The train ride was not bad. We met a company of people from Liu Zhou; they took up nearly the whole train car we were in. Their English was basically nonexistent and they would have to converse amongst themselves to think of difficult sentences like “What is your name?”, “Why are you in China?”, “Do you have a boyfriend?” (I lied which led to…) “Is he Chinese?” (No). They found one girl who had decent English, but they physically dragged her to where we were sitting. Once they stopped using her as a conduit for their questions, she chatted normally with us for a bit.
I took out my mini speaker sometime during the trip, and they were fascinated by it and started asking about my music tastes. Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga seemed to be the only common artists with them (sad). They also remarked, verbatim, “Lady Gaga is a Meiguoren!” which was hilarious to all of us, for whatever reason.
We arrived in Guilin and met up with Tracy, a connection of Jon-Michael’s. We weren’t sure what sort of person to expect, since the text she sent Marlie was to look for “a black coat and glasses”. She was around our age, and came with her friend Steven (a friend of her boyfriend). She helped us book our Guilin-Shenzhen train ticket successfully, and mailing a box of Li Jiang purchases back to Kaifeng. Immediately walking around Guilin, we noticed it was a little too similar feeling to Kaifeng and we weren’t sure we would enjoy that. I’m sure there are good things to do in Guilin, but after hearing multiple people tell us that we should skip Guilin and move on to Yangshuo where you can get the same things for cheaper and generally better, we told Tracy we wouldn’t be staying in Guilin that night.
She treated us to Guilin’s rice noodles (no soup, but with meat and egg and spices, quite good) and led us to the minibuses for Yangshuo. Only 15 kuai and we were on our way.
Our bus driver was a bit… giggly, in a way like “Oh hahahaha I almost hit that other bus, wheeee”. Rambo was also playing on the tv.
I was immediately glad of our decision to skip Guilin, as Yangshuo was smaller, but more welcoming than Guilin had felt at first sight. We had a small bit of trouble finding a hostel. We came across one, but it felt very cold and empty. We wanted to find Monkey Jane’s, a hostel highly recommended by our various sources. It was tucked away in an alley [see picture], and it took some time for us to find it because of that. But it was absolutely worth it and it was a great first dip into the dorm-style rooms (we’d been doing private doubles before). It was probably the worst bathroom in the whole trip, but it was warm (the room had a heater) and that was slightly more important to us.
We let ourselves be called into a restaurant with the promise of free beer with dinner, and instead of possibly regretting it (possibly bad food and just good beer?) it was delicious.
After dinner we went upstairs in our hostel, seeing the promise of the Amazing Rooftop Bar of the Marvelous Monkey Jane. It was awesome up there, and she even had a beer pong table set up, something I haven’t seen in a while, and definitely not in China. There was a big flat screen tv, heating fans for every table, and board games and a huge DVD collection underneath the tables. I found Connect Four and challenged Marlie. I won seven times of seven. I am the Master! I recall playing it a lot as a kid, so maybe it’s remembered skill, because I don’t play with any specific strategy.
As much as we liked the rooftop, we wanted to test out the rest of the area. We didn’t have much luck, since the few foreigners that were in Yangshuo weren’t handily gathered together, but rather clumped in small groups of 2-3 in each bar we found. We found some neat shops, but no company. Slightly disappointed, we returned to bed, and there was only one person there, and she was already asleep.
Day 11 – Moon Hill, not Moon Cave
Using a map that we found at the desk, we headed out to Moon Cave. Again, we purchased tickets from the hostel, thinking it would be easier for us. Unfortunately, we took our bus too far and into the next town (高田) so we had to take the same “bus” (a small van packing as many people as possible while still sitting) back about 5 minutes along the road to the entrance of Moon Hill. Old ladies tried to sell us Moon Hill tickets, but we told them we were trying for Moon Cave, not Moon Hill. We finally understood we needed to cross the road, where the ticket office was. It was closed. We stood around for a while, unsure of what to do. Another old lady tried to lead us down the road SOMEWHERE, but we told her we would just go to Moon Hill instead (we knew where that was, at least, after accidentally trying to get in with our cave tickets). We were surrounded by the old hawking ladies again as we bought our tickets from the window . We didn’t want to chance giving them money and not being able to get in with their possibly fake tickets (it was only 15 kuai per person at the window). It was weird that they were all gathered right outside the entrance, though.
We’d missed a larger group going up to the hill, but it didn’t matter much as it was pretty easy to navigate the hill. You go up.
Yet another old lady started following us up the hill, slowly, with her box of water (a little a la Jishnu from Good Woman) and postcards. She knew just enough English to be dangerous, and we couldn’t shake her. There was only one way up and one way down, after all. She did help when the path forked and told us the faster way up, but we were still wary of being too near her in case she tried to pull a fast one on us.
