After spending two uneventful days in Guilin, Chrissy and I head north to a town called Yangshou. Two Brits had approached us in our Guilin hostel about going in together on chartering a boat to Yangshou. This boat trip is one of the things you are supposed to do in the area so we take them up on the offer.
A car picks us in early in the morning and drives the four of us down to the river where the boat we have chartered is waiting. It wasn't much of a boat. A kind of funny looking, long, skinny thing. We have an old man as captain. He doesn't speak any English, but smiles a lot. We wait around for no apparent reason for about half an hour and then shove off. The boat moves pretty well. The scenery along the river is nice, and is very similar to what we saw in Halong Bay (Vietnam). It is raining, but the boat is covered so we don't mind too much. Our captain keeps stopping for no reason that we can determine. We pulled into a little town for a while and were served a large amount of a grapefruit looking thing that none of us liked. He picked up what we think was his wife here, we sat around for about an hour and then left again. Another time we pulled up next to another boat and hung around for a while. The captain smoked a cigarette with another boat driver. Anyways, we make it to our destination, sort of. We knew ahead of time that these cheaper boat guys won't take you all the way into Yangshou because then they have to pay some kind of tax. So, we are dropped off in a nearby town and then have to take a rickshaw to a bus, and then the bus drops us off in Yangshou.
Yangshou is a beautiful town. It sits right in the middle of a series of jagged limestone peaks. Everything is very lush and green. The town is very touristy, but mostly with Chinese people. We do see a bunch of foreigners around, but they are outnumbered by the Chinese about ten to one.
Still together with the Brits, we walk down the main tourist street in Yangshou searching for a place to stay. This town is loaded with guesthouses. We look at several and settle on a place called The Bamboo Guesthouse. It is an inexpensive place that is quite nice. Our room has a balcony, TV, and a DVD player. After the hard work of traveling and finding accommodations, we go to a café for dinner and happy hour. The place is called "Lisa's" and the food is very good and very cheap.
That night we do some serious drinking in a local bar. I buddy up with a few Chinese guys and they teach me a dice game. Good fun there, except the Chinese always want you to pound down your drink. One of the guys we meet is in the business of selling fireworks. I knew they made all the fireworks for most of the world in China, I didn’t think we would run into anyone in the business.
The next day our heads our pounding from the previous nights festivities. We are pretty worthless and spend the first half of the day watching a movie in our room. It is really nice just to have a room with a TV. We do eventually venture out and do some window shopping around town. There is a lot of touristy stuff to look at, not much that we want to buy.
On day three of our Yangshou stay, we rent some mountain bikes and attempt to ride outside of town to this place called “Moon Hill”. We buy a map of the countryside but it is a terrible map and we get lost (it is the maps fault). We have a nice time anyway riding around in the country through a valley full of rice fields. The local folks keep trying to sell us on a bamboo rafting trip down a river that runs through the valley. They will even throw your bike on the raft. The ladies are nice, but want a crazy price for this raft trip. We also don’t have much time because we need to be back in town for a calligraphy lesson which we signed up for the day before.
Chrissy and I don’t know a thing about Chinese calligraphy. I had seen a Kung Fu type movie once where the main guy defeats his opponent by going off to some special calligraphy school where he learns great wisdom as well as the ability to fight. We head off to the calligraphy place to pick up some Kung Fu. We have hired a private teacher who will instruct just Chrissy and I for two hours. We know in about five minutes that this stuff is really really hard. The teacher is nice and tells us we are doing very well. Not. He even tells us that United States means “Beautiful Country” the way it is written in Chinese. Not sure how we scored that. After the lessons, we have dinner at this place called the “Twin Peaks Café”. We sampled some stuffed river snails which were pretty good. These are a specialty of the Yangshou area. We also tried a Chinese wine brand appropriately called “Great Wall”. It was kind of nasty, but could have been worse. Surprisingly, it seems like the younger Chinese drink a fair amount of wine. There was a bunch of French stuff on the menu.
Yangshou has a lively party scene. Every night we try to sleep while the club across the street pounds techno really loud and we can hear horrible attempts of Chinese guys trying to do American songs on Karaoke. Probably the worst though were these bastard guys that walk up and down the streets selling flutes. They play them constantly (and only know three songs, one of which was Amazing Grace), even at two AM.
