桂林山水甲天下 Guilin scenery, finest under heaven

We spent our last four days of luxury in Hong Kong with Phil and Ta before going on the road again for the remainder of our trip.  We rested so well in Taiwan and Hong Kong in August that we got soft.  Our backpacks became heavier all of a sudden and the idea of staying at hostels again was quite unwelcoming.  Luckily our first stop from Hong Kong after Phil and Ta went back to Vancouver was to visit our dear friend Didi in Guangzhou, Guangdong province.  He was gracious enough to let us crash at his place and took us out to two amazing Cantonese meals before we moved further west to Guilin.  Thanks Didi! 🙂  There wasn’t much sightseeing in Guangzhou but Didi said if we stayed longer, he would have taken us to Donguan, a factory-filled city that’s becoming a Taiwan town due to the numerous Taiwanese-owned factories.  There’s good bubble tea and Taiwanese food too, nice!  Guangdong province is where most of our Hong Kong friends’ predecessors were from originally.  Eug was no exception.  He remembered Guangzhou was a dump (quoting Eug’s exact word) when he visited with his grandparents about 20 years ago.  Now it’s certainly a modern city.

Remember I said I was not a fan of overnight traveling?  This time I really did not like it.  Unfortunately the train system in the interior isn’t as new as the coastal cities, so in our 12 hour train ride from Guangzhou to Guilin, Eug and I ended up stuck in the middle bunks of a 6 person hard-bunk room, whereas we had the comfortable 4 person soft-bunk room from Shanghai to Beijing before.  There was no room to put our backpacks let alone room for us to sit up straight, and the bunk beds were as hard as the Sahara sand we slept on.  We ended up having to lie horizontally for the whole 12 hours every sleeping and waking moment.  To top it off, a local Chinese guy snuck in and slept on the free bunk on top of Eug’s and started talking on the cell phone really loudly and then snored up a storm in our tiny cabin.  Fortunately for us, he was caught sometime during the night by the train attendant and got kicked out, phew…

After the tiring commute, I was glad to find the hostel we booked comfortable and clean.  And the girl working there was extremely helpful and accommodating.  Our room wasn’t ready yet when we arrived but she let us take the bigger room which was empty and ready at no extra charge.  After an energizing nap, we took a gondola up to Yaoshan (Yao hill), the biggest and the highest hill of Guilin to get the bird’s eye view of the city.  On the way back we visited Jingjiang King’s Palace and hiked up the Solitary Beauty Peak at the back of the palace.  Guilin is in the Guangxi province and of course there’s a Chinese saying about Guilin – 桂林山水甲天下 (Guilin scenery, finest under heaven).  The landscape of Guilin is like Halong Bay in North Vietnam.  There are countless limestone hills but instead of being surrounded by water, they are surrounded by the city itself.  The top of these hills covered in the clouds look like the scenery in Chinese paintings.  Eug and I actually weren’t that impressed by the end of our first day; we thought it was overrated, maybe because of all the high praise we’ve heard about Guilin.  However, we were soon proven wrong.  The next day, we took a boat cruise down the Li River to the town of Yangshuo.  The scenery nearly took our breath away.  It was as if we were inside one of those Chinese paintings I talked about earlier.  One section of the river we passed by is what’s printed on the 20 RMB bill.  The town of Yangshuo is like the Chinese version of Banff, beautiful and nestled in the mountains.  A few years ago, it was backpackers’ heaven but now it may be a little over-developed for those independent travelers as it has slowly been overrun by herds of China tourists from other provinces.  Here we went to another Zhang Yimou show called “Impression Liu Sanjie”.  The setting on the water was similar to that of the “Impression West Lake” show that we saw in Hangzhou, but this one was on a river and set against the hills in the background.  This show casts about 600 dancers and singers to reflect the different minority groups of southwest China.   Visually it was also pretty amazing (as can be expected by Zhang Yimou) but we liked the Hangzhou show a little better. 

We hired a personal guide for a baffling 50 RMB(8 USD) for the day who took us around on a bicycle tour around the country side of Yangshuo.  She was a Yao girl; the Yao are one of the minorities that live in this region.  She said before the year 2000, she had mostly ‘Lao Wai’ (Western foreigners) clients.  After 2000 when people in China started to get wealthier, they became the major visitors.  It is very good to hear that China’s citizens are traveling around more and more in their own country, though unfortunately being surrounded by throngs of China tour groups can really test your patience.  Pushy and loud would be understatements, but we just try to understand that for many this is their first vacation in their own country and they really don’t want to miss anything, and I mean anything.  The bike ride around the countryside was the highlight of our time in this region.  Seeing the local farmers working on their neat, small plots of land nestled between lush, green limestone hills is unbelievably soothing.  In addition, the tour groups don’t go biking on farming paths, so we really were able to find our own little slice of heaven, just like that old Chinese saying.  We also took a 2 person bamboo raft down the Yu Long River.  It would’ve been perfect if our boatman would have stopped bugging us to buy pictures or food from the numerous floating stalls in the middle of the river.  Oh well.  Some things are just out of your control.  He did finally keep his mouth shut after Eug got mad at him in Mandarin.  Eug’s Mandarin is improving a lot by the way.  People are starting to think he’s from Singapore instead of Korea. 

On our last day in Yangshuo, we went on a day trip to the Longji (Dragon’s Backbone) Rice Terraces.  The hills in this region were reshaped into terraces in order to farm rice and other vegetables.  The result is a visually stunning feat of farm engineering.  It’s jaw dropping to even try to fathom how people made this in the first place.  The minorities that live in this region are mostly Yao and Zhuang.  The Yao girls in this region cut their hair only once in their lives at the age of 18.  Their different hairstyles can distinguish if they’re married or if they have children.  In addition the men marry into the wife’s family and thus adopt the woman’s family name, as do the children.  For the women, if they are interested in a man, they can openly pinch the guy’s butt.  I was joking to Eug that no girls would be able to find his butt but to his delight the girls definitely did.  We hiked up to the top (where again there were less tourists) of the terraces to take a look at the view, and it blew us away.  I took about a million pictures of the same vista.  Eug had to stop me as I was getting just slightly carried away and turning a little TWC (Taiwanese crazy) with the pictures.

 I thought the interior of China would be tough to travel in due to under-development, but I was proven wrong yet again.  All I can say is China can surprise you in every aspect, most of the time in a good way.  The toilets (squatters), the constant horking sound close-by before people spit, and the pushy grandmas at tourist destinations can get to you, but the positives of visiting this country have far outweighed those negatives.  I really enjoyed visiting Guilin and Yangshuo.  Nature’s beauty really hit the spot for us here.