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Published: February 5th 2009
Boat
The lovely view as we head out onto our Li River tour. We definitely hit that wall on the rightSo Sunday (the 25th) morning we schedules a bus to come pick us up at 10 am so we could head to our next destination. The bus shows up on time (bus means van in China) to pick up myself, Fito, and Elinor. Two Brits and a Scot traveling together came with as well. On yet another terrifying bus ride, the driver drove us about an hour to a place on the Li River where we would meet our boat. No seatbelts, of course, and our driver spoke 0 English so we were bouncing around the seats with our backpacks on our laps as our driver flew around the outskirts of Guilin. We passed some strawberry fields with stands of people selling them. I was really intrigued but with my limited Chinese all I could manage to come up with was "I want that," and he probably wouldn't understand that I wanted to stop and get strawberries so I didn't even bother, I figured he should keep his eyes on the road anyway.
After taking us through several dirt roads, our driver dropped us off at a "park" where we were to board our boat for the Li River Cruise.
Once again, all luxuries had been provided for us as we stepped into our covered boat with a bathroom. Too bad our 'covered' boat had cracks leaking cold air in everywhere and our driver was an avid smoker so he kept a window open so that all the cold air could blow his smoke right into our faces, making for a pleasant ride. The bathroom was a squatter, so when Elinor was in need of it, I told her she might as well just hang out the window. We took off from the "harbor" and out driver ran into a stone wall. Not that they care in China of course! The cruise itself was absolutley beautiful. We saw beautiful mountains and caves, and I'm sure it wouldn't been much nicer had I not been freezing my toes off. At one point we saw a man cleaning his dog in the river water. And by dog I mean furless dead/future dinner dog.
Three hours later we reached our destination, which was nowhere really. But a lady met us and took us up to her "bus" (imagine a 6 passenger covered ATV). If I wasn't terrified enough by the first driver,
this lady surely did the trick. We drove for about 15 minutes through rural China. Now in rural China, everything is even crazier than it is in Shanghai. We saw a lot of farmers working the land, random oxen, chickens, other animals just running around the dirt roads. Sadly, there was a lot of trash and pollution even in these areas. At one point my friend saw someone dumping their trash out a window into a river. Waterways seem to be the common trashcans of China.
Crazy driver lady took us to a small small town, forget the name of it, I'll have to edit this once I ask Elle haha. We were all starving by this point, not having eaten breakfast, so we asked our next bus driver if we could get food (What I actually said was somewhere along the lines of "we like food" then I pointed to the city, because usually we have someone decent in Chinese with us but of the three somehow I had the best Chinese so we all sounded like babbling idiots) They didn't like this idea so we had to get on the bus right away and head to Youngshou.
Maybe twenty minutes driving through more of rural China, we came to Youngshuo. The bus dropped us off at the station and we hiked to our hostel. We were so hungry/needing to relieve our bladders before we got there that we saw a KFC and just about ran inside. After a very large and fattening meal of twisters, popcorn chicken, fries, and potatoes, we finally set out to find out hostel. Once again we got pretty lucky with our hostel, we had a three-bed with heat and a shower! It was about 4 or 5 when we arrived and I was exhausted and freezing, so I immediately took off my shoes and passed out.
Because it was the New Year, it's a big night to celebrate and have a big dinner with family. The managers of our hostel were nice enough to invite us to dinner but I was so cold I couldn't even make it out to eat with them. Fito and Elinor went and I guess they had a good meal of hot pot (kind of like fondue but with oil instead of cheese). After dinner, I was finally feeling better so we headed out to meet
the other group who was also in Youngshou (Alex, Amanda, Meaghan and Trent). We went down to a part of the river that goes through the town (a tributary of the Li) where everyone was going absolutely crazy setting off fireworks. Sounded like the city was blowing up. Obviously, we immediately found the first place we could find with fireworks and bought as many as we could carry. We set off a bunch down by the river at around 9. Car alarms were going off there were so many!
Trent came and found us by the river and we went to a restaurant where we had the local dish, beer fish, and some other meat that I'm not 100% sure about. After dinner we bought some more fireworks and acted like a bunch of children playing with fire, then walked down West street which is an awesome touristy spot with tons of shopping and restaurants. We had a lot of fun looking at all the crazy Chinese stuff. There was a guy drawing faces on tshirts and I really wanted one of myself and Obama but he wanted to charge 80 kuai (about $12 US) but we figured we
could find it cheaper somewhere else. I got a hanging for my dorm room, and soon realized that I was outta money so Fito and I head back to the room to get my card. As we were leaving the hostel, Fito decides to go into a bar next door for some tequila to celebrate the new year. There we met a cool Australian who lived above the bar and was working there while he learned Chinese. We also met a bunch of cool foreigners there and invited them to come with us to celebrate the New Year (Well Fito did because I think he had the hots for one of the girls). After I got my money, we went to our friends hostel on West Street. On top of the hostel they had a rooftop bar that overlooked the entire city and was right next to a gorgeous mountain. People were setting off fireworks and playing beer pong, which is apparently a big deal in China, we Americans had to teach everyone the rules because I think we're the only people that play it. I opted out of beer pong to harass the waitresses for some dumplings, which were
phenomenal by the way.
I tried to take pics but because it was so dark they didn't turn out great. Plus it was lightly drizzling so they're a little blurry. The place was absolutley gorgoues though. In the distance there is a beautiful building on top of one of the mountains that is all lit up. To celebrate the new year we set off the rest of our fireworks and took snake oil shots, which are those pics of the jar with snakes in it (not recommended) Finally our night ended somewhere around 3.
Monday morning we were all exhausted from staying out late (and Fito from the tequila) so we had kind of a lazy day looking around the city. We grabbed a late breakfast and found a bookstore that was cool to look around for a while. West Street is more of the touristy spot and doesn't get really busy until later in the evening. We met up with the other group for dinner because it was their last night in town. That day they did the Li River tour that we'd done the previous day. They also found a place in town that served them
dog! I was pretty bummed I missed out on it, but those who ate it said that it was pretty good. We tried ordering frog legs but they were fresh out so we ordered some "mud snails" which are something like escargot but worse-sounding and don't taste quite as good. I ate a few until finally some mud rolled out of one and I was done with the mud snails. The other group left, so we wandered down West St. and visited some more shops that we hadn't seen the night before. By this point the first group (Chris, Evan, Mike and Miles) had made it to Youngshou, but they were busy hanging out with their hostel owner in a cave (as the night progressed we recieved more and more drunk phone calls from them trying to convince us to party in a cave with them). We called it an early night so that we could wake up early and do some of the touristy things outside of town!
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