Today we had been promised a much shorter walk.
We needed to get down to the bus station, from which we would get a ride back to Guilin, and from there catch a train to Hong Kong. And even more importantly, we didn’t need to check out until 11.30. Some people from the group said the walk up to the top of the valley was nice (and short), so after breakfast of tasty tasty omelettes we found the path and climbed into the forest.
Each valley usually has a quaint name, referring to the shapes of the hills or something like that. Seven stars with a moon. Nine tigers and five dragons. The lookout at the top of the ‘seven stars with a moon’ has a couple of shops selling the usual whatnot and of course the view is quite handy. Right near the top we met an American man coming back down who teaches law in Beijing for a few months and then sneaks off somewhere new in China for a holiday. He recommended Dazai village as somewhere less touristy, but pronounced it like ‘Dajai’. That’s probably the right pronunciation because in between talking to us in English he translated for his Chinese friend in what sounded like fluent Mandarin. He’s right; Dazai has far fewer neon lights.
It took us a bit over three hours to walk to Pingan from Dazai but it would have taken him a lot more because when we were walking back down from the lookout he was stopped about 300 metres further down chatting to someone else!
At a junction a little further along we started to follow the path toward the other valley ‘Nine tigers and Five dragons’, but eventually turned back when we had walked around three hillsides and still weren’t going up at all, and also it was after 10am. We packed up quickly and Alice went back out to the front of the hotel to have another try at photographing the piles of drying chillis and mushrooms for her wall of interesting patterns. An old lady was tending a child and laughed at her for going ‘snap snap snap’. We’ll show that old lady – when we get back we’ll put together the best wall of interesting colours and patterns…(mumble mumble grumble).
The walk was as short as promised; it took about 20 minutes, and the bus ride was the main event. On the way up the hillsides don’t look so steep or so close to the edge of the road as they do on the way down. A couple of times we got into a bit of a horn frenzy after the driver would try to overtake a slow truck, only to have someone else come around the corner and have to pull out. Or the opposite would happen and we would get to beep at them.
Guilin is a much bigger, shinier and, let’s say, well-lit city than Yangshuo. Actually it was more like a mini-Beijing. And by the time we arrived everyone was starving, and with a slight detour to the Bank of China for those whose ATM cards wouldn’t work in the banks near the station on Saturday, we went straight into the first restaurant that looked like it might have enough food.
The train didn’t leave until 9.30pm so we got free time in the afternoon to wander. We sat near the pagodas by the lake, twiddled our thumbs and waited for lunch to start having an effect, and then bought an ice cream and wandered back and forth in the main cross-shaped shopping streets, where we encountered other bunches of people from our group doing the same.
‘Anything interesting up that way?’
‘No, don’t go that way. It’s a trick.’
In the mini-market where we bought some train food they had packets of stuff labelled ‘Instant tofu pudding’. The ingredients on the back were; Tofu, sugar. So for a laugh and to see just how bad it could be Alice bought some of those.
We came to what looked like a main street and on that main street was a large bookshop, perfect for killing time until your train arrives. Most of the books in the ‘English Books’ section were books to learn English, printed in Mandarin. Those in the foreign books section were foreign books, printed in Mandarin. But near the English books Alice did manage to find a book of short stories by Mark Twain.
Out on the corner we got a cab ride back to the station, and a slightly odd look from the driver, which made more sense when we saw that it wasn’t really that far to drive. We waited outside the baggage store and went and took some time-exposures of traffic flying past and that type of thing. Predictable while you’re sitting in the middle of the road some Chinese person crossing the street will stop to see what on Earth it is that you are doing, so I zoomed him the picture on the LCD screen and zoomed in on some writing in the background to show that it was perfectly legible. He seemed happy with that and went on his way.
Slowly the group arrived at the station, most of them having walked back to fill in time, and we collected everything and got ourselves on the train. This time we had most of the parts of a cabin, except for a front door, and after settling in we crowded around to watch a movie on Adam’s laptop which then promptly ran out of power half way through, in the middle of a suspenseful part.
Greg