We reached the hill, and as usual, had great views of the surrounding scenery. The old lady again pushed “10 yuan postcards? Water?” and had also added a new phrase of “one hot, one tired”, referring to me and Marlie respectively (I was going pretty fast up the stairs and stripping layers). We went as high as the path allowed, let her take a picture of the two of us (slightly afraid she would take the camera, but where would she go? We were clearly faster than she was), and as we descended, we finally bought water off her. We got a little ahead of her and she completely disappeared.
We took the “Vanity” path which was a better overlook of the small village below, and is where this picture comes from, looking backward towards the hill.
Returning to the town, we ate at Lucy’s, a cool restaurant with scribbling all over the walls. I had the tastiest burger yet, onion rings, and a pot of ginger tea (famous in the area). We explored the stores nearby a little, and we found a store with many things “Obamao”. Here’s a picture…
With enough exploring completed, we decided we didn’t want to be disappointed again with the bars in the area (we could really tell we were visiting in the off-season) so we returned to Monkey Jane’s and went straight to the rooftop.
This was a fabulous decision. We arrived earlier than we had the night before, and Monkey Jane herself invited us to sit with her and watch things on her laptop. We chose an American faux-documentary movie called “The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down”. A really tall (6’8”) white guy came up to the bar partway through the movie and joined us. The four of us started chatting more when the movie finished, and he said he was teaching in South Korea, but from South Africa. Monkey Jane had pretty good English, but her indistinct accent made her hard to understand. She taught us a bluffing dice game that we’d seen some Chinese men playing a few days ago. It was a good game, and if you lost the bluff, you had a shot of beer. When we got a bored with the game (though that took a while), she brought over shots that I *think* she said came from her jar with snakes in it. But I could be mistaken. We all went to bed shortly after, found that Aidan (the South African) was in the same dorm as us and the girl from last night had left, so we weren’t bothering anyone returning to the dorm so late.
Day 12 – Dragon Water Cave
We were able to convince Monkey Jane to accompany us to the water cave the night before. This was very good because she’d been there multiple times and would know exactly what to do, unlike us. We also invited Aidan, since he didn’t seem to have other plans. So we all woke up, showered, had breakfast on the rooftop (sans Monkey…) and waited in the entryway. Finally we asked the other girl working and she called Monkey. She hadn’t even woken up yet. So we waited a little longer, Monkey apologized for her tardiness, and we were off.
This was another great decision of ours, as the cave with Monkey, was a great time. I’ve never been in a cave before, so I thought it was particularly cool. It’s hard to capture caves with photos, but I attempted. I have video that is decent, at least.
Monkey translated what she could of our tour guide (we needed to have someone guiding us along with a flashlight, we couldn’t just explore ourselves, and I think it would have been quite difficult anyway), so we got a taste of what a typical Chinese tour was like. It was just a lot of “oh this rock looks like a dragon, kind of”, and “these stalactites form an elephant, don’t you think?” and making up random stories about shapes. I didn’t really care and sometimes couldn’t see what he pointed out. I was just happy being in a freaking CAVE.
We’d explored the entire cave and passed by the mud baths (faaar too cold to do) but knew we could do the hot springs. I wasn’t expecting to be needing a swimsuit on our trip (I did bring some to China, but left them in Kaifeng), and neither was Marlie, so we both stripped down to bra and underwear. The hot spring area was small-ish, and the pools were obviously naturally-made. Monkey convinced us (it wasn’t that hard) that we should all buy a beer and drink them in the hot springs. It was a very good idea indeed and was refreshing against the hazy heat of the springs. There was a sign saying that we could only be in the springs for ten minutes, but I think we sat there for at least 45. The picture here is one taken by some guys running the hot spring area that we all bought for 10 kuai.
In total, we were in the cave for at least four hours. We got back to Yangshuo, and with Aidan, had dinner at a restaurant directly across from Monkey Jane’s alley. Black-pepper steak, lasagna, chicken schnitzel, and cheesecake were our choices, and the phrase “cheesecake crawl” (after talking about pub crawls) was coined while we ate. Knowing that the bar situation had not changed since last night, we all returned to the rooftop to rejoin Monkey.
I grabbed her DVD collection, as Monkey said it was fine if we wanted to watch something on the flat screen tv. Aidan and I were in the mood for something mindless, and we found a Sci-Fi (SyFy- I hate the new abbreviation) movie called Pterodactyl. It sounded PERFECT, and oh, it so was. I don’t know if Marlie quite appreciated the glory of a bad Sci-Fi Channel movie. We tried guessing the order and means of each character’s death, and we were right probably 75% of the time. We watched a second movie, The Sitter, because of its cover promising a babysitter + bloody hammer. It did not deliver. It was merely a bad-bad movie rather than an awesome- bad one. It also started skipping near the end and we didn’t find out how it concluded (Oh. No. The tragedy. /sarcasm). We “talked shit” with Aidan (as he phrased it) long into the night until Monkey kicked us out and then went to bed. This is a picture of what the dorm room looked like in daylight, of course, not at night. A maximum of 6 people could sleep in there.
