The Big China Trip: Days 8 and 9
OK. I know I said I'd have this to you yesterday. Well, I lied. Sorry about that. In my defense... well, I think "Jet Lagged" is an excuse I can keep using for a few more days!
April 22th, Day 8: Checking out of the Lhasa Hotel at about nine, we climbed back onto the bus and soon found ourselves in yet another plane, headed towards Guilin. Which, I thought at the time, was just about as green as anything could possibly be. We drove past lush tree-covered hillsides, hills which became increasingly eccentric as the bus barreled past. The pictures don't quite do justice how strange the local geology was, any more than they establish how lush the vegetation looked.
Eventually, we arrived at our first destination: an art gallery, where a middle aged man gave us a demonstration of traditional Chinese drawing. Having taken the Arts and Culture Class, I'd seen it before, and while he was pretty good, the drawing isn't what I remembered.
Because outside, perhaps two-thirds of the way through his presentation, the sky broke open with the crash of thunder, and the rain came down as though Nature had bought it in bulk (which if had, of course) and was now worried that the "Best When Used By" date was about to go round. As someone who'd spent the last three weeks longing for rain (in Beijing, of course, the rain is scarce, and when it does come, it dissolves steel as though it was sugar), I had some difficulty resisting the urge to rush into it, an urge finally tempered by the knowledge that I really didn't have enough clothing on this trip to let anything get that drenched. I was forced to content myself with the bellowing of the thunder and the soft tattoo of the raindrops.
After the demonstration, and a quick wander-through of the gallery, we clambered back onto the bus and headed to our destination for the night: Yangshuo.
Yangshuo was... Well, when I said that the hillsides of Guilin were green? They weren't really. Truth be told, those trees were barely alive, denuded of leaves which were already turning the color of mud. Compared, at least, to Yangshuo. But more of that for the post on the next day.
We checked into the Venice Hotel, and went to get dinner. Which... well, I should say that the restaurant was a bad idea. It wasn't a bad restaurant, as I recall; but the kitchen clearly wasn't designed to serve a group of the size we were carting around. It took two hours for the last meals to finally arrive, and no food could possibly be worth that kind of wait.
Afterwards, we went out into the night. I added a few samples to my growing pile of gifts/souvenirs; it turned out that Steve, a member of our group, is an excellent barterer. I am not; but more about that at a different post. Eventually, I headed back to the room and turned in.
April 23th, Day 9: This was a fantastic day.
Yangshuo, it soon becomes apparent on arriving, is a tourist trap. I'm not sure whether it's all the signs in English (frequently better English than the signs at, say, the Temple of Heaven), or all the merchants on the street hawking goods that for the most part would be found everywhere in China and only in China, or the fact that every restaurant on the street offers coffee for breakfast (actual, grounds-in-filter, drip-brewed coffee)... I don't know; something about it seemed to imply few things were made here besides omelettes and money.
On the other hand. Yangshuo is my idea of tropical paradise, so I can't really see why they wouldn't try to milk tourists who'd want to stick around as soon as they found the place. Heck, I have written in my notebook a couple lines reminding me that this is a place for a honeymoon ("All I need is the girl"). The climate is warm and wet, but not in a humid way. The inability to speak Chinese isn't as much of a problem as in most of the country. And, as yo may have gathered, the local landscape is probably the most beautiful I've ever run across.
I doubt that the old "If It's Tourist Season Why Can't I Shoot Them?' joke would work in China, culturally and linguistically, but I can imagine that Yangshuo is the kind of place hose shirts are produced for.
Anyway: we were soon lead on what could perhaps be losly termed a triathlon. First, we walked towards where the company who had set up what to follow had it's HQ. Then, we chose bikes and, following a woman ,who worked for the company, lived in Yangshuo, and therefore knew where the hell she was going, raced to the banks of the Li river. I'm reasonably certain everyone had "Bicycle Race" going through their head.
The bike ride was brief. Too brief, in fact, in that if it had been slower we could have stopped from time to time to take pictures, (because apparently I don't have enough). We wound up at the side of the Li River, a place full of (as always) people trying to sell things to tourists. But also, boats.
Well, sort of. "Boat" implies that it sits low enough in the water that it needs sides to remain buoyant; They were actually more like long, skinny bamboo rafts, as the pictures will further indicate
It was two to a raft, plus the raft-poler (gondolier? Can it be a gondolier if it's not a gondola?). Normally, history suggests that Steve and Robert would have been on one raft, and Michael and I would have been on another. But Robert and Steve are men of substance; having them both on the same raft, the cunning raftmen realized, would probably not be the most buoyant of circumstances. So I was with Robert. (Robert, incidentally, who is going to be my roommate next year) as we pushed off of the land and, with a raftman to guide us, slowly, languidly, boated and floated down the river.
Stopping, of course, every so often to engage in Commerce. We're still in China after all, even if it seems odd that the same nation could hold Beijing (which is, I've decided, one of the uglier places I've ever been, the buildings coated with the smoke of industry and the dust of wastelands) and this quasi-Eden. But, sure enough, every fifty meters or so, people were plying their trade: a raft which roasted fish, a raft which sold bottles of water and beer, or (and this was particularly impressive) a raft with a computer which would print out a picture of your boat going down one of the occasional, minor waterfalls, a picture taken by a digital camera and wirelessly transmitted to the computer. We passed by three or four of them.
Honestly, while I'm a great fan of science, you know, the fact that they had a computer setup which I honestly hadn't known existed before seeing it... well, it kinda de-exoticized the whole experience. Which was still awesome; but less so.
As I mentioned, there were a bunch of minor waterfalls. They were also artificial waterfalls. I assume the purpose was to make the trip, overall, more smooth going down, and easier for the boatmen while poling back. No way of confirming this, though. They got my shoes soaked at one point, but otherwise they were just momentary moments of excitement in an otherwise most restful trip down the river.
Something else I should mention: the people who had stores cared a great deal for the raftmen. Every time we'd pass by, after asking us if we wanted anything, they'd suggest we buy something for the man poling us along! Our man, while slower than most (we had the longest trip, which it could be argued is a good thing, although I had a beer on the trip so that by the end my bladder would disagree something fierce), was responsible, and refused our offers of beer. He did have some fish, however.
Anyway: after the trip, some people biked off to... some kind of... mud cave? I don't know what that was about. And the rest of us biked back to the village. (A truck either brought all the bikes from the start to the finish, or brought a different pile of bikes). The day was only half over, but the rest of it wasn't nearly so exiting: lunch (I had a Hot Chocolate Brandy, which cost more than my sandwich and made two drinks in one day, more than any other day on the whole damn trip. I have issues, re: alcohol among other things, but I think they're subsiding), shopping, dinner, shopping...
Oh. Also, while we wandered, I found a used Western book store, the sell-buy-trade kind. And now, instead of two terrible fantasy advanced readers, I have a hardcover copy of Don Quixote which belonged to the Crossroads Studentd Center in Chicago fifty years ago. And yet, I'm the guy who broke the binding! Does that seem fair to you?
And after finding a flower-garland in the water (they were selling them where we boarded the rafts; I assumed someone else bought it and lost it, then claimed right of salvage), I bought a really nice shirt. The combination made me look... Well, people gave a bunch of interpretations:
OK. Well, I'm hitting the hay. I'll try to get the rest of the travels to you tomorrow.
Which means Friday...