Yangshuo and Ping’an: A Week in the Country

After an unpleasantly early flight from Shanghai, I took an hour-long taxi ride from Guilin airport to the small town of Yangshuo, nestled between the Karst mountains. We drove through small rural farming communities between the lush green mountains which jut out dramatically from the flats in between. Geologically, these mountains are the result of techtonic movements which thrust limestone sediments up from the sea bed to heights of over 200m. Many thousands of years of erosion followed this to generate the bizarre and beautiful landscape of Guilin and the surrounding region.

Arriving at my hotel I was immediately calmed by the serene setting and quaint style of the eco hotel by the banks of the Yulong river. It was such an incredible contrast to Shanghai, and the constant noise and bustle of the Chinese cities I have visited so far. For the first time since I arrived in China over 2 weeks ago, everything was quiet. Butterflies flitted by and hummingbirds visited the beautiful pink and red flowers planted around the hotel. I sat by the river bank and drank a mug of ginger tea, watching the small bamboo rafts sail past. It was as though every bit of stress from the preceding weeks (and months!) of my life immediately left my body. I decided to treat myself to a nap.

CHN_066The only problem with staying somewhere a little out of town, and in such a beautiful, natural setting, is that everything pretty much grinds to a halt when it gets dark. I had prepared myself for a few quiet nights, however, and it was actually quite a good thing since I had some work and a lot of blogging to catch up on. I went for dinner at the hotel restaurant where I was excited to find my first opportunity to try a genuine Chinese spring roll. I ordered some to go with my sweet and sour pork. The pork was lovely, although very sweet. The spring rolls were also delicious, but didn’t particularly closely resemble those that we get in England. I was served three long vegetable spring rolls, filled with cucumber, aubergine and bean sprouts, but the outer casing was more pastry-like than I’m used to. It was interesting to see what the real thing is like; I’d been starting to wonder if we totally invented spring rolls, since nowhere else in China seemed to serve them. I caught up with a little blogging that evening and did some reading before bed.

The next day I had a Chinese cooking class organised, and after a healthy lie-in, I was picked up from my hotel around 10am for a visit to the local market and the Yangshuo cooking school. The market was an interesting experience. The meat and fish is the first part of the market, and within seconds of walking in we were confronted by a huge, decapitated fish head, still gasping for breath (gasping for water?!); a rather upsetting sight, given that as a biologist I’m aware that fish are able to feel pain. Moving on, we passed pig carcasses and other assorted meat items, in various stages of preparation, as well as snails and, a little later, bags of live frogs, eels, snakes, fish…. you name it. I was fairly relieved when we reached the fruit and veg section of the market, and it was interesting to see the enormous variety of vegetables they consume in China. Bamboo in various forms, and lotus root, were a common theme. We also saw a lot of tofu, again in various forms and states of preparation.

CHN_076We then drove a short way out of the town to the cooking school, where our teacher showed us how to prepare 5 traditional dishes. The first, and probably my favourite, was pork and egg dumplings, although they were more like omelettes stuffed with pork. Delicious and surprisingly easy to prepare. We also made steamed chicken with dates and goji berries, stir-fried pork, stir-fried aubergine with ginger and garlic, and some greens to go with. By lunch time we had prepared quite the feast, and we sat down to enjoy our meal, which provided enough leftovers to take a doggy-bag home for dinner tonight. I also finally came across some insect life in the form of some cute furry little stripped caterpillars, which were all over the trees.

Returning to my hotel around 2pm, I got my things together and decided to go for a little wander into town. Strolling down the relatively quiet, tree-lined streets, where the cars and motorbikes drove in a sufficiently civilised manner that I didn’t constantly fear for my life, was a refreshing change of pace. I somewhat underestimated the distance, though, and an hour later I was still walking and starting to become anxious that I’d gone the wrong way. As it turned out, I hadn’t, and just as I was starting to thing about turning back, I arrived in the town center. I had a little stroll down the famous ‘West Street’, which as well as restaurants, is home to a charming street market where I bought a few souvenirs. In particular, I was pleased to find one very sweet Chinese girl who was settling hand-pained glass bottles; the type that are painted on the inside. I didn’t even bother to haggle with her over the price, as she was such a lovely, softly spoken girl, who was clearly a genuine artist; I was happy to pay the 3.50 (pounds) she was asking for a small bottle that I felt reasonably confident about carrying home in one piece. At the end of the street I met the Li river, and took some photos of the stunning scenery. The contrast between old and new is ever present here; the traditional boats that offer tours up and down the river were blasting out techno music, and across the river were several motorbikes and 4×4’s next to a herd of buffalo.