Day 13 – Jeanie
Our stay in Yangshuo had to finish that day since we really wanted to see Xingping and meet up with a CouchSurfer, Jeanie. (Google it if you don’t know), and we only had one more day before our train from Guilin to Shenzhen. If we could have, I think we’d have stayed a few more nights. Alas, we had to leave.
We snagged a one-hour bus to Xingping. I slept the whole way. Yangshuo had a very simple “bus station”. It was just a parking lot with destination signs in the bus windows, or in a few cases, hanging above if they were parked under cover. Easy.
Jeanie texted me the directions to her art gallery/home, and they were simple enough. She’s Australian, but has been living in China for over six years if I recall correctly. She still knows very very little Chinese; she seemed a little resistant to learning it for some reason. We met her grandson Clint, who works in Shenzhen and had just gotten married a few days earlier. They were both very chatty people and she provided us with a lot of tangential stories, tea, and snacks, including pomelos, a fruit somewhat similar to grapefruit though not as sour. Xingping seemed to be the land of pomelos, too, as there were trucks and trucks filled with them there.
Jeanie led us to the only hostel in town, This Old Place, which was incredibly nice, even as they were refurnishing and adding MORE wood accents to the already super wooden décor. It was also the second (and last) of our hostels with heat, and so we steamed up the room and it was glorious. It would be a really terrific place to stay in the (proper) springtime and autumn. I don’t think I’d want to travel anywhere we did in the summer because of my aversion to heat.
Anyway, we unloaded, and met with Jeanie again for dinner. It was a very Kaifeng-esque meal: cheap, fried egg rice, noodles with veggies, and an egg/tomato soup. Jeanie also said she could organize a river tour with a guide who knew a little English.
Our beds were warm, and my eye hurt from a mysterious scratch over my eyelid, but all was well.
Day 14 – End of the Karst
I haven’t mentioned it thus far, but the description for the mountains we saw in the Yangshuo region are called “Karst”. I haven’t bothered to check what it means or WHY they’re named that, but this would be our last day among them.
I had the best shower ever- even though the bathroom was downstairs from our room, it heated up quickly and didn’t run out of hot water (like in previous hostels).But I did have to run up the metal spiral staircase in wet socks. We met Jeanie again for tea before breakfast and to arrange our boat tour. The day was wonderfully warm in the sun, but significantly chillier in the shade. James, our guide, arrived, and with a lot of confusion we finally got him to understand that we had to do the tour TODAY because we were leaving on a train that night. He hadn’t had lunch (he was quite late), and so we waited even longer, chatting with Jeanie outside in the sun on benches. An old “eccentric painter” (Jeanie’s phrase) came and set up his strips of paintings across from us. Marlie and I each bought one for cheap, even though Jeanie said he would just be using the money to drink that night.
James finally returned and we were off for our boat ride on the Li River. It was beautiful, but our enjoyment was hindered by the breeze off the cold water and lack of sun when we went under the shade of the mountains. We paid for the longest ride available, but there wasn’t much distinction between any docking areas, and so he really could have turned around at any point and told us that it was our stop. We were so cold, it didn’t really matter. James was also the slowest raft in the water, I noticed.
We only had one more mission for the day, which was to climb up the local mountain, Lao Zhai Shan. We passed another funeral on our way back to town, and James had pointed out earlier that it was for a man who was 96 years old. It didn’t have the intensity of the other funeral we’d witnessed (maybe because of the age of the deceased). They seemed to be in the midst of a meal, but for the rest of the day we heard booms and cracks of explosions from the site of the funeral.
Lao Zhai Shan had what you could call “steps.” It wasn’t nearly as paved and man-made feeling as some of the other mountains and hills we’d climbed up. That was nice for a while, and then it was just tiring. We reached the top and met a guy from Shanghai. He had me take pictures and VCD for him and he was oddly particular about the angles and such, but still a nice guy. He knew enough English to chat with us for a few minutes, and then we all walked down together. Walking down Lao Zhai Shan felt more treacherous than walking up. (As it did with Moon Hill and Cangshan.)
We picked our luggage up from the hostel (all the hostels we stayed at let us store our things after checkout if we needed), said goodbye to Jeanie, and caught a bus to Yangshuo just about to leave. I thought it would be easiest to eat in Yangshuo, where we were familiar with restaurants, and then head on to Guilin, instead of wasting time trying to find an acceptable place to eat in either Xingping or Guilin, neither of which we were familiar. We ate a quick dinner at the China Café, the same place we’d eaten with Aidan a few days earlier, hopped on a bus to Guilin, and got on our train. Our train left Guilin at 9:30pm so we weren’t expecting the lights to be on long (they turn them off during the night), but it was enough time to meet another American, Ramadan from Phoenix, who worked in Hong Kong and was returning after a short vacation himself. Lights went out around 10:40pm; I stayed up a little longer playing my DS and then slept.
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