It's all about the landscape

Either Norah Jones has an agreement with the Chinese government to pipe her tunes into all hostels in China, or, we are experiencing the impossible scenario. If I hear “Come Away with Me” one more time, I think I’m going to lose it. Is Norah Jones a communist? Does she have ties to the government here? Or, do Chinese people just widely enjoy her breathy voice?

I’m pretty sure anyone who has functioning taste buds agrees that Pizza Hut tastes like rancid crap. When visiting China though, a visit to Pizza Hut should be part of your “To Do” list just so you can experience the joy of watching a group of young Chinese women bond by building a salad tower together. The absence of self-service restaurant food bars in China seems to be placing excessive amounts of pressure on Pizza Hut’s novel self-service salad bar. The format goes like this…one small salad bowl costs 30 yuan, and, it is only to be used for one visit to the salad bar…no limits on the number of people working to fill that bowl, and your time at the salad bar runs out when a Pizza Hut manager stops by and comments on how much of a cheapskate you are for building an 80 kg salad…let the games begin! It was fascinating to watch; every single group and bowl combo had the same basic strategy to building the perfectly huge salad. First, build The Great Wall of Cucumbers in a circular fashion along the rim of the bowl using the sliced cucumbers as bricks and a light splattering of thousand island dressing as mortar (what is it with Chinese people and wall building?) Carrot sticks can be used as a complement to the cucumbers for added stability or simply for aesthetics. Second, fill the base of the bowl with the heaviest salad bar item (usually mandarins, pears or some other dense fruit). This looks to provide reasonable inner strength, reinforcing the walls and preventing inward collapse (as the rim of the bowl slopes slightly towards the center. Once the center of the bowl is filled to the height of the cucumber wall, continue to build up the wall for a few more centimeters, leveraging the overall strength of the wall/filling combo below. Finally, once things start looking shaky, carefully place a dollop of salad dressing (usually 1000 Island again) on the very top, middle of the structure. After that, designate one person to be the porter and create a protective barrier around this person as he/she carefully transports the structure, two-handed, to the table. The whole process takes between 15 and 30 minutes, depending on the size of the construction crew and it is brilliant to watch.

Other notable reasons to visit Pizza Hut:
- to view the décor which looks much like the hotel lobby of a decent mid-range hotel
- if you are in the mood for escargot
- if you are in need of an immaculate bathroom or a nicely heated environment (our primary reason for turning up)

After a quick 1hr15min flight, we arrived fresh and coherent in Guilin which was a bit of a change from previous night-long sleeper train journeys resulting in hazy mornings. We were forced to purchase a more expensive airline ticket out of Kunming as the train tickets were sold out 10 days in advance due to the increased holiday traffic. This was bad because the airline ticket cost us 499 yuan each compared to the hard sleeper ticket at 250 yuan each, however, good because the flight was less than 1.5 hours versus 22 hours for the train. Our evening flight landed in a nest of neon lights and we promptly high-tailed it to the nearest hostel fearful that the other laowai on our flight would snatch up the few remaining rooms in town (due to the on-going holiday). We settled in for the night, oblivious to the landscape surrounding us, only to wake the next morning to a city enveloped in a silhouette of misty limestone peaks that looked like some sort of Dr. Seuss drawing. Rozy and I had seen some nice karst scenery before in Ipoh, Malyasia, however, the number of peaks, couple with the height and shape of these mountains made them truly spectacular and surrealistic. Several peaks in the middle of town were scalable giving way to fantastic views of the circle of peaks that surrounded the city. The scenery underground was equally intense as immense limestone caverns (decorated in true Chinese fashion with the obligatory colored lights) sprawled beneath the humps and points of the mountains above. Stalactites and stalagmites were overly accentuated with pinks, greens and blues emitted from neon lights tube placed in every nook and cranny throughout, giving the impression of some sort of geological rock concert…very weird and very much worth the 60 yuan entrance fee.

Guilin had some fun things to look at, however, the little town of Yangshou (just a 1.5 hour bus ride away) had all the great peaks but without all the buildings and neon signs. Yangshou was an excellent place to get some unobstructed/uncluttered views of the mountains as the development was significantly less. Important to note though, the town survives predominately on tourism, as such, touts and scams dot the streets waiting for the next sucker or victim. Regardless, it is worth putting on your people blinders, grabbing your camera and staring at the peaks for hours.

The next stop in our Guilin-area circuit was the little farming village of Ping’an, known for its vast paddy fields scaling mountaintops and dubbed “The Backbone of the Dragon”. Shocked and awed again, we roamed around the hills all afternoon snapping pictures of the immaculately carved landscape…definitely one of those sights where even the best pictures fail to capture the feeling you get from the experience. Buildings clung to the edges of mountains while rice paddies snaked their way to the very crest of the surrounding hills. While roaming around taking pictures, every now and then a few local ladies would walk up to you, all smiles, asking if you want to see their hair (for 5 yuan, of course). As a bit of background, the local minority women don’t cut their hair, so, most women have hair the length of their body, of which, they are very proud. So, upon the first solicitation, I happily accepted and got a serious showing of hair. Two ladies began to undo their headdresses (which cover most of their hair, apart from the massive bun that protrudes from the front, center) to reveal not only their floor length hair but also two massive lengths of previously cut hair (the length of their body) stored in the same headdress! Overwhelmed with hair, I began snapping as many pictures as I could before they concealed their prized possession and searched for another ‘customer’.

Back in Guilin, we had just one evening before catching the train to Shanghai, our final place to explore in China. We spent the evening hoofing the city in the freezing cold weather getting a detailed view of the lights and general décor. Plastic coconut trees lit up with green and pink, 20 meter tall light tubes with changing colors, hastily shifting ads on lighted billboards, rivers lined with green, purple and yellow lights, a Plexiglas-house lit bright white extended out across the river, giant white-lit orbs on bridges, plastic palm trees with multi-color lighted branches with motion lights that give the appearance of an exploding firework, buildings lined with pink string lights, China Construction Bank building almost entirely covered with lights, multi-colored water fountains, and the list goes on and on. Relatively small Guilin gives the air of a little city battling for luminous superiority among its much larger cities to the north. In a country struggling to meet energy demands, it seems a bit conflicting for every building in every city to be lit up like a Christmas tree…one of the many contradictions of China!

Bottom-line, we didn’t spend enough time in Guilin (especially the surrounding areas) to really explore the way we would have liked to. The cold temperatures sapped out motivation and we engaged in the slash and burn brand of tourism rather than taking it slow and biking/hiking around. The whole area deserves much more time than we had to spend here…a solid week in this area during the spring atop a bicycle would be an excellent chance to really take in the scenery and thoroughly enjoy the experience.

See you again in Shanghai!

STATISTICS

• Flights taken = 3
  
• Intercity trains rides taken = 6
  
• Intercity bus rides taken = 26
  
• Times lost = 7
  
• Total instances of diarrhea = 3
  
• Total number of requests for pictures with Daniel = 2
  
• Total megabytes of pictures taken = 9,260
  

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