Hitting the Backpacker Trail
Back in Sanjiang we arrived at the bus station in late morning. Sanjiang had two bus stations with a river and a bridge in between them. It took us quite a bit of work to realize that the bridge was closed for construction and we had to head down to the banks to take the pedestrian floating bridge across.
We got to the east bus station just as rain started bucketing down and got our tickets for the bus to Guilin departing just under an hour later. Guilin (and nearby Yangshuo) are known for the karst landscapes of towering limestone buttes and spires that rise up out of the plains surrounding them.
Most of China doesn’t have a well established “backpacker trail” the way that mainland southeast Asia and, say Turkey do. There’s usually not a clear route for visitors to follow, and rarely do you have the experience of meeting the same people over and over in backpacker hostels the way you do in some other places. The exception to this is in the country’s southwest, where foreign budget travellers have been visiting many of the same well tested places for two decades or more. And of course an industry has built up to service them. With the rise of domestic tourism in China it’s probably not as pronounced as it once was, but arriving in Guilin we were truly stepping on to the southwest China backpacker trail.
The landscape in the countryside around the town of Yangshuo
The rain and mist continued all the way to Guilin, so we didn’t really get to see any of the scenery on our way in, leaving it as a surprise for the days to come.
With only modest difficulty (thank goodness we can read the odd Chinese character at last… It’s starting to come in quite handy with local bus routes) we figured out how to get into town and got ourselves a room at a YHA hostel in the centre of town.
We spent the afternoon having a look around town. Insofar as this was possible. Guilin is a massive tourist attraction in China and is packed with sites such as karst peaks and caves to visit. Many of these are impossible to see, much less visit without paying entry fees (to the point that operators have planted bamboo to block the view of some sights from public streets.) Given that the entry fees are steep (a “through ticket” to the top 6 sights in Guilin sets you back almost NZ$60!) and most of Guilin’s sights were meant to be eclipsed by those in Yangshuo we decided to give them a miss and just have a look at the city itself.
One thing Guilin has going for it is that it IS an actual city so that, touristy as it may be, one needn’t feel completely immersed in that side of it for one’s whole stay. We had a pleasant walk along the river (except for a couple of near-falls caused by the Chinese love of polished marble and granite walkways in areas prone to dampness.) We passed by swimmers and fishers and armadas of bamboo rafts tied up ready to take tourists down the river the next day. We checked out a couple of the karst pinacles from afar. We had a wander through the main shopping street. At one end it was packed with chain stores for the locals, at the other with souvenir shops and restaurants for the tourists. We were approached by an “art teacher” who offered to take us to his gallery for a look and who claimed to have a sister in Vancouver. Given that a common scam in China involves art students taking tourists to exhibitions and pressuring them to buy overpriced works we were a bit skeptical, but the guy was soft-sell all the way and actually quite pleasant to talk with so we were content to have a look anyway.
The riverside promenade in Guilin
Guilin’s sun and moon (or as I thought of them, gold and silver) pagodas. Despite my earlier rant there was no entrance fee to the pond where they were located
In short, Guilin was quite a nice city. It probably ranked up there with Xiamen as the most pleasant, livable city we’d yet seen in China.
The next morning I rushed out to buy train tickets for a later leg of our journey (I’d gone to the wrong place when trying to do this the night before. Word of advice: only buy train tickets from travel agencies or booking offices displaying the China Railways logo. They have an electronic booking system and charge a mere 5RMB commission, whereas all the others simply send someone to the station to queue up and buy tickets for you and charge ~40RMB.)
I arrived back with a few minutes to spare before the bus arrive at the hostel to take us about 40 minutes down the road to the Yading pier for the bamboo raft trip down the Li River that we’d booked the night before. This trip was something we’d been looking forward to since departing NZ, as Sarah’s Granny and Granddad had done it about 20 years before and absolutely insisted it was a Can’t Miss part of any visit to China.
The trip wasn’t perfect. We realized we could have done it cheaper ourselves, the bus trip to the pier was a non-stop sales pitch for other tours, the raft engine was a little noisy, and the day was quite hazy making the scenery a little less pretty than it could have been.
But despite this it was still wonderful. We spent 2 hours cruising up and down the river on a “bamboo” (actually 9x 6″PVC pipes lashed together) raft. The banks were lined with bamboo and sandy beaches. And where they weren’t, there were towering pinnacles rising hundreds of metres straight out of the river. At the time I observed that it was kind of an anti-Wadi Rum. The towering rock formations were very similar to those in the deserts of Jordan, but where Wadi Rum had red sandstone peaks with sand between them, the Li Rivier had lushly vegetated grey limestone spires with the cool river in their midst.
