The karst topography around Yangshuo and Guilin make it the number one scenic destination in Guangxi province, and debatably in all of China. The distinctive sharp peaks, caves, natural bridges and streams were all formed by groundwater working on limestone over the course of a few thousand years. While stunning, this area is fragile and easily damaged by the everpresent pollution. I had my first look at the region in Guilin, and loved it. Then, I took the obligatory Li River cruise. This was 4 hours on a cruise ship floating down the river past peak after peak after spectacular peak - all the way downriver to Yangshuo town. Most of the peaks have a Chinese name that was settled on it hundreds of years ago. These are names suggested by the shape of the hill. Think of laying in the grass looking for shapes in the clouds. Instead, people laid on bamboo rafts and looked for shapes in the hills. We have elephant trunk hill, demon hill, weeping woman hill, etc. etc. Most require a great deal of imagination to see, and honestly it's a lot more fun to discover your own shapes in the hills. Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.
So, I spent my 4 hours on the boat, watching the hills slowly pass, and comparing the sight to the documentaries on China that I've seen in the past. It was a little anticlimactic. I always thought that it would be so amazing to go down the Li River surrounded by that dramatic scenery. It was nice, but I think that I'd reached saturation point. One can only be stunned and awed so many times before becoming a little blase. I really needed to rest and build up a new store of globetrotterism. I would certainly recommend the trip, but think it'd be better if you don't expect too much.
Lunch began my food purgatory for the next 4 days. The vegetarian option was soup of celery and potato, a dish of fried celery, a dish of fried cucumber, rice (mine had bugs in it), and sweet tofu skin which was pretty much pure fat rather than protein. I was to become extremely tired of cucumber and celery. There must have been a bumper crop of it just recently, 'cause all "mixed vegetable" dishes are cucumber, celery, and a couple slivers of carrot. I really don't like cooked cucumber.
We docked in Yangshuo at around 1:30. I declined the opportunity to take the supplementary tour that would give me, for 200 yuan, a set of watered down, accessible experiences that I could have on my own for 65 yuan and much more personal satisfaction. I found my hostel, the Waterbuffalo Guesthouse inside the Buffalo Bar right off of West Street (the main pedestrian street in Yangshuo). I was disturbed to realize that this was definitely not a hostel, it was a few nice rooms above a bar. There would be no meeting of other travellers in a common room. As a trade off, I got a private sitting room, bathroom, and bedroom with air conditioning and a television. Hmmm. I was won over by the private bathroom, a by now unthought of luxury.
That first afternoon, I mostly spent searching for edible food and exploring my environs and my options. The available activities were: cormorant fishing, hot air ballooning, full day tour to the dragon back rice terraces, the Impressions show on the river, cycling, the water cave, rock climbing, white water rafting, kayaking, bamboo rafting, hiking, etc. etc. This place was fully kitted out with a myriad of tourism options as well as a large expat community that mostly consisted of American and British 22 year olds who didn't want to teach English, but didn't want to go home either. They worked in restaurants, led tour groups, and mostly just got drunk every night, adding to the atmosphere of Yangshuo.
On the food front, the town was covered with pizza and ice cream. The pizza was uniformly awful. The ice cream was quite yummy. I also tried 3 versions of a veggie burger. The best was just a slice of firm tofu in a bun with tomato, lettuce, and cucumber. Simple and tasty. The worst was the breaded, deep fried soft tofu. I came to a decision that I would no longer force myself to eat the disgusting food I was served. I would still pay for it, but if it was inedible, I would no longer fool myself that the few bites I managed to choke down was a meal. Instead, I'd go to a different restaurant and try again. This wasted a lot of money, but succeeded in stopping my weight loss. I don't know if I've regained any weight, but at least I am no longer wasting away. My personal favorite on the inedible food front is the 'vegetarian burrito'. I was quite excited to see that on a menu. Until, that is, I inquired as to the ingredients, "Oh, it is very good. It is full of bamboo shoots, celery..." at this point, I thanked the girl and continued walking. Yangshuo is definitely an adventurous place for the vegetarian diner.
The main tourist area confined by the river, New West Street, West Street and Diecui Street was filled with hotels, hostels, bars, restaurants, bike rental shops, kitch t-shirt shops, shops selling all of the accoutrements of the international backpacking set (i.e. headscarves, flowing cotton skirts, cheap jewelry and indian print tank tops), old ladies selling postcards (quite enthusiastically), old ladies collecting recyclables (often before you've finished your water/coke/etc.), one annoying old man with his wood flute, on which he knows only one song - haunting the first time you hear it, but extremely annoying the 50th time, tour agents, bank machines, ice cream stands, etc. etc. The approximately 6 blocks of tourist area is absolutely crammed full of every possible thing that the residents could come up with as a mode of separating foreign devils from their currency.
