Yangshuoian adventures

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I'm listening to a bit of the doors as I write this entry, and I'm beginning to realise I should have listened to my doors discography sitting on my hard drive at home a long long time ago... Oh well, better late than never.

When I wrote my last entry I was supposed to be teaching 11 hours that week, but unfortunately the teacher I was filling in for arrived earlier than expected and I only ended up teaching my usual 2 hours on friday evening (12 y/o) and an afternoon class of 7 y/o mentalists. The school, in what I have come to regard as their usual style, didn't care to inform me of this until I asked about it after teaching another class the day before. Great. I've had an interview with another private English training school though which went really well and it sounds like a cool job, but I'm waiting on some more visa related info before I go for a second interview. Even though the rules have relaxed a little after the olympics, Zack's version of the olympic motto still largely holds true: "one world, one love, no visas".

Enough about work related hassles though, and back to party central, a.k.a. Yangshuo. The last entry finished with the mud cave, after which we all went back to our respective accomodation to get cleaned up before going for dinner. The night finished with Zack and I finally being defeated at beer pong after 7 consecutive wins. Nice. Unfortunately we were too busy winning to take any photos of the dream team...

The next day six of us (Zack, Liu Li, Shira, Chris, Shea and I) caught a bus to Yangdi in search of some bamboo raft related frolics. We soon discovered that the woman that followed us onto the bus had read our minds, and was in fact running some bamboo raft tours. Her price was reasonable and her bamboo rafts looked stable enough, so we decided to go with her. We got two rafts between the six of us and one watergun per raft, and we set off towards Xingping - a few hours downriver. The scenery was once again truly spectacular with seemingly endless karst peaks in every direction. Chris and I even had a go at piloting the raft for a while, which was good fun until the lady suddenly rushed back to where I was standing and hastily took control of the raft again. I quickly realised why, there was a dangerous bit coming up in the river where certain rocks had to be avoided, and I was heading straight for them. Oops.

We stopped after a little while to get some snacks, and ended up eating some delicious deep fried (whole) fish. The fish were only tiny and you could eat the entire thing, the bones being too small or soft to worry about. At the end of the river cruise we ended up at the spot pictured on the back of the 20 kuai note, which was pretty cool 😊. After finding the Xingping bus "station", we were once again on our way back to Yangshuo, but not without seeing a chicken being ended on the street to the bus station first.

That evening was pretty uneventful, as we had planned to rent some scooters the next day and get up early. Early for a traveler that is, which is of course nothing like the kind of disgustingly early that people in that thing called the real world often encounter.

After a light breakfast we all headed down to the scooter place, and after some initial to-ing and fro-ing, Chris and Robbie rented bycicles and Zack, Liu Li, Shira and I rented two scooters between us. The rental man wanted to rent us electro bikes, but seeing as they are totally rubbish we obviously opted for the petrol scooters instead. The electro bikes also only have enough power to last them 40km, and we were planning on doing at least that, probably more.

There was really only one good scooter, which Zack drove with Shira on the back. My scooter (with Liu Li on the back) wasn't great from the start but it got steadily worse and worse and worse. At first I thought the choke was just fully out as it started spluttering more as the engine heated up. After a thorough examination of the bike I couldn't find a manual choke, so we just continued on our merry way. At least the bike was getting us around the crazy little villages around Yangshuo. That is, right up until we stopped for petrol. My bike was going through fuel a lot faster than Zack's, but as I couldn't find a choke or indeed anything I could change without tools, I just filled it up and we drove down to the river.

The river looked very inviting on such a massively hot day, and we all decided to go for a little swim to cool down. I tried to swim to the other side of the river, but after getting past the half way point I started being very rapidly dragged downstream by a strong current. It was then that I realised it was time to abort said attempt. Immediately. At least I got some excercise from swimming all the way back upstream again 😊.

