My “Summer” Holiday
After Taryn’s email on Sunday afternoon directing me to my mystery, yet warmer than Wuhan destination I booked tickets and flew out Monday to Guilin in northern Guangxi. An initial hiccup (the cafe we had organised to meet at had closed down) didn’t hinder us from having an excellent adventure.
Monday evening we went out for Guilinese food, which apparently means that stones come free of charge in hot pots. Nevertheless, we now both have an interesting souvenir from China. Could’ve decided to go to the Barbie Bar for a few drinks (only in China is a bar called “Barbie”) but headed back to our hotel instead taking in the beautiful Li Jiang river at night. We had an early morning cruise to look forward to.
Turned out to be not quite as early as expected thanks to the failure of Taryn’s alarm clock (or possibly Taryn but we won’t talk about that). Surprisingly we both awoke at 7:59 am and were ready at 8:10 am for the 8 am start, which thanks to the Chinese habit of being at least 15 minutes late for things gave us 5 minutes to relax and meet Robert, the Dutchman who was also taking our cruise. And to think that we could have slept in another 5 minutes. Anyway, we headed down to the pier by bus and jumped onto the “deluxe” boat to Yangshuo.
The scenery around Guilin, Yangshuo and particularly the Li Jiang river is amazing. The hills are tree-lined and odd-shaped, and I’ve never seen anything quite like them. We spent the first half of the boat trip trying to spot the hills from our map, which are named in the normal Chinese manner. We missed “The Wakening Frog”, “The Nine Dragons Playing With Water”, “The Frog Crossing The River” and the “Lion Ascending The Five Finger Hill”, however we saw three “Grandpa Watching Apples” none of which were the actual hill. Eventually, we gave up hope of spotting anything and resorted to naming the hills ourselves, which we became rather good at. Nonetheless, the cruise was brilliant fun, and the scenery was definitely something that I’m glad I’ve seen.
On arrival into Yangshuo we quickly checked into our hotel and headed to the “cultural” town of Shangri La. As expected, it was a town created purely for naive foreigners. The signs were particularly amusing… you can apparently walk or run places but definitely no striding.
I did however enjoy the boat ride through some nice scenery and managed to partake in the “heel and toe” version of native Yangshuo dancing.
We toured back into Yangshuo and headed straight to the bar. We were looking for anything on flat ground but somehow found an Aussie Bar. Now I’m all for experiencing the culture of a place, but we spotted a Cooper’s Beer in a cold fridge for the first time in a long, long time. So we stayed… and an enjoyable evening was had by all.
The next morning we took in the sights and sounds of Yangshuo by walking to breakfast. It is a beautiful city but a bit too touristy for my interests. I even lost interest in going up into the hills. I was definitely keen to get back to Guilin. Nevertheless, there were some picturesque spots in Yangshuo.
We headed back into Guilin by the 12 noon bus. On arrival, we checked back into the hotel and took a taxi to the Reed Flute Caves, which once again turned out to be a bit of a farce. Not that the caves weren’t spectacular. It was just that the Chinese had managed to turn it into a light spectacular. The cave had some of the most amazing rock formations, but the green, red and blue fluorescent lighting made it all seem fake. That and the 30 other people in our tour group and the made-up stories behind every section of the cave. Both Taryn and I felt that if the Chinese had left the cave in its natural state then it would have been much more interesting.
Afterwards we had an enjoyable dinner, a lovely walk around Guilin and returned to the hotel. I left the next morning to return to Wuhan and the teaching of English students.
