk, clothes and more CDs and DVDs. Similarly to Lijiang and Dali, it's a great place to crash for a few days and do nothing much except wander or bike around.
Most Chinese tourists by the way really get ripped off here - they are all kept in big hotels in Guilin, which is expensive for Chinese terms - and get bundled on the 500 yuan (!) boat ride along the beautiful Li river, leaving them just an hour or two to wander around in Yangshuo (blinking bewilderedly at all the slacking foreigners hanging out on the terraces) before they get herded on to their tourbuses back to Guilin.
It was here that I met two loud and friendly Dutch girls, one of which who was celebrating her birthday that evening. I got some Great Wall wine and dug up the last two stumps of candle that I have been dragging with me since leaving India (no power cuts in China) and ceremoniously sent them up in smoke in a French restaurant.
I met Ronald, a Dutchman who was based here, doing tours for Dutch travel companies, and we got asked by to help out by volounteering to teach English to a school in an isolated village where foreigners hardly venture. This effort is run by an elderly Canadian called Laurie who thought his retirement time would be spent better doing projects like this. He told me that as a young soldier he was parachuted into Holland and helped the Dutch resistance in World War 2 - wow.
The teaching sounded interesting to me, so the next day we got on a bus to a village 20 minutes away, where a few teachers were waiting us up on their motorbikes; it was another 10-minute ride along a gravel path to the village school, a soulless concrete block with bare, barely heated classrooms. However, in the teachers' room stood a foreign-funded computer and a widescreen TV with DVD player, and these gadgets were switched on in our honour. The kids were excited to see us, and all of them (70!) sat in a wide circle around us while we practised the names of colours, body parts and a song (happy birthday being the only simple one we could remember; teaching them 'My bonnie is over the ocean' proved a bit too difficult).
The teacher here was surprisingly good; young, modern and actually able to speak English - Laurie said that often their English is appalling. At the end of the session the kids could come and ask us questions, but as they had only had English lessons for a month or two, it was limited to the older girls gigglingly coming up to us and doing the hellohowareyou-whatisyourname-Imfinethanks-goodbye routine. Still, we all had a blast, some of the kids visibly enjoying speaking a funny language and actually being understood (I have the same feeling trying to speak Chinese).
Renting a mountain bike, I pedalled around the valleys surrounding Yangshuo, going from major tourist sights like Moon Hill (a limestone mountain with a big hole in it) to undisturbed mud villages along sandy paths that no tourbus ever reaches. The landscape was stunning; green fields and rice paddies surrounded by soaring rocks.
On my last day, I headed out by bus to Xing Ping, a traditional village with a fabulous wooden main street and a new town stuck to it. It's on the banks of the Li river just at the point where the Li decides to wind itself most sensually in the gorges between the limestone rocks. I was happy to notice that the condition I'm in hasn't deteriorated too much since my Himalayan hiking; I was able to climb up the 1500 steps leading to a pagoda a viewpoint 200m above the valley in 14 minutes. At the top, I sat in the sun for an hour overlooking the beautifully mad landscape, the river and the dozens of tourist ferries chugging upstream to Guilin. A wonderful place to think about the nine months of travel that brought me here, and a fitting moment to say goodbye, thanks a lot, and see you again Asia.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Next up: trying to go home.
Currently reading: 'De Asielzoeker' by Arnon Grunberg. By Holland's most promising young writer, not a bad read, very funny at times. Check out his 'Blue Mondays' if you're interested.