As a tourist, I can not be so hypocritical as to deride the commercialization of this small town, considering that I contributed to the problem. I bought silk scarves, ice cream, tours, and bad food along with everyone else. However, I believe that I was one of the few Westerners not charmed by the veneer of Western sybarism over the rural beauty spot. After you've been to a few backpacker hotspots, watching 20 year olds get wildly drunk in the streets to the blaring of outdated Western music loses a bit of its charm.
On Day 2, I took the requisite bike ride into the rice paddies. I rode out to Moon Hill, and the Water Cave (but did not actually go in for a mud bath), then past them on a side road. What I got was an intense sunburn, a lungful of fertilizer and air pollution, and the sight of poor farmers performing the same functions that poor farmers do throughout the entire world. The crop might be rice instead of beans, but the basic premise is the same. A great deal of hard labor under intense sun, interspersed with periods of extreme boredom. The small village settlements were quagmires of stagnant humanity. The rural Chinese are not allowed by the government to move to the city. They are condemned to continue living the same lifestyle enjoyed by their great grandparents. Yes, it's quaint to watch an old man hand till a field with the aid of a water buffalo, but would you want to do it? It's charming that children are running around half naked in the dirt, but is that what you'd want for your own children? Sorry, but while actually riding my bike in the countryside, the heat, bugs and odors made me feel intensely sorry for the people who are fated to live this way. It was a shocking reminder that being born in the United States (or, even better, in Scandinavia) is equivalent to being a SuperLotto winner every day.
Then, I went up above the stink and the filth, and took a hot air balloon ride. Wow! The whole thing takes on another perspective from the air. Suddenly, the backbreaking labor takes on the appearance of manicured waves of green fields. The odor is gone. The bugs can't touch us. Everywhere I look is beauty. The fields, the river, the people so far below performing their miniature tasks. I watched a woman spray her fields with insecticide and found it marvelous. I spied on bamboo rafts floating down the river and was filled with wonder. From above, Yangshuo was a place of mystical beauty. The karst peaks are reaching for the sky and casting long shadows on the toy villages beneath.
I loved it. I was up for an hour, and I wanted to go on forever. Actually, I only paid for a half an hour, because when the tour guide tried to tell me that there was only a trip for an hour, costing 600 yuan, that there wasn't a 480 quai 1/2 hour trip that day, I said, "Fine. Never mind then." The tour purveyors invariably try to pull fast ones on you. I wasn't buying that there was no 1/2 hour trip, and felt vindicated when suddenly, a 1/2 hour trip was available. Funny. It turned out that there really was only an hour trip available. The girl who picked me up asked me to please tell the other two tourists that I paid 750 yuan for one hour, just in case they happened to ask. Yes, I felt a little bad that those two had been ripped off, but mostly, I was happy to have actually gotten a good deal in Yangshuo.
After the hot air balloon ride, I raced over to another tour outfit to go cormorant fishing. I'll admit, I mostly wanted to go on this trip because I saw Anthony Bourdain do it on his "No Reservations" show and it looked fun. It was amazing! I enjoyed it much more than he seemed to. How it worked was, it was night, very dark. About 20 tourists were loaded onto a long barge with a put-put motor. We put-putted along the Li River until we saw a light. We drew closer and came upon a bamboo raft, poled by the fisherman, with a lamp overhanging the water in front to illuminate the actions of a crew of eight cormorants. We drew alongside and that's when I realized that I had the absolute best seat in the boat. I was in front, behind the driver, next to an open window, on the same side that the raft was on. Other people were crowded in trying to see bits and pieces while I had the best view in the house.
The birds entertained us by racing along before the raft, occasionally diving and swimming underwater. For a good 10 minutes, that was the whole show. Then, we hit fish. Suddenly, every 30 seconds, a bird was emerging from the water with a struggling fish in its mouth. The cormorant would tilt back its head and swallow the prize whole. However, the fisherman had a string tied around each bird's neck. This string constricted the bird's throat so that the fish did not go all the way to the digestive tract. Instead, the fish(es) would stay put in the man-made crop until the fisherman pulled the birds in one by one by the string and forced them to regurgitate the fish. The birds were not damaged by this operation and didn't even seem too bothered by it. They all appeared healthy and happy and well fed. Each bird costs $100 US, so the fisherman has incentive to keep them in good health.
