Village hopping to the back of the 20 kuai note

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Im once again writing this entry from my favourite internet cafe in Chengdu. It's right round the corner from my hostel and even has sofas for skyping on. Perfect.

Ive spent over a month in Chengdu now and I must say I'm loving it more and more by the day. It's such a chilled out city, even when it's busy everybody still seems to be relaxed. The people are friendly, and of course the food is delicious. There is also loads and loads of live music here, I think I've seen more bands in the last two weeks than I have in the entire year before that. Take the day before yesterday for example. First we saw a Chinese rock/reggae band in the "new little bar", after they finished playing we went next door to the "little cafe" to see a guy and a girl play the guitar and sing, and after that we went to "jah bar" to see some of the local musicians do a little friday evening jamming. I think I've seen live music pretty much every single night this week, and I love it.

Also, I wil be teaching 11 hours this coming week, which will get some money coming in to last me until I find a "real" job. This teaching position is only temporary as the school has some teachers coming over from abroad, but this isn't a problem as it's teaching young children and ideally I want to teach older students.

Enough about Chengdu though, and back to my previous blog entry. This finished with us having booked the bus from Congjiang in Guizhou province to Sanjiang in Guangxi province. The bus ride was pretty awful for the first hour and a bit. In fact it took exactly the same route we had taken a few days earlier to get to Zhaoxing (video with previous entry). After the first hour or so the ride calmed down a little, and we had lots of guazi (sunflower seeds) to keep us occupied during the ride. To cross from Guizhou to Guangxi province required getting a boat, which was pretty cool and reminded me of the slow boat down the Mekong from Thailand into Laos.

After getting back on another bus and finally arriving in Sanjiang, the first thing we did was find some accomodation. Seeing as the tendency (especially in villages) seems to be to rip off foreigners, Scott and I let Liu Li go into the hotels first to inquire about the price. After finding a suitable hotel, we then walked in as well, at which point the owner promptly wanted to raise the price but of course couldn't go back on what he had just told Liu Li. Nice work.

The next day we went to see a particularly impressive "wind and rain" bridge. This is the name given to a type of covered bridge which, predictably, protects the users from wind and rain. There are loads of these bridges dotted around the place, but the bridge in Chengyang was supposed to be one of the best to visit. When we arrived at the bridge we realised there was a disproportionately large entrance fee to cross the bridge and get into the village, so we decided we would check out any other entrances. As it turned out, the local ticket collection mafia were ready and waiting for us at every single entrance to the village, so we just decided to see the bridge from outside the village. It seemed like the village was of the type where special shows are put on for tourists anyway, which was exactly what we weren't looking for. And we could see the bridge just fine from outside the village.

We walked around the surrounding villages to get a feel for the place before climbing up a mountain to get a better view of the area. The views from the top were pretty spectacular, and on the way down we even managed to get some good shots of the bridge too. We took a minivan home feeling good that we hadn't had to pay an extortionate entrance fee for a good day out.

The next day we decided to try again in our quest for an "authentic" minority village. We took a bus from Sanjiang to Linxi in the morning. It was a typical village bus with everybody smoking and the odd carrier bag with two upside down chickens feet in rigor mortis poking out. Linxi was quite a nice village, although it was obviously a hub for the surrounding villages to do their shopping etc, so after taking a few photos we decided to get a minivan to a village called Gaoyou.

As it was the last day we had to check out villages, we were glad to see that finally we had succeeded in finding an authentic village. The people were not used to seeing tourists, let alone foreigners, there were no stalls selling tacky souvenirs, there was no entrance fee and people were just going about their daily business. The village was very picturesque and it was a peaceful place to mooch around for a little while. I took some cool photos and we went back to Sanjiang feeling pleased that we had finally found a village without satellite dishes on every roof and without a cringe-worthy "show" put on for tourists.

That night we ate a delicious hot pot which we had ordered from our favourite restaurant in Sanjiang the night before, and felt ready to leave the villages behind us and continue on to the party capital of the province, Yangshuo. The back of the 20 kuai (Yuan) note in China shows the Li river near Yangshuo/Guilin surrounded by impressive karst peaks, which is exactly where we were headed 😊.

When we arrived in Guilin, Scott left us to take the train back to Kunming. His passport with his new visa was now ready and waiting for him there, and he had the rest of South East Asia to look forward to, starting with wonderful Vietnam. Liu Li and I got on the bus to Yangshuo. After arriving, it didn't take us long to locate monkey jane's rooftop bar, where we would end up returning almost every single night for more beers, beer pong and related craziness 😊.

Our first day trip out of Yangshuo was to rent bikes and cycle to dragon bridge. This was a really rewarding cycle ride with impressive scenery all the way. We cycled to the river and followed it right up to dragon bridge more or less. It was a little difficult to find the correct route now and then, and we did end up cycling down a few roads just to find they led up to the river and nothing else. Back again to the main road we went... The cycle ride ended up taking all day, and finished with Liu Li cycling into a stationary motorbike. Luckily she was okay except for a few scratches, and after returning the bikes we went to the famous rooftop bar once more to consume a little amber nectar to ease the pain 😊.

The next day was spent watching more of the olympics which was in full swing now, and in the evening we saw some friends from Kunming who invitied us to go and see the cormorants fishing with them that evening. The fishing wasn't massively impressive but it was quite interesting. The cormorants (type of bird) have a metal ring fixed around their necks so they can't swallow anything apart from very small fish. The way the fisherman uses the birds is by letting them dive under water and catch fish, after which he yanks them back onto his bamboo raft and removes the fish from their neck before throwing the bird back into the water. You can see the fish moving around inside the bird's neck after it has caught one, and occasionally the cormorant would be able to swallow one of the fish. One of the cormorants didn't feel like fishing (according to the fisherman), and quite frankly, I don't blame him. Perhaps this one saw how pointless is was to fish up a fish only to have it taken off him again.

I had heard about a mud cave day trip from some people at (you guessed it) monkey jane's, and we got a little group of people together to do the trip the next day. At first we all got changed into our swimwear, and were then handed bright red hard hats. While standing around waiting for Liu Li with four other guys wearing only swimming shorts and hard hats, I started to wonder what exactly I had singed up for... The village people did not go unmentioned haha.

The cave was typically Chinese in fashion. The best cave I've been to was in NZ, where it was as close to the state it was in when it was discovered as was possible. The mud cave in Yangshuo was no such thing. There was a concrete path with conrete steps through the entire cave, with electric lights everywhere. Our guide kept pointing out special sights in the cave, along the lines of "look to your left, it's king kong, and now to your right, its the famous scene from titanic". Yeah right. You would have to be stuck in a cave for an awfully long time to start seeing things like that. At least we all touched the famous "turtle's head" (forgive the pun), which means we will live forever or something.

After all this random cave rubbish we finally made it to the mud part. It was good fun exploring the mud cave and taking a few stupid photos while we were at it. After a while the guide finally convinced us to get out of the mud and go back. As we walked back to the cave's entrance via the outside of the cave, the mud was slowly drying on us. We all felt like we had extremely healthy skin after this little episode, and went back to Yangshuo for a long shower and then some more of our favourite fizzy drink at monkey jane's 😊.

That's where my photo album stops so I'll leave it at that for this entry. I've also uploaded a not particularly brilliant video of the cormorant fishing, but it does show the birds diving for fish, and the one lazy/clever bird who had decided he was off duty 😊.

The Photos

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