Day four in Yangshou, we wake up early and go to a cooking school. The setup for this place is almost identical to a class we took in Thailand. The class starts with a trip to the local market where a guide explains the typical Chinese ingredients. One significant difference from what we saw in Thailand was that the Chinese market had a section in the back with dogs. We told our guide we did not wish to see dogs being sliced and diced. I did see one all skinned up, hanging from a rack. We could also hear them barking. Other choice items in the market included fried rats, snakes, eels, and a whole aisle of mystery meats. I took a photo of the meat vendors and one guy threatened to punch me in the face. I found out later that this is because he is probably selling illegal exotic meats like bear or tiger and doesn’t want to get in trouble. Nice.
After the market, we get into a van and are ferried out to the country to a small farm house where they do the cooking classes. This place is beautiful. We were making stir fry’s in an open air patio type setup with gorgeous mountains and rice paddies as a back drop. The food wasn’t the best, nor was the instructor, but the atmosphere made it well worth it. Here is what we made:
- Egg battered minced pork in mint dumplings
- Steamed chicken and vegetables
- Pork stir fry
- Stir fried vegetables
- An eggplant dish
Chrissy got really mad because one of the helper ladies kept messing with the flame of her burner. Sometimes she would turn it up, then come by five minutes later and turn it down, etc, etc. Chrissy blames this lady for some of her dishes not coming out. I have no comment on the matter. I bought a sweet looking meat cleaver with a gold handle right before we left.
Later that same day we rented bikes again and got better directions to Moon Hill. Getting there was pretty straight forward, once we ignored our crappy map. It took us less than an hour to bike outside of town and reach the bottom of Moon Hill. While we are locking up our bikes in the parking lot, a couple of ladies approach us and want to sell us water. We have just bought some out on the road and decline their offer. One of these ladies had actually followed us from outside of the park about ten minutes back out on the road. This crazy lady starts following us as we climb a steep path up Moon Hill. This kind of thing drives Chrissy crazy. She tells the lady repeatedly that we will not be buying any water from her. The lady backs off a bit but continues to follow us up the hill. This is killing me because with Chrissy all worked up by the water lady, she is lunging up the hill with a vengeance. We eventually make it up to the top of the hill. The view is spectacular. The place is called Moon Hill because there is a big round hole in the top the shape of a moon. We could look down across the valley at all the other limestone peaks and rice paddies. You could even go a bit further up after where the official trail ends, which we did. There was a radio tower up there and a more 360 degree view. Coming back down to the official path we meet up with the water lady. I had been forbidden by Chrissy to buy any water. We had agreed that I could buy a beer, if she had any, which we doubted. Ah, but she did. Her price wasn’t even that bad and the beer was cold. So this crazy lady made a sale and we drank cold Tsing Tao beer on the top of Moon Hill. There was another American up there also drinking beer. He had his own drink lady. She was sitting next to this guy fanning him with a hand fan while he sipped his beer. This lady looked like she could be pushing 80. We sat and chatted with this guy. His lady had followed him from the bottom as well (of course). These women are nuts. We saw more of the water lady mafia on the way down. One lady was even holding a tourists hand while giving her encouragement as she huffed it up the hill. Our lady tried to sell us water one more time at the bottom, and offered to accompany us to a nearby set of caves (in case we needed water there), we declined. She left after selling us the two beers for what amounted to about a dollar. This lady chased us down the road and climbed a small mountain to sell two beers for a dollar. Can’t say they don’t work for it.
That night we go back to Lisa’s for dinner. This is the restaurant we first ate at when arriving in Yangshou. I got some soup and was thrilled to find a maggot floating in it. So much for the food at Lisa’s.
The next day is our fifth in Yangshou, we spend another day just relaxing, sleeping late, and eating good food around town (but not at Lisa’s). It is starting to feel like we have been in Yangshou forever. It’s a great place, but we are ready to move on. We catch a bus south back to Guilin where we will spend a night in transit and fly out the following morning for Beijing. Our good friends John, Damien, and Polly are meeting us in Beijing. It has been a while since we have had visitors and we are excited about seeing our friends. Beijing, here we come.
- Bill