It was around 5pm now, and I knew that walking back to my hotel was unfeasible, so I found a taxi and managed to negotiate a reasonable fee. When I got back, I drank a cold beer outside as I watched the sunset behind the Karst mountains. Early night tonight as tomorrow I had a bicycle tour along the Yulong river booked to begin at 9am.

Getting up the following morning was a struggle, my bed was comfy and I had slept so well in the peaceful countryside retreat. But, I was really looking forward to the day’s activities. After a lovely breakfast, I met my guide at 9am and cycled out into the countryside together, down winding country roads, being passed by the occasional motorbike and some bizarre-looking half-tractor-half-car-like vehicles which seemed to have their engines on the outside, completely exposed to the elements. We passed small farming communities and ram-shackle shops, and after about half an hour we arrived at a small village on the banks of the Yulong river, a little upstream of my hotel. Here my guide introduced me to my bamboo raft-driver, and I climbed aboard. CHN_085 The raft consisted of no more than 8 thick trunks of bamboo, bound together, with two metal chairs attached to the top, propelled along the shallow, slow-moving river by a longer stick of bamboo pushed off against the gravelly bottom. Only a few minutes down the river, we ran aground on a particularly shallow part of the river, and my ‘driver’ struggled a little to break us free. Just minutes later, we ran into a second problem – the local people seemed to be building some kind of dam across the river, a concrete structure protruding several inches above the water line across the entire width of the river, totally blocking our way. A dozen or so men and women were making their way up and down the pushing wheel barrows and carrying buckets of cement. I was told to get out, and watched, slightly alarmed, as my driver hauled the raft out of the river and most of the way over the dam, seemingly at great effort. Once it was most of the way over, he gestured me back onto the raft, and we pushed off down a fairly steep drop, back into the river with a huge splash. Onwards, down the Yulong!

The rest of the journey was far more peaceful. We floated quite effortlessly downstream, past the lush vegetation of the river bank and through the farming communities, all nestled between the amazing Karst mountains. The only disturbance came from other river traffic; there were many similar rafts on the river, mostly carrying Chinese tourists. Some were singing, others shouting, and a few were quite clearly talking about me, which naturally made me somewhat uncomfortable. At one point we even got stuck in a raft traffic jam. Every so often we reached small drops in the river, which generated slight ‘rapids’ which we had to navigate down. They were relatively gentle, really, but felt quite dramatic from the top of a bamboo raft. Thankfully they started out small and slowly worked up to larger ones, giving me time to get used to the short, exhilarating rush through each rapid before returning to the calm of the river again. Finally, we reached our destination, just downstream of my hotel, and I met up with my guide again.

From here, we cycled about 15 minutes up the road to the base of moon hill, a particularly famous mountain which had a huge hole in the middle. Here my guide showed me to the base of the stairs and said she’d wait for my return. I began the climb up over 800 steps to the top. It was fairly hard going, the steps were quite steep and the weather was beginning to warm towards midday. After about half an hour, and a few stops to catch my breath, I reached the top. The views were beautiful. I crossed through the hole (the moon of moon hill) and enjoyed the views from the other side. Of course, no scenic spot (or any other spot, for that matter), is devoid of at least one group of Chinese tourists, so it wasn’t as peaceful as I might have liked. One rather sweet Chinese couple, wearing matching t-shirts (seemingly with caricatures of them on) and matching red puffa-jackets (all the rage in China right now) offered to take my photo and this turned into somewhat of a mini photoshoot, from various different angles and in different poses. Still, I was grateful since as a lone traveller, I rarely get any photos with me in.

