China II - Yangshuo and Tour Group Rebellion

Yangshuo was described to me as the most Western friendly town in China. Yangshuo is a tourist town. The reason everyone is here, of course, is for the stunning scenery. Huge karst rocks pop out of the verdant green rice paddies while rivers sweep around the hills. The area covered by the karst scenery is vast and its easy to spend a few days cycling around.

Yangshuo is pleasant but it does suffer from tourist town problems. There are for starters lots of people there as tourists and lots of people attempting to make money from the tourists. It isn't a bad place to be based and it is quite easy to escape the town and get into the karst scenery.

In a contrast to the karst scenery of Ninh Binh in northern Vietnam old buildings and villages have survived to a greater extent and they lend an atmosphere to the scenery. Unsurprisingly with the number of tourists in Yangshuo there are lots of tourists out and about in the countryside. The vast number of which stay in certain tourist traps. I went off cycling on my own and escaped the crowds. Without doubt the prettiest area was along the Yulong River. The river is lined by the karst cliffs and green rice paddies. I had a great lunch and a long chat with the owner of the Mountain and Water Farmer Restaurant in the old village of Jiu Xian. She had a book of English words that visitors added to. For some reason we got chatting about arteries and veins. I'm not sure she entirely understood my definitions of the two. Another great village was Xing Ping where I did a disappointing cruise along the Li River. However, the village itself was very interesting once you got into the back streets away from the river.

On the way back from my second day of cycling along the Yulong River the chain slipped off on my bike and jammed between the gears and the wheel. I could not budge it for love nor money. An old man appeared to see what was going on, whereupon he disappeared to return with an adjustable spanner. By this time my hands were covered in grease. The old man disappeared again only this time to return with a bowl of water and some soap.

For some reason at the end of my stay in Yangshuo I broke a cardinal rule of travelling. I decided to do some organised tours. I'm not sure why I chose to do this but having done my best to avoid the organised tour in South East Asia I chose to do a couple in Yangshuo. An organised tour is not always a bad thing, however, prices are so low in Asia it is nearly always possible to organise it yourself with a local. I did a boat trip along the Li River for 60Y which was really disappointing. A bus picked me up from Fawlty Towers guesthouse and we were driven to Xing Ping for 5.50Y put into smaller buses costing 2Y where we were driven up the river to another landing stage and put in small boats where we had possibly a twenty minute trip along the river before stopping on a sandbank for twenty minutes and then coming back down the river. I followed this up the next day by visiting the Dragons Backbone Rice Terraces. These are beautiful rice terraces carved on the mountain side by hill tribes. It is a beautiful spot well worth a visit. It is possible to catch public transport there. I chose to do a day trip from Yangshuo and get dropped off in Guilin on the way back where I could catch a train to Wuhan. We spent four hours on the bus getting there. As we neared the guide then informed us that having paid 160Y we would each have to pay an extra 50Y to watch a 45 minute show about the long haired hill tribe women. When we voiced our unease about this and the fact it was not part of the advertised itinerary the Chinese tour guide got very angry. I lead a rebellion of the westerners on board who wanted to spend as much time on the rice terraces themselves. The coach was half Chinese and half Western tourists. The tour guide would not drop us at the bottom of the rice terraces so we had to walk the fifteen minutes to the entrance and she made a big deal of saying that if we were late back she would leave without us. Some of the Chinese tourists joined us and we marched off in search of the rice terraces. There is another bus you have to catch to the rice terraces themselves and then there are a couple of main view points. What was particularly annoying was that if you went to see the long hair show you would not have time to go to both view points. The only reason to do the tour is to save time, if you have a few days then it is much better to do it yourself.
I travelled to Guilin from Nanning on the N722 train. I had purchased my ticket the previous day from a very smiley ticket seller. I think I bought a hard seat but I wasn't entirely sure because everything on my ticket was in Mandarin apart from some numbers. The ticket cost 65Y. Hundreds of people were getting on the train the next morning. Everything was organised. I wandered down the train with my ticket whilst the waiting attendants pointed me in the right direction. Once I was aboard passengers helped me find the right seat in the double decker train.

I arrived in the huge Guilin train station intent on catching a bus straight to Yangshuo. It was not as easy as I hoped. The Chinese passengers headed off in different directions. There were lots of buses milling about but I was struggling to work out which ones went to Yanghsuo whilst trying to avoid the shouting touts. After getting on a couple of buses and refusing the prices they tried to charge me I found a bus that would take me for 14Y. I headed off for the hour journey to Yangshuo with a guy behind me blowing his nose on the floor. I stayed at Fawlty Towers Guesthouse immediately opposite the entrance to the bus station. The staff were friendly and helpful. However, I was disappointed in the tour they sold me for the Li River.