Yangshuo Day 1 - Arriving and Bike Ride
Our trip was off to a rough start when the water in the shower came out brown and scorching hot. This set us back about half an hour or more. We took a taxi and of course our taxi driver had a hard time understanding that we wanted to go to the airport. We got to the terminal and when we asked someone where the Air China counter was, they told us it was a ten minute walk to the next terminal so we started running with our massive backpacks. When we got to checkin, the woman told us we had five minutes to get through security and on the plane and she just smiled. We continued running, and cut to the front of Security where a very nice Chinese man stepped aside for us red-hot laowai (foreigners) to get to our flight. Both of us had bottles of water which the security guys opened and smelled, I guess to make sure it wasn't baijiu (Chinese alcohol), which further delayed us. After going through security we looked for our gate, gate 25. We saw that gate 24 was not far, so we figured we were almost there. Oh how wrong we were! For some odd reason every other gate was normal, but gate 25 was a ways off and was it's own mini terminal that was divided into sub-gates. We found the gate and got onto a bus that took us to the plane. Of course the bus did not go anywhere near the gate, instead it drove all the way around very near to the first terminal we entered. How backwards!!!
My first experience on a Chinese domestic airline was decent except for the screaming baby kicking the back of my seat for almost three hours. I turned around and gave the mother the "Control your child or I will rip off it's leg with my claws" look and that worked for about . . . fifteen minutes. The food on the flight was surprisingly ok, it was actually better than the Continental flight to Beijing. On top of that, my ears did not even pop!
When we landed in Guilin the air was so humid and warm, the complete opposite of Beijing. For about five minutes it felt good until we started sweating for no other reason than it being humid. Carrie had a driver pick us up and drive us to Yangshuo. Driving to Yangshuo was amazing, the colors were so vibrant. Some of the greens looked like they contained colors outside our viewable spectrum, it was so intense.
While driving through Guilin we saw people carrying some weird things on their bikes, the strangest and saddest to me was a man biking with crates of live chickens in the back. They were all completely squashed together.
When we arrived in Yangshuo we were met by Carrie and her cousin Mike. Mike has been living in Bangkok, so Yangshuo was a good place for us all to meet up in the middle. We brought our stuff to her room at the Buffalo Bar & Cafe and then rented bikes for $1.25 for the whole day. I don't know why but they gave me an extra cushion cover on my bike seat. Was that to protect my not so boney bum? Out of everyone, I think my bum was the least in need of extra cushioning. We followed a path that Carrie had been on earlier in the week (she had been in Yangshuo for over a week before we arrived) and got to see some really pretty farms and amazing scenery.
While biking through the farms, we came across some people selling oranges and bought a few. This woman was carrying oranges and had a baby on her back and all four of us were taking loads of photos of her. I felt a bit weird because I don't much like invading peoples' spaces and taking photos if they are unwilling, but she seemed cool with it.
We kept riding on and came upon a little town with some really nice old Chinese architecture. We stopped for a break and this woman with silver teeth kept hassling us to look at her menu. After walking around a bit we went in and had some snacks. The food was surprisingly good and the view was really lovely. The day was how I had imagined Yangshuo, cloudy, misty and surreal. We sat around for a while before we decided to leave. It was getting to the point where if we kept riding our bikes we would not make it back before dark, so we decided to catch a boat down the river back to Yangshuo. This proved to be harder than we had anticipated. When we went down to the dock there were two boats. One was reserved for a group of over 10 Chinese tourists and their bikes and another was reserved for a couple who did not have any bikes. We asked the couple because there was tons of space on their boat. The guy was really sneaky and acted like he would help us and then their boat started leaving and they just told us no. So we went to the Chinese group and they were really cool in trying to find room for us on their boat. The boat had an indoor area where they all squished in. Apparently there was room but we decided to put our bikes on the back and stand on the back. There was barely room for the four of us with our bikes but we made it work. It was a lot of fun but we were also trying not to get wet as we all seem to think that if you touch the water in China you will get the plague.
After we got off the boat, we rode our bikes to the light show. As we got close to the ticketbooth, several women were trying to sell them to us for less. We bargained with them all the way to the ticketbooth. We discovered that their "tickets" were not really tickets. It was more of a "You pay me and I will take you to a secret place where you can watch for a third of the price and a third of the view." We thought that we could find the same place without paying them since they weren't real seats. It was getting darker and we were walking down dirt paths with our bikes and these women kept following us even though we kept telling them we did not want their tickets. After spending some 20 minutes trying to find the secret viewing spot we found a group of people walking along a path and we followed them. Eventually we got to these dirt stairs that went towards the water and then some really sketchy boards you had to walk on to get to a floating raft of benches. We were ultra paranoid that our $1.25 rented bikes would get stolen, so we lugged them the entire way up into the seats and locked them up. I wish I could have filmed the entire search for the secret spot because it was really much more involved than I can write. At this point we decided we had to pay them something because it was their "boat." So we watched the light show from behind the scenes and it was pretty cool. Maybe not worth the $22.50 they charge for it for the actual seats, but it was pretty cool.
