Entry #4

Guilin is a beautiful city on the Li River. The area is known for its karst topography. Karst is the eroded lanscape found in the limestone regions in Guanxi province. Despite its beauty and relatively relaxed feeling, Guilin was the most expensive city we visited in mainland China, and it also contained among the pushiest street vendors and most crooked cab drivers. Our first cabbie in Guilin offered to take us from the train station to our hostel for 20 yuan. When we asked him to use the meter, he offered to drive us for 15 yuan. When we demanded that he use the meter, he got huffy but obliged. Our cab ride to the hostel was less than 10 yuan.

We spent day exploring the city and sampling the local cuisine. Pijiu'yu ('beer fish'), is local Li River fish cooked with chilis, spring onion, tomato, ginger, and beer, and is delicious. One day in Guilin was plenty, so we headed the next morning for Longsheng. And so began a week of doing everything completely on the fly. Upon arriving in Longsheng, we were immediately swept onto a bus departing for Ping'an. Stopping to pick up additional passengers and goods along the way, we made it to Ping'an in relatively good time, despite having to switch buses midway when we encountered a road block. We walked around the road block and switched buses with a load of passengers headed the other direction. The ride was long and winding, as usual, but the scenery was spectacular, as always. When the bus dropped us off at the entrance to Ping'an and the Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces, we were approached by a sweet woman who invited us to stay with her and her family in their house. She told us they have travelers stay with them all the time. We agreed to take a look at the room, and followed her up the steep stairs through her village to her house. The house, in many ways, seemed more like a hotel, but our room was beautiful with windows on two sides overlooking the rices terraces. We had some lunch in their small restaurant out on the deck. We went for the rice noodles, instead of the menu's other offerings: 'braised old pumpkin,' 'froot planet,' or 'locar coca' (coca cola).

After lunch, we hiked to the top of the rice terraces. The views were absolutely amazing. Stay tuned to this blog in August when we're actually able to upload photos! The land is cut in a very even, stair-stepped structure; an amazing feat of Chinese farm engineering. In July, the terraces were bright green and the sky was a perfect blue.

Anxious to move along, we didn't stay long in Ping'an. We did have a nice dinner that night, though, followed by hilarious converstaion with a 16 year old Chinese boy called 'Cake' and his 10+ member family. "Whaaaaaat?" he's ask in a high-pitched voice to his family when he didn't necessarily agree with the line of questioning he was expected to translate.

In the morning, we managed to hitch a ride all the way back to Guilin with some locals who were heading into the city on their monthly shopping trip. The ride took nearly half as long as our trip up, which made a stopover in Guilin a bit more relaxed. We headed to our previous hostel in search of Jen's sleeping sack that she'd mistakenly left behind. It was a fortuitous bit of backtracking because, after successful retrieval of her sleep sack, we were able to pass a couple of hours playing cards with the waitstaff at a local restaurant. Jenny asked them to teacher her to play Chinese cards, but it was too hard for us to understand, given that we could never quite determine what the Chinese characters on the cards meant. Next, we taught them to play hearts which was good fun. They caught on much more quickly than we had been able to.

We hopped on our 3pm bus to Yangshuo, about an hour and a half south of Guilin, hoping that finding lodging wouldn't be too much of a challenge. Sure enough, as we got off the bus, we were approached by a friendly hotel owner who convinced us to follow him to his "brand new hotel" not far away. Our room, which had A/C and its own bathroom was nice, and quite a bit cheaper than most of our hostel dorm rooms, so we agreed to stay for three nights. The owner's wife also helped us book our overnight bus tickets to Shenzhen (that is another story for another entry!) at the end of the week. After showers, we headed out to the night market for dinner. The night market was full of vegetables, not to mention live fish, ducks, chickens, frogs, shrimp, crawfish, eels writing around waiting to become someone's dinner. We also noticed "dog" on the menu, but overhead other backpackers say that dog had to be found before it could be cooked. Otherwise, you could point to just about anything and have it cooked to order.

Our favorite day in China was the next day. We rented bikes from our hotel and rode into the countryside. We hired a bamboo raft and floated down the Yulong River for the afternoon. Our bikes strapped in behind us, we lounged in wooden chairs as our guide pushed us through the shallow water and over some small waterfalls. After our hour and a half float, we pedalled on through the small villages and rice fields on our way back towards Yangshuo. It was an appropriately quiet and peaceful day, one that we'll always be glad we spent together.

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Back in Yangshuo, we spent the next two days quietly, passing the time reading and writing in coffee shops, awaiting our sleeper bus to Shenzhen and seeing my sister in Hong Kong.