After a good rest and some time to soak up the views I began my descent and within 20 minutes or so I was back at the bottom and most definitely ready for lunch. I ate pork dumplings (which seemed worryingly to be slightly undercooked) and rice and enjoyed sitting in the sunshine in the outdoor seating area, which I had almost entirely to myself. That was until a 20-strong group of Chinese tourists turned up to stare at me fumbling with my chopsticks (I’m getting better, really I am!). This made me feel pretty awkward but they soon distracted themselves with taking photos of each other in various poses in the swinging garden chairs before scoffing down an inordinately large plate of snails (oh, and weighing some live chickens….as you do). After lunch my guide and I cycled back to the hotel, this time down the scenic route. We took small winding roads and tracks past a local school, orange trees and strawberry plantations and over a small bridge on the river before arriving back at my hotel around 2pm. The ride back was wonderfully quite and the scenery was stunning. That afternoon I spent a little time photographing some beautiful butterflies in the gardens around my hotel, and had a little nap before dinner (all that fresh air and walking really tired me out!). I was looking forward to a totally free day tomorrow and renting a bike by myself.

CHN_078I awoke a little later than planned the following morning – apparently my body needed a few extra hours sleep. After breakfast I rented a bike from my hotel and headed out into the countryside. I started by returning down the meandering road we had taken the day before, this time taking it at my own pace, stopping frequently to take photos and absorb the scenery, and enjoying the freedom of a solitary bike ride. Reaching the main road I cycled up and down a little trying to find the strawberry-sellers who had seemed to ubiquitous the day before. This was a little more of a struggle than I expected, but I eventually found them and bought a decent-sized bag of freshly-picked bright red strawberries for just 10 yuan. They were delicious! I ate a few and stashed the rest carefully in my bag for later. I headed back down the road past my hotel and started down the scenic route into town. I wanted to try and find a path, marked on my map, that would take me up to ‘Dragon’s Bridge’, a fair way out of town. I got as far as the point where I had boarded my bamboo raft the previous day but I couldn’t find the track that would allow me to continue on to the bridge. I tried to look at my map whilst a local woman on a moped hassled me relentlessly to take a bamboo raft. I tried to explain I’d already done it. This was too much of a stretch of her English skills. I showed her on the map where I wanted to go. She kept repeating ‘bicycle bamboo raft’. Not very clear. I followed her towards the river a little, hoping she might direct me, but when we reached the river she just kept gesturing forwards (across the river but where there was no bridge) and repeated ‘bicycle bamboo raft’. Eventually I got bored, and seeing no way to go, cycled off and instead headed straight into town. It was getting towards lunch time and I decided I could get some food in town before trying again to find a way out to the bridge.

According to my hotel, there weren’t very many legal places to lock up a bike in town, but there was one English-speaking rental place that would let me leave my bike there for a measly 5 yuan (50p). I got into town and after a short cycle down the busy main road (which was rather hair-raising, I must say!) I found a bike rental place, and tried to ask about leaving my bike. The lady spoke literally no English, and she quickly tired of my game of charades and walked off. There were some bikes and motorbikes chained up by the side of the road so I gingerly locked my bike up. I was pretty nervous about it though, and resolved to have a speedy lunch and come back to my bike asap. Having crossed the road over to west street, however, I immediately found a much larger bike rental place, and a nice woman who spoke good English came over to speak to me, I checked with her and it turned out this was the place I’d been looking for, so I fetched my bike and locked it up safely with them. Relieved, I set about finding somewhere for lunch. I wandered down the so-called ‘snack street’, and found a small restaurant called Lucy’s Place, that boasted a ‘TripAdvisor recommended’ sign. I saw they had a fairly reasonably priced beer duck on their menu (a local speciality that I had been intrigued to try), so I ordered that as well as a beer and a plate of noodles. The only problem with beer duck, which I had been warned of but hadn’t fully appreciated the implications of, was that it contains bones. Ducks have fairly big bones, I thought… how hard can it be? Turns out, pretty difficult. It seems that they just literally hack up the whole duck into appropriately sized pieces. Although the sauce was absolutely delicious, I really struggled to get much meat out of it, and tried not to be alarmed by the bones that were very clearly vertebrae. My chopsticks skills are not yet sophisticated enough to hold small pieces of duck and pick the meat off with any degree of accuracy or success. My noodles were lovely, though.

