Lesson 3: Drinking 1 litre of banana shake and eating 1 Kg of chestnuts will make you sick

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After 3 nights in Yangshuo, we decided to move onto the city of Guilin, 34km away on a local bus. Approaching the 'bus station' well car park with buses in it, the conductor started waving frantically at us as if we were going to miss the bus. Naturally worried we put on a spurt and threw our bags into the luggage hold and hurried on board...only to sit there for another 20 minutes waiting for the bus to leave. Grrrr, bus conductors in Asia have continually done this to us, we really should learn not to rush!

Finally under way we discover the newly published (May 2007) Lonely Planet has the price of the bus wrong. Instead of it being 15RMB (£1) it was 20RMB (£1.30), this is just one instance of how the Lonely Planet guidebook is useless in China...more examples will follow as well in later blogs!

The journey went quite smoothly with the local people being sensible and not bringing their chickens onto the bus but shutting them into the luggage hold instead and we arrived safely into Guilin to another 'bus station' in the car park of the train station. This was great as we had planned to pick up our tickets for our up and coming 25 hour train journey to Shanghai as the travel agents in Yangshuo had wanted 50RMB (£3.50) per ticket to book them for us, no chance we were paying that considering that a room was only 80RMB per night in some places.

Entering the train station at Guilin, it became pretty clear that nobody spoke English and there was no special 'foreigners priority' queue as we had seen in other stations. We attempted to ask the information ladies about the train tickets only to get really blank stares back and an explanation in Mandarin which we didn't get a word of! The travel agents around the station weren't much better, trying to sell us a bus ticket. So we gave up and walked over the road to a youth hostel which was both highly recommended by Lonely Planet and looked pretty decent on the internet. The hostel was called Flowers and if you ever visit Guilin, do NOT stay here, this place is awful. Donna went and had a look at one of the double rooms with ensuite bathroom (they wanted to charge 120RMB - £8) and it was the worst room she has ever seen, very grubby and with a squat toilet that looked like it hadn't been cleaned in 10 years! We think the look on Donna's face gave the staff the hint at what she thought of the room and we high tailed it out of there to find a better standard hostelling international place.

An almost 2km walk later we arrived at the hostel, were relieved they had a room and it was a good one too, cheaper than the hovel at Flowers at 100RMB (£7.30). We quickly settled in and asked the friendly hostel staff to write in Mandarin our train requirements and headed straight off to the station. Unfortunately the only hard sleeper we could get was for the top bunk...this is the worst of all the beds as on the hard sleeper carriages there are three bunks stacked on top of each other. The top one has literally 2 feet room between the bed and the ceiling and there is a light right next to your head...and we had to spend 25 hours like that!

Deciding not to worry about it then we headed off to have a little explore of Guilin. Guilin to be honest is nothing special, just another big city and it was too smoggy to see the limestone karsts around the city. We didn't take very many pictures here as you can see. We mainly just wandered around, bought supplies for our journey (pot noodles, biscuits, coffee sachets, crisps...you know all the good wholesome food!). We found a great restaurant called Rosemary's which did fantastic Western and Chinese food, the steak was unbelievable and Neil was in heaven not having had steak since Argentina.

Wandering around at night, Guilin was a much nicer city. It was lit up nicely with neon (again) and there was a great night market which didn't just sell tat and some brilliant food stalls. We were so excited to see a fruit shake stall, we went right ahead and ordered a banana shake...a litre for 30p! Wow, this was a treat. A little later down the road we spied some roasted chestnuts and couldn't help but buy a kilo for 40p. Later in the room we scoffed the chestnuts...unfortunately the amount of chestnuts we ate combined with the banana shake made us feel very sick. That'll teach us!

Before we came to China we were warned about the hocking that everyone seems to do. The Chinese (both men and women of all ages) seem to hock from their toes and spit out a nasty blob of crap! To be honest, it wasn't as bad as we expected but the Chinese take great pride in this dubious 'skill' and even seem to congratulate each other on a 'good one'! It did have Neil concerned though for some of the biggest hockers that they could dehydrate from loss of so much body fluids. Like most things here you do get used to it but narrow misses of flying spit does give us some health concerns.....among other things splatters of hock spit on the ground can be as slippery as a banana skin so watch out!

We only spent 2 nights in Guilin and had a 5am start to catch our train to Shanghai...we were beginning to worry about how cold it was getting as we were moving around China and with no winter coats, only jumpers we hoped that Shanghai wouldn't be too cold and also hoped that we wouldn't get too bad a crick in our necks from the 25 hours we would have to spend squished into a 2 feet space!

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Photos

Guilin river lit up at night
They love their neon in China. Looks very pretty too.

Twin pagodas
we think they were used by Buddhists...very pretty but not that old.

We got all of these chestnuts for 40p
...and then we felt sick because we ate too many.

They make McDonalds restaurants small over here
...only joking it was selling ice cream only.

Guilin good idea
We adopted this technique for carrying our 'food bag' which was getting heavier because of the amount of fruit that Donna was buying.

Donna outside of Rosemarys restaurant
served western and chinese dishes and exceptional steak.

A poor attempt to imitate the louvre
but the open square looked better for it anyway