Before the show completely finished we decided to leave. At this point it was late at night and very dark out. We somehow had to navigate our bikes back down the stairs, across the planks of wood and up the dirt stairs, through the narrow dirt path and back to the rental place.
It was 11 PM and we were tired, however we had not actually booked a hotel for the evening. We thought the Buffalo Bar would have an extra room but when we got there they had sold out. We checked some 10 other places and all were booked. Eventually we found the Magnolia which is a step above most of the hotels. We stayed there for a decent price since we arrived so late.
My first experience on a Chinese domestic airline was decent except for the screaming baby kicking the back of my seat for almost three hours. I turned around and gave the mother the "Control your child or I will rip off it's leg with my claws" look and that worked for about . . . fifteen minutes. The food on the flight was surprisingly ok, it was actually better than the Continental flight to Beijing. On top of that, my ears did not even pop!
When we landed in Guilin the air was so humid and warm, the complete opposite of Beijing. For about five minutes it felt good until we started sweating for no other reason than it being humid. Carrie had a driver pick us up and drive us to Yangshuo. Driving to Yangshuo was amazing, the colors were so vibrant. Some of the greens looked like they contained colors outside our viewable spectrum, it was so intense.While driving through Guilin we saw people carrying some weird things on their bikes, the strangest and saddest to me was a man biking with crates of live chickens in the back. They were all completely squashed together.
When we arrived in Yangshuo we were met by Carrie and her cousin Mike. Mike has been living in Bangkok, so Yangshuo was a good place for us all to meet up in the middle. We brought our stuff to her room at the Buffalo Bar & Cafe and then rented bikes for $1.25 for the whole day. I don't know why but they gave me an extra cushion cover on my bike seat. Was that to protect my not so boney bum? Out of everyone, I think my bum was the least in need of extra cushioning. We followed a path that Carrie had been on earlier in the week (she had been in Yangshuo for over a week before we arrived) and got to see some really pretty farms and amazing scenery.
While biking through the farms, we came across some people selling oranges and bought a few. This woman was carrying oranges and had a baby on her back and all four of us were taking loads of photos of her. I felt a bit weird because I don't much like invading peoples' spaces and taking photos if they are unwilling, but she seemed cool with it.
We kept riding on and came upon a little town with some really nice old Chinese architecture. We stopped for a break and this woman with silver teeth kept hassling us to look at her menu. After walking around a bit we went in and had some snacks. The food was surprisingly good and the view was really lovely. The day was how I had imagined Yangshuo, cloudy, misty and surreal. We sat around for a while before we decided to leave. It was getting to the point where if we kept riding our bikes we would not make it back before dark, so we decided to catch a boat down the river back to Yangshuo. This proved to be harder than we had anticipated. When we went down to the dock there were two boats. One was reserved for a group of over 10 Chinese tourists and their bikes and another was reserved for a couple who did not have any bikes. We asked the couple because there was tons of space on their boat. The guy was really sneaky and acted like he would help us and then their boat started leaving and they just told us no. So we went to the Chinese group and they were really cool in trying to find room for us on their boat. The boat had an indoor area where they all squished in. Apparently there was room but we decided to put our bikes on the back and stand on the back. There was barely room for the four of us with our bikes but we made it work. It was a lot of fun but we were also trying not to get wet as we all seem to think that if you touch the water in China you will get the plague.
After we got off the boat, we rode our bikes to the light show. As we got close to the ticketbooth, several women were trying to sell them to us for less. We bargained with them all the way to the ticketbooth. We discovered that their "tickets" were not really tickets. It was more of a "You pay me and I will take you to a secret place where you can watch for a third of the price and a third of the view." We thought that we could find the same place without paying them since they weren't real seats. It was getting darker and we were walking down dirt paths with our bikes and these women kept following us even though we kept telling them we did not want their tickets. After spending some 20 minutes trying to find the secret viewing spot we found a group of people walking along a path and we followed them. Eventually we got to these dirt stairs that went towards the water and then some really sketchy boards you had to walk on to get to a floating raft of benches. We were ultra paranoid that our $1.25 rented bikes would get stolen, so we lugged them the entire way up into the seats and locked them up. I wish I could have filmed the entire search for the secret spot because it was really much more involved than I can write. At this point we decided we had to pay them something because it was their "boat." So we watched the light show from behind the scenes and it was pretty cool. Maybe not worth the $22.50 they charge for it for the actual seats, but it was pretty cool.Before the show completely finished we decided to leave. At this point it was late at night and very dark out. We somehow had to navigate our bikes back down the stairs, across the planks of wood and up the dirt stairs, through the narrow dirt path and back to the rental place.
It was 11 PM and we were tired, however we had not actually booked a hotel for the evening. We thought the Buffalo Bar would have an extra room but when we got there they had sold out. We checked some 10 other places and all were booked. Eventually we found the Magnolia which is a step above most of the hotels. We stayed there for a decent price since we arrived so late.
posted by Ramune at
4/10/2006 05:15:00 PM
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