After watching the fishing for another 20 minutes or so, we pulled onto a sandbar and were able to take turns holding one of the birds. They have green eyes - green with a hint of blue. They are heavy with webbed feet and a strong grip. The cormorants also entertained us by sneaking up to the basket containing the evening's catch and trying to steal back a fish or two. While the fisherman was forcing one bird to cough up (literally) its illicit gains, another bird would sneak around to nab a fish. Very amusing. I absolutely loved it.
That concludes Days 1 and 2 in Yangshuo. The next entry will cover kayaking, the Impressions light show, and the small incident of the baby cockroaches in the night.
For pics, please see http://picasaweb.google.com/christine7world/GuilinYangshuo
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The Li-river boat is where I met you. The tour was a way for the family to have a day without a need to find another cousin to watch over the older daughter and me, and I myself was also interested in seeing the scenery of the 20 yuan bill, as well as to see how 20 million tourists a year have been translated into a profit making industry. Yangshuo was the perfect answer to that. I congratulated the Chinese for their wisdom.
My experience of the vegetarian meal on the boat was better than yours; I was lucky enough to end in a table of Indians from New Zealand, who had lots of Indian pickels and spices with them, giving them kindly also to me. Everything became delicious. Besides, I am not attached to a particular type of food; if it is non-meat, or even meat in specific circumstances, I just eat.
The 200 yuan additional tour was good. I saw the huge banyan tree that appears in the famous opera-movie Liu San Jie from the early 1960s (even the actors playing the roles of bad rich landlords were skinny then). We took a ride on a river raft. I am from the Lake District in Finland, have been in boats before I was able to walk, so a bamboo raft was interesting to see, and to paddle. I saw cormorant fishing and held a cormorant in my hand. And I spent a long time sitting at the end of the raft, my feet in the river, smoking very slowly a cigar. It was normal tourist bisnes, as it should have been, but I was very happy.
Here I have to disagree with you somewhat: "A great deal of hard labor under intense sun, interspersed with periods of extreme boredom. The small village settlements were quagmires of stagnant humanity. The rural Chinese are not allowed by the government to move to the city. They are condemned to continue living the same lifestyle enjoyed by their great grandparents."
The Chinese system is extremely unjust and unequal, much like a caste system, but the situation is complex. I spent two days in three villages around Guilin. I met there intelligent and inqusitive tiny grandmothers and grandfathers, some born during the Qing dynasty, still healty. There was a lack of men in the villages, because they were mostly working away, some in Guilin, some very far away, legally or illegally. If you make money, it is possible to buy the legal status of a city dweller and move to a city. However, there are dangers to that. As long as you are a farmer, you are guaranteed a piece of land, where you can grow food both to eat and to sell. You change your legal status and you are completely on your own. Farming is poor living, but it is also a form of safety. Unless a businesman or government official finds your home village suitable for industrial or real estate development, or a factory is established near you, polluting you water. Against this you can only riot and be beaten by the police. So the people act as families, some members staying in the villages, some going out to work. From Guilin villages many girls also marry to farmers in Thailand; poor farmers there cannot get beautiful young Thai wives, while uneducated Guilin girls have the small chance of getting to a more open society with more possibilities for them.
There is an abundance of girls in the villages. Because they are poor, and can feign extreme poverty, they do not care about the 1-child policy. They make children until they have a son. There was a family with 8 daughters, and still no son. State officials come to fine them, they have no money, the officials go away, and they set down to making a new baby. The number of girls is much too high compared with boys, so even if Thailand means beating by a cruel husband, or death, it still is a chance.
Life in the villages are not boredom. Women always have work to do, men sometimes work, sometimes fish, sometimes play games, sometimes drink, but I do not think most people are especially bored. Villages are not quagmires of stagnant humanity, and life there is quite different from that of their grandparents. People in the villages have better mobile phones than I do (mine is 5 years old technology, I do not buy anything new until the old breaks down). They exchange a big number of text messages. Farming technology is old, because family plots are so small, but the villages themselves are dynamic in the capitalistic way. Or they die out, and people try their luck elsewhere, or make a suicide.
I never paid any money in the villages, when eating with families, or getting oranges picked from trees, because I always was the guest of a classmate of a cousin, or of a friend of a cousin of a classmate. But I paid with honour. I always thanked in Chinese but bowed in the Japanese way, which is much too deep and polite for contemporary Chinese, but positive exaggeration is perfectly appropriate for a strange foreigner. Stagnant humans do not care about sincere displays of respect and admiration, but these people cared a lot.
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