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Published: January 26th 2011
Shilin
In the rock park, with noone around!!The next day we set off on a massive load of travelling, which involved a huge amount of IPad playing...and landed us in Shilin in the early afternoon. Now, Shilin is famous for it's amazing karst geography...and I'd decided that we really should go and check it out...even though I knew that entry prices to the park were extortionate... We got a minibus from the bus station, which was quite a way away from town... And they took us to the train station to buy some of the last tickets on that nights train to Guangzhou, and to find somewhere to dump our bags. The latter seemed to be slightly dodgy, as we ended up leaving them in a tent/ restauranty shack in the car park that served people catching the train. Meh...
On the way to the park, I asked the taxi driver if she knew of a cheaper way to get into the park, otherwise we were gonna be paying about 75 kuai each for entry into a park that was about to close. She said that she had a friend who could help us, and proceeded to phone up this friend and organise for us this cheeky
A pond
...with Clare maybe falling into it a litlle... way into the park. Before we knew it, we had pulled up at a random junction, at which point our driver had waved her hand out of the window, and a small electric bicycle with a trailer had pulled up. The driver seemed slightly surprised to see foreigners in the taxi, but bade us jump on the trailer anyway, and we hummed off at a steady 5 mph...some smuggling vehicle.
About 15 minutes later we pulled up to the edge of the road and the drivers assistant jumped off and told us to follow him into the wilderness, only about 15 minutes 'till we're in the park, he assured us... Half an hour later we were still following this man, climbing through all sorts of terrain, ducking at points so that the security guards didn't see us, climbing through barbed wire fences, and at points being told by him that we shouldn't break sticks underfoot as the guards would hear us. It was all rather exciting really! Anyway, we finally stopped and our 'guide' told us that we had arrived. The lights had nearly gone...but he had finally got us into the park! As it turned out, our taxi
driver had also negotiated the price...and for some reason had settled at 80 kuai per person...5 kuai more than we would have paid at the door...balls...
It also turned out that we had successfully got into the park when it was closed, so we ended up having the whole place to ourselves...just about. We quickly looked around, mindful of missing our overnight train, clare fell in a pool in an epic attempt for a good photo, and then we headed off, racing through the gardens dodging the automatic sprinklers that had decided to come on just as we decided to take a shortcut. We popped in and grabbed our luggage, had a tasteless soup for 7 kuai each (massive ripoff), and caught another sleeper train to Guilin!
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