After lunch I took another stroll down the markets of West Street, and the next hour became a blur of haggling and almost constant requests for me to take a boat ride down the Li River. Eventually, I was offered a pretty good price (I’d been quoted 100 originally and it came down to 40), and a middle-aged Chinese lady hurried me onto a motorised bamboo boat with two other Chinese tourists. It was an hour trip in total, half an hour each way. It was rather lovely. At one point we passed a small ‘beach’ on the river which appeared to be the ultimate in tacky tourist traps – I watched from the boat as a man offered camel rides, and a group of tourists got dressed up in brightly-coloured, almost tribal-looking outfits and posed with spears. Weird. When I got back to dry land, there was a cormorant fisherman offering photos of him and his birds for 3 yuan. I paid him 5 and got no change but I wasn’t about to quibble over 20 pence, I just enjoyed getting lots of beautiful photos of the majestic birds. These fishermen employ a special form of night fishing which utilises the cormorants to catch fish (who are presumably then paid a fishy wage in return), it is quite a unique method, and it was great to see how comfortable the birds were around him.

I got some dinner quickly in town and then collected my bike to begin the hour-long cycle home, racing against the sunset (I didn’t much fancy trying to navigate the winding country roads in the dark with no bike light!). It was pretty hard-going on a bike with no gears, but I made it back by about 6pm and had a quiet evening (primarily working and packing) at my hotel.

I got up bright and early the next morning and had a quick breakfast before checking out and meeting my driver who would take me the 3-hour journey to Ping’an, a small village in the Longji rice terraces, on the other side of Guilin. The terraces are the largest in the world, cut into steep mountains up to 1000m tall (estimates vary wildly depending on your source), and the current terraces are around 600 years old. I put my headphones in and watched China pass by outside the taxi. Passing through Guilin gave me some pause for thought on the pollution and industrialisation of China (see my next post, Reflections on China). After about 2 hours driving we began to get back out into the countryside again, but this time it was a stark contrast to the geography of the Karst countryside in Yangshuo. As we drove into the mountains, slowly meandering higher, I saw that these were more ‘traditionally’-shaped mountains, and covered in cedar forest. The temperature was dropping a few degrees, as well.

My driver, who was fairly sensible on the road (he only occasional overtook on blind corners and he rarely broke the speed limit by much), started to slow down to a crawl. “Are we here?” I wondered. Nope. Suddenly there were frequent speed-bumps, and several policemen and cars about, I figured they were there to stop speeding as the roads were getting increasingly windy. Then we turned a corner and I immediately pulled out my headphones and probably went quite pale. Ahead of us at the next corner there was a crashed lorry – it seemed to have gone straight into the rocky mountain edge of the road. It was over turned and looked totally wrecked. Then I saw in front of it a coach was crashed into the next bit of rocky wall just a little further round the corner. The front of the bus was totally smashed in and I can’t imagine the driver would have survived an impact like that. There were lots of police officers looking on from the other side of the road, but clearly we had missed most of the action – the crashed vehicles were all empty and no casualties or passengers in sight. It was a little tight to squeeze down the road past the two ruined vehicles. Finally, turning the remains of the corner I saw there was a third crashed vehicle, another lorry, up ahead. Again, totally wrecked and on its side. A fire engine was just pulling out on the left to leave the scene. Now totally unnerved, the rest of the journey turned me into a jittering mess. We continued on, climbing the hillside, along winding, narrow roads, with a steep drop on one side. Far too many tight, blind corners where I felt we might at any moment meet a coach coming in the other direction. I thought it would be easier for my nerves if I could close my eyes – nothing I could do about the situation anyway – but my motion sickness was having none of it; I would have to endure the entire journey with eyes open.

By the time we arrived at the end of the road and the entrance to the Ping’an rice terraces I was feeling pretty ill, looking rather pale and with a headache rapidly developing. So when the local lady asked if I wanted her to carry my bags up the terraces (a 20 minute walk up steep, winding stone steps) for the fee of 40 yuan, I really had no choice but to accept. I was in no state to carry them myself, and at least I was putting some money into their small village.

