To get to Yangshuo you get off the train in Guilin, pronounced something like ‘Gway-lin’ at 1.30pm, rolling on the way into the station past a large number of Army vehicles strapped to flatbeds on the other train line, with their drivers standing behind the trucks showering out of water tanks. Then you get into another minibus (Intrepid loves hiring those; just like Tiggers hiring minibuses is what they do best). The minibus takes you the last hour and a half to Yangshuo.
And then it’s 3.30pm and time to check-in. Most of the morning on the train was spent catching up on sleep; or that’s what I was doing in between starting one of the two books I bought with me and have hardly touched so far. We were promised a unique landscape in and around Guilin and Yangshuo, and that’s what we got. The region is basically the opposite of Lake Baikal. There, the lake was created by one tectonic plate sliding under another, forming the wedge-shaped lake. Here, large and oddly shaped limestone karsts have been pushed up through the earth by tectonic rumblings below.
And what’s more important, when we got off the bus in the Yangshuo, with three days of not much planned ahead of us, we had t-shirt weather and blue skies to contend with. The town feels more like a town than a city, even thought Lilian had told us on the train that it was quite small; in China that means 300,000 people. There is one main tourist street (West St) and other than that it just looks like a regular town. Adam came to China 8 years on a previous holiday and says that West St has changed quite a lot; and there are indeed quite a few electric and neon signs on restaurants and shops that I cannot imagine were always there.
Our ritualistic orientation walk took us down West St through the shops and restaurants and markets to the river, then back up another street of shops and restaurants which led back to West St. All of which were within 1km walk. Everyone noticed that while you would get offered products and touted at on the street, they were far less persistent than in Shanghai. In Shanghai if you turned your head or took the time to say ‘You can see that I’ve already got a watch, can’t you?’ that was clearly cause to follow you for the next 100 metres trying to make the sale. Thereafter the strategy was to deter this behaviour by offering 1 yuan, sometimes 2 if you felt humorous, for whatever was being sold.
‘No no not 1 yuan, 80, OK you buy for 80?’
‘OK. 2 yuan.’
And that does the trick. Although observant osbervers observed two things; firstly street salespeople and touts did bother Lilian as well, not just the tourists, and she dealt with by looking straight through them as though their parents were glassmakers. Her success rate was somewhere between 99% and 100%.
I’ve left it ’til now to reveal that our hotel was genuinely named ‘Fawlty Towers Hotel’. But there was really nothing faulty, or even fawlty, about it. Comfortable rooms, reasonably priced washing available via reception, and they let us plug the broadband cable from the back of one of their computers into our laptop, which makes things much easier.
For dinner Lilian took us to a restaurant with tables set up near the lake and I don’t recall anyone saying anything other than ‘That was fantastic’. Fish cooked in a beer sauce is a specialty in Yangshuo and I’m assured that it’s top-notch, although I didn’t try any. I was busy enough with the braised eggplant and spicy green breans, as well as some garlic broccoli and spicy tofu that was going around. Lilian, throughout the tour, did a great job of ordering to suit everyone’s tastes, and also the whole group were very courteous about sharing the vegetable dishes.
Actually there was a sort of a ‘fracas’ in our group lunch in Shaghai when our meal included two huge bowls of Tofu soup, which is a concoction of tofu, chinese cabbage and noodles. Sounds average but I can promise you it isn’t. Normal procedure at a Chinese restaurant is that all the food and bowls of rice go in the middle of the table, and everybody picks and chooses and shares. A lot of the time there is even a large rotating glass plate so you play ‘Dinner DJ’. And pretend like you’re going to shake someone’s beer over. And so forth.
So yes… people were only too happy to ‘share’ the tofu soup, and that didn’t get ordered again after Shanghai.
After dinner I couldn’t resist getting the mini tripod out of my bag and setting it up on the railing for some pictures of the lake and hills and that type of thing; one short walk around the shops at night later we retreated to our hotel room.
Greg