“Bamboo” rafts at Shengdi pier
In typical Chinese fashion, each rock formation had a name that was somehow, vaguely, if you were in an impressionable state of mind, linked to its appearance
We shared the raft with only our driver and another couple (we did a fruit exchange, trading some of our last Dudong mandarins for their bananas 
The scenery was beautiful. The trip was relaxing. And after docking at the pier again it took us straight to Yangshuo, where we were headed anyway. Clearly Sarah’s Granny and Grandad knew what they were talking about.
The Yangshuo Culture House, where we were staying, was a bit out of town. But:
A. The centre of Yangshuo’s tourist district is not somewhere we were that keen to be near anyway. It might not get quite as many tourists as Guilin, but there’s no city to absorb them. Yangshuo exists almost solely for the tourists. To get an idea of what Yangshuo’s famous West Street area is like, think Khaosan Road in Bangkok with the added attraction of hordes of Chinese tour groups.
and
B. The friendly owner, Mr. Wei and the communal “family” dinner included with the room more than made up for it. Each night all of the guests would gather round the table and eat a wonderful Chinese dinner that Mrs. Wei had made up. A few dishes would be on the table when we arrived, which would be followed by more (and more) as the meal progressed. Every night Mr. Wei would come in and ask if we needed more food. And while this got to feel almost like a challenge, there was only one night of the four when we could manage even one dish beyond those originally sent out from the kitchen.
The communal nature of dinner made it a fabulously social occasion. You’ve got to be awfully shy to not talk to your tablemates when breaking bread together, so for perhaps the first time in our trip, we had the typical backpacker conversations and traded ideas, impressions and information with other travellers. Too much of this can get a bit tiresome, but I loved it.
We went out for a wander around town and while you still couldn’t see the fullness of the landscape’s majesty from inside the city, it was startling (in a fun way) to turn a corner and see a huge limestone tower at the end of the street.
Yangshuo’s West Street strip
The sorts of views you can run into just wandering around Yangshuo’s streets
Our first full day in Yangshuo set the pattern for future days. While a wide variety of modes of transport were available for exploring the countryside (bicycle, scooter, electric powered mini-bus-cart things, [real] bamboo rafts) we opted for the simplest one and went out for a walk.
We had little idea where we were going and ended up spending most of the day in a valley between two rows of karst mountains with rice paddies and fruit orchards filling the space between the peaks. We scarcely saw another soul, let alone another tourist, for most of the time we where there (unless you count dogs and water buffalo. There were several of each of these.) This was doubly so when we wandered off the “main” road and up towards one of the mountains. After over an hour of aimless wandering we discovered that we were in an orange grove that we’d walked past earlier. We ducked our way through the trees, picking up the odd fallen fruit to peel and eat as we slowly found our way back to the entrance and the road.
The “main road” down our valley
Limestone towers behind an orange grove
Sarah carefully negotiating the way through the orange trees
Sarah making friends with mama and baby buff on our walk home
Day two was a variation on the theme established on day one. We took a bus out to the village of Fuli for market day. Despite having been to dozens, I just can’t get enough of Asian markets. Special features of this one included lots of agricultural implements (including many hand made wooden ones), an outdoor barber shop, big piles of taro and other root vegetables, and a whole roasted dog at one stand. The town itself was kind of fun too. A bit of old Chinese architecture. A tiny peanut oil factory that we could smell ages away. Dozens of silk fan manufacturers. And a big pasture down by the river where Sarah made friends with her friend buffs.
We took a ferry across the river (making the mistake of paying before we saw how much all the locals were charged and thus paying 5 times the proper rate) and walked back to Yangshuo through more farm fields and karst peaks that were, if anything, even more beautiful than those we’d walked past the day before.
Fuli market day
Another feature of Fuli market was the gambling halls. They were packed with people playing cards and Mah Jongg. Someone or other we met during our trip had said that gambling was China’s national sport. Given the omnipresence of people engaged in it in parlours like these, in parks, on sidewalks, it was hard not to believe.
Silk fans with ribs glued on and set out to dry
Day three was our final sightseeing day in Yangshuo and again it was a variation on a walk in the countryside. We headed for the Yulong river (which was actually our intended destination on day 1) and walked up its banks. At first this was on the narrow gravel road that paralleled the river (and was shared with tons of bicycles, not a few tour buses and speeding trucks carrying bamboo rafts back up river.) But soon we’d left the road and were enjoying the sunny (if hazy, like all of our days in Yangshuo) afternoon almost all alone amongst the fields. Farmers, bamboo rafts headed downstream, and a woman on a bicycle who appeared once in a while to helpfully offer us directions were our only company.