We finally reached my hotel and I dumped my bags and lay down. I was still not feeling well from the journey up, so I put myself down for a half-hour nap that lasted 2 hours. Around 4pm I woke up again, feeling much better, and went for a little walk around the village, up to one of the two main view points. The views of the rice paddies were excellent, although it was a slightly misty day (pretty sure it was mist, not pollution on this occasion, although it’s always hard to tell!) so the views weren’t as good as I imagine they could be. Looking out across the terraced landscape felt almost like looking at contour lines on a map.

As the sun began to set I headed back down and struggled for a little while to find my hotel again (the wooden houses in the village all look the same!). Trying to retrace my steps I realised that my mental map now included phrases like “go past the duck and turn left”* and “near the men with the surveying equipment” – both of which sound like pretty temporary landmarks, but they did in fact work, at least for today! I had dinner in the restaurant at my hotel, and finally found the one person working here who actually speaks a reasonable amount of English. Mounds of delicious sweet and sour pork and egg fried rice, exactly as I remember it from home. The English-speaking lady asked me to help translate some instructions on some medicine she’d bought to find out whether it was suitable for children. Turned out the instructions were actually in French, but as I clearly spoke more French than she did, I had a look and found what seemed to be a section saying it wasn’t suitable for under 18s. I’m not totally convinced of my translation, but I figured that was the safer translation option anyway – better to say no and be wrong than say yes! After writing up this blog, I tried to get an early night; I had a 5 hour hike over the Dragon’s back bone rice terraces tomorrow, and wanted to get the most of my last full day in China.

After a wonderful 10 hours sleep I got up not quite as early as I’d hoped, got my things together and had some breakfast at the hotel. At 9am sharp my guide (who turned out to be the English-speaking girl who worked at the hotel) arrived to take me out for the morning. She told me I could choose our route depending upon how far I wanted to go. Turns out any of the routes would include the two viewpoints in the village, so I was glad I hadn’t pushed myself too hard to see them both the previous day. The longest route we could take, seeing two different outlying villages, would mean taking either two buses or a rather expensive taxi back, so I opted for the next shortest route, she estimated between 4 and 5 hours. We set out walking and it was nice but the weather wasn’t great – it was very cloudy so the views were not very good. She explained that this wasn’t the best time of year to come to the rice paddies. We walked on for about 2 hours, up and down (although mostly relatively flat) on small stone steps and a little on tarmac roads, past a reservoir where some people were doing building work, and through a couple of smaller villages where the local women offered to sell me some hand crafted gifts, or show me their extremely long hair (which they keep tied up on their heads but will take down, for a fee). My guide explained to me how these women have different parts of their hair different lengths – one part represents their ‘coming of age’ at 18, another their wedding, and so on. She also told me that they don’t use shampoo but instead wash their hair with rice water, and that their hair never goes grey because of this (…?). We reached our final village, the Zhongi village, and admired it from a distance. Apparently they are not so accustomed to tourists so we wouldn’t be allowed to go in. Here we turned back towards Ping’an. It was a nice walk and I imagine the views would be incredible in better weather. On our return the sun began to try to peep out between the clouds a little, though. We got back to the hotel around lunchtime and I decided to have just a little rest before having something to eat. I fell asleep and slept for 2 hours. I think I have been fighting off a cold for a while now, I seem to be more tired than I have been previously, and clearly my body needed the rest. All this fresh air an exercise makes me very sleepy, as well!

I got up again early afternoon, had some lunch and then went for a little wander around the village to buy a couple of souvenirs. As the afternoon drew to a close I headed back up to the second view point (seven stars and the moon, so named because the shape of the terraces here resembles that), and enjoyed a little time staring out across the paddies. This was my last day in China, and as the soft Chinese ‘pop’ music played over the stereo in the shop next door, I felt a little sad to be leaving. Eventually I tore myself away from the views of the paddies and headed back to my hotel before dark to get a little work and blogging done, and pack for my journey down to Hong Kong tomorrow.
Goodbye China!

* The duck actually stayed in the same spot for the whole 3 days I was here, so perhaps it wasn’t such a bad landmark after all!

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