After we all set off back to the big Y on the scooters and wearing wet clothes, my vehicle started to die on me. The scooter would now not even open up a little bit, as if it was drowning when doing anything but idling. This wasn't very useful at all, and it took us a really long time to get back. By the end my scooter wasn't even moving at walking pace, it was totally ridiculous. I even stopped at a garage to see what was wrong, but all they did was say it was because of petrol mixed with water, as in, the stuff I bought in the village... They subsequently drained the fuel tank, after which I filled up the bike once again at a petrol station to hopefully solve the problem. This didn't help one little bit, and we decided to just return the bike without saying anything. We could have complained about the bike being broken, but this almost certainly wouldn't have got us our money back and would have probably resulted in us being blamed for the problem. Instead we just drove the scooter into the depot slowly, and when they tried the bike toi see if it worked all they did was start it and let it idle. Luckily that was the one thing the bike could still do, and we got straight out of there after getting our deposit back.

The evening was spent doing much the same thing as every night at monkey jane's, although after all the beer we cleverly decided we'd start watching a film at 2am. And then it turned out to be a hugely long film. We ended up switching it off after 3 hours of thinking it was going to finish any minute now, and finally left the bar. Walking through the empty streets of Yangshuo at gone 5am is an inspiring experience, and I took the opportunity to take some cool night photos before getting into bed as the sun came up.

I had heard some interesting stories about the farmer's market in the centre of town from other travellers. Stories specifically involving dog meat on display. Seeing as I had only seen dog restaurants from the outside, and the odd skinned dog's rear end winking at me from a restaurant counter, I was interested to see what this market had that set it aside from other dog meat offering venues. I was not disappointed...

After perusing the isles of the first section of the market which was mainly veg and spices, I went through into the meat section. This place was full of death of all kinds, from the usual stuff like endless duck and chicken carcasses either freshly killed or already pre-cooked, to the more unusual stuff like snakes in buckets and of course dogs. My first intense photo was of a duck meat counter. The ducks were in cages behind the counter, from which they would be removed one at a time to be killed. After this was done, no time was wasted in getting them on display, neck wound facing the potential customer. Nice touch.

After walking a little further, I noticed half a dog carcass hanging from a hook. I felt a little nauseus, but this was what I came to see after all so I went for a closer look. I saw two skinned dog bodies, neatly cut in half, hanging from a hook in the face. I decided this was the time for a photo. The owner and her daughter weren't at all pleased with my photographic interest, and the first photo I took shows the fingertips of the girl as she came running to stop me taking a photo. Unphased by this, I walked a few more steps and took another photo. I was quicker this time and the girl didn't manage to get her grubby hands in my photo again, although the owner did manage to dive away behind a dead dog in time for her face to be hidden. Basically, if they don't think their cruelty to dogs can stand the light of day, then perhaps they shouldn't do it.

The worst thing about the dog meat stand was that the live dogs were actually in cages about 2 metres from their less fortunate counterparts on hooks. You can see the dogs in the cages on photo 37. The dogs get killed in the back of the tiny shop, and there's no way the other dogs don't know what's going on. All this dogs-on-hooks business combined with the constant barking of the caged dogs and the hostile environment created by taking a few necessary photos, meant I was ready to leave the market and get some fresh air. I took some photos around town to take my mind off the dogs, and vowed not to try dog meat during my stay in the PRC.

That evening, quite unlike any that went before it, we ended up playing beer pong. But not before I took some photos of the stunning sunset from the rooftop bar. Monkey Jane and I formed a beer pong team, and almost managed to equal Zack and my record with 6 consecutive wins before eventually being bested by one of the many challengers. This was our last night in Yangshuo, and we made it a good one 😊.

The next day we set off towards Guilin, where we would spend one night before heading to the Longsheng rice terraces. Guilin wasn't that spectacular. It was a nice enough city, but when compared to the scenery around Yangshuo, a nice enough city just wasn't going going to cut it. We got on the bus to Longsheng the next morning in full anticipation of some of China's most impressive rice terrace scenery.

More on that in the next blog entry. Here are the photos:

Yangshuo and surrounding countryside

*I've just fixed the 'time warp' on photo 53. Thanks Paul 😊.

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Comments

[Paul]

Time Warp!
Mark, there's a time warp in photo 53! Why didn't you tell us about that?