Near one of the bamboo raft piers. It was hard to understand where they all went on the other stretches of river where minutes often passed in between rafts
Despite the tourist focus of Yangshuo town one didn’t have to go far into the countryside before agriculture became the main industry once again
We reached our destination, the Dragon Bridge around 14:00 which on a hot sunny day meant that I couldn’t dream of NOT going for a swim in the river. I walked down to the bank, found a spot not occupied by bamboo rafts looking for clients to take downriver and was soon happily immersed in the wonderfully clear, cool (but not cold) Yulong river. This attracted a lot of attention from the locals (while the river is quite clean [especially when compared with the Li {even more especially when compared with, say, the Yangtze or Pearl}] it’s quite deep, and swimming just isn’t something locals do. Several other foreigners (including Sarah) took the queue and got their share of attention too. Which promptly vanished when a couple of other Laowai, braver than us, took turns jumping off the 6m high bridge into the water below.
Sarah having a dip in the Yulong (Jade Dragon) River under the Long (Dragon) bridge
What’s the point of having a waterproof camera if you don’t take it for a swim now and then
Cormorant fishing like we’d seen in Fenghuang was also still practiced around Yangshuo, albeit primarily as a show for tourists
Through all this time, our “helpful guide lady” hadn’t abandoned us. We had, of course, suspected that her intentions weren’t entirely altruistic. And indeed they weren’t. Once we’d had a bit of a swim we set about looking for a bamboo raft to take down the river. As soon as we showed any interest she jumped in and prepared to act as an intermediary ensuring that there was no way we could talk to any of the individual boatmen. When this became apparent we tried to wait her out by sitting enjoying the riverside and going for further swims. It was not to be. We eventually tried negotiating a trip with her but at great length just couldn’t get the price below about $50 for the two of us, which was just too steep. In the end we decided that we’d had a lovely Yulong river experience with our walk and swim in any case and caught a bus home.
Which was another story in itself. We boarded the bus, asked the conductor how much the fare was and were informed that it was 10RMB each for the 15-20 minute trip back to Yangshuo. Now we’d had enough time in China to realize what a bus trip of this length ought to cost and we knew that it was less than that. Contrary to what one might expect, bus travel in China, despite being privately run, is pretty smooth and regimented standard tickets are used all across the country and prices do seem to vary fairly directly with the distance of travel. I put up a bit of a fuss over the fare but the young man insisted that this really was correct. I eventually gave up and took my grumpy place standing in the middle of the bus.
However by the time we reached a slightly extended stop I’d given up giving up. The river ferry the previous day and the ages negotiating over the bamboo raft trip had me in an ill temper as regards getting ripped off. So I climbed out of the bus, walked around front and took a photo of the bus’ licence plate, intending to complain to someone when we arrived at the station. The moment I’d done this the conductor flew out of the bus saying “no, no!” He put his arm around me, took me round the back of the bus and refunded the 8RMB of our fare that he’d pocketed for himself. “OK?” he asked. “OK,” I said, smiled and shook his hand. I got back on the bus and he was all smiles, doing his best to ensure I got a seat (despite my protestations that I didn’t really need one.) While it is true that this whole episode was over less than NZ$2, and that as usual, the conductor could have used it more than us, there was a principle involved and I’m still pretty happy with the result.
Back at the Culture House we took advantage of the time we’d saved by not going on the raft trip to check out the kitchen where our scrumptious dinners had been emerging from every evening. Mrs. Wei was happy to have us come in and watch. It was a pretty slick operation. All the prep work had been done in advance. Mrs. Wei would be cooking on two woks at once would finish a dish, plate it, hand the wok to her son for cleaning and throw a new one on the burner ready to get cooking again seconds later. Before long I’d even been put to work as a sous chef. True, Mrs. Wei kept a close eye on me, motioning that I should stir this now, cover that a moment later, etc. And she only let me do the addition of ingredients to the pans under carefully controlled conditions. But I think I can still honestly say that I made two or three of our dishes for dinner that night
Cooking up a storm with Mrs. Wei!
The next morning we had to do little more than step out the door to find a bus headed back up to Guilin. We were dropped at the train station where we had a bite to eat and did a bit of snack shopping, but soon enough we were headed southwest on the next leg of the backpacker trail towards Kunming in Yunnan province.
Posters and the remains of posters in Fuli town
Tags: China, Guangxi, Guilin, Llew Bardecki, Travel, Yangshuo
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