Bike ride, dancing, and massages
Trip Start
May 06, 2007
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131
166
Trip End
Jul 24, 2008
Yangshuo,
China
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
On Wednesday, after a good time in Shanghai, we moved on to YangShou, a town about a one and one-half hour car ride south of Guilin. About half of the ride was through the mountains where farmers have built beautifully terraced gardens and rice paddies. The other half was on relatively new interstate highways. YangShou is basically a tourist town with two streets (West Street and the street along the river) fully dedicated to selling goods to tourists [they're mostly focused on the Chinese tourists, but they definitely don't ignore the Western tourists]. "Hello, come looky, you want to buy this? I give you good price." After a while you have to teach yourself to ignore them and move on otherwise you'll get tied into their sales spiel and end up talking to all of them that come up to you.
YangShou was relaxing. We found a great little restaurant that we ate breakfast at most of the time and also rented bikes from. (Yak Café) The owner is a Canadian/American who visited China as the result of a life change, met a women [who is now his wife], and then decided to stay. He was a wealth of information and we took advantage of most of his suggestions about places to stay and see. Many of the people we saw at the restaurant were also repeat customers.
On our first night there we just walked around getting to know the city and finding our way around the different streets and tourist areas. We talked to some of the tour travel agents in town to see what they recommended we do while in YangShou. Everyone recommended the "Impression on Sanjie Liu" light, dance, and music show on water. It's held on a private lake and is one of the biggest draws in the area. Just about all of the actors perform on rafts or portable piers on the lake. It was spectacular with just the shear number of performers that were part of the show. Our pictures didn't turn out as well as we'd hoped so I recommend clicking on this link to see some photographs.
Next up on our first full day was a bamboo raft cruise on the Li River. Everyone we talked to about it said it wasn't something we shouldn't miss. We enjoyed it just about as much as everyone else did. The adventure was getting to the cruise and back to YangShou. We were put on a city bus and told someone would meet us in XingPing and then put us on a three wheeled cart to get us to the raft. What they didn't say was that this cart was going to be driving us down a very narrow road with tons of potholes. That was the very scary part of the tour. [It gave my parents a tiny taste of what my many treacherous bus, cab, tuk-tuk, and rickshaw rides have been like for the last 10 months.] The farthest point of the tour took us to a mountain that is featured on the back of the 20 Yuan bill. We can't remember its name and our raft guide made it a point to show us that it was on the bill, but we didn't realize it until we were told the story by a child that had also been on the raft tour. [At the beginning of the ride, the raft driver passed us a 20 yuan note, but couldn't explain to us in English what it was for and didn't even try to act it out. Even at the end of the ride, we weren't sure why we had this 20 of his, since we didn't think he was going to pay us to take a ride in his raft.]
That evening we discovered an amazing vegetarian restaurant, Pure Lotus, the only veggie restaurant in Yangshou. Even Dad, who typically will eat anything but doesn`t like eggplant, loved the braised eggplant dish. And we all salivated over the almond rolls. We were shocked by the massive portion sizes and ended up over ordering like crazy. Luckily they were happy to pack up our leftovers to take back to our hotel for Laura`s breakfast the next morning.
On Friday we went to Silver Cave and took a cooking class. If you've ever done any spelunking, you've pretty much seen Silver Cave. The fun part of it was the signage. We were directed not to "Beat" or "Stride". [The common mis-translations of signs in China, often referred to as Chinglish, was one of my favorite parts of traveling there. You would think that no one in the country has any knowledge of English based on how they seem to translate everything word for word. I took a number of different pictures of some funny signs, so they'll be posted along with their respective entries.] They had the cave formations lit with different colors and overall it appeared they did a nice job highlighting some of the formations. They also had the obligatory photographers set up in strategic locations to take your picture with a formation in the background and then sell it back to you. Dad took advantage of two of them not being there when we were when he used their tripods to get his pictures. [We were also the highlight of a group of Chinese guys' pictures when they asked us all to pose with them and then took a picture just with Dad.]
For our evening activity we went to a cooking class on the southern outskirts of town. We were met at our hotel by one of the school's staff who took us to the big market in town where the restaurant owners and hotels buy their foods. They had just about anything you'd want or desire, including fruits, vegetables, eggs, spices, teas, meat, fish, chicken and even roosters. They also had what, in Asia, is considered a delicacy and westerners don't even like to hear or talk about, much less see: dog meat, both in the live and not live varieties. They tell westerners that the live ones are their pets [but we all know this is a load of crap]. After we finished at the market, we were driven out to the country home of the lady who owns the cooking school. She is Australian and has been in China for the last 5 years. Mom and Laura did a vegetarian option while Dad was the meat eater. We prepared 4 dishes, including noodles with cashews for an appetizer, steamed stuffed vegetables, beer fish that is famous in the area, chicken with cashews, eggplant and steamed green vegetables. Tofu was substituted for the pork stuffing in the stuffed vegetables and lotus root for the fish (Mom didn't use the beer and just gave it to Dad to drink). [While this cooking class was better than the one I took in Laos, it still doesn't match up to my Thai cooking class.]
On our third full day Mom and Dad rented bicycles and toured the southwest area of YangShou for about 4 hours while Laura sat a restaurant relaxing and catching up on some internet stuff. They braved the traffic and made it out to a country road that took them along the Yulong River on the west side of YangShou. They found it interesting watching the people in the communities along the river and the different animals that happened to be walking down the road. They even stopped by a roadside vendor and learned how to peel a pamelo, which they thoroughly enjoyed. That night we returned for our second meal at Pure Lotus (the only reason we didn`t go back the previous night was because of the cooking class).
In the evenings, we spent our time at the park near the bus station where we found group dance lessons and open dancing. One night Mom was trying to figure out the dance they were doing and a man came up to her and invited her to dance. He was a good lead and Mom had a wonderful time. [We tried asking a number of different people the name of the dance, but even a woman who said she is an English teacher didn't know enough English to tell us. I also joined in with a couple of line dances that were pretty easy to pick up.] After dancing we went to a massage parlor [a real massage parlor full of loud Chinese people getting foot massages, not a "massage" parlor] and had wonderful foot and whole body massages at very reasonable [aka cheap - about $4 for an hour] prices. In total we had two nights of foot massages and one night of full body along with manicures/pedicures for all.
One of the things I enjoy is signs that don't make sense and China was ripe with them. We found "Civilized Airport," "electrizing," "conf luence" and "SAFET," to name a few.
Next up - Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta Warriors.
