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Published: April 14th 2010
because the chickens were all doing it. I thought of this HILARIOUS and original joke while walking from our rooms in a restored farmhouse to the main buildings at the Outside-Inn Guest House in Chao Long Village. There were so many chickens, and ducks and roosters crowing at all hours of the day. Oh and many a water buffalo (someone told us they are water buffalo) working the fields. This was my favorite in China trip to date. So many great memories and so much fun.
We flew from Shanghai to Guilin where we were met by a driver holding the now familiar “Suzanne” sign. Emily’s first comment: “When can we have a driver meet us with an Emily sign?” I need to remember to do that, but it might be my dad at the Santa Barbara airport at this point. Our world travel days are winding down soon. Or at least pausing.
We drove from the airport to our guest house in a village outside of another city, Yangshuo. It was the Tomb Sweeping holiday, and we saw many families out in the fields near grave sites setting off fireworks, laying flowers, and performing what we assumed were
holiday related rituals. Fireworks seem to accompany all major holidays in China, so we heard the whistles and pops during our entire stay. They were pretty minimal compared to those we are used to in Shanghai fireworks.
After about an hour and a half, and after a quick stop to buy some snacks at a store en route, we arrived at the Outside-Inn in Chao Long village. We were greeted by Wendy the assistant manager and were shown to our rooms. We had arranged to rent an entire floor of a very recently renovated farmhouse. It was only opened four days when we checked in, and it was in amazing shape. Brand new everything, wireless working, mini kitchen with dishes, coffee pot and fridge. The perfect family setup. Two bedrooms with two beds for the kids and a door to close after bedtime. My dad was setup right next door in the grandpa apartment. Not as fully appointed, but equally new and nice. My dad and I developed a fun ritual each morning. I would make a pot of Peets coffee (we brought some with us) and head over to his room with 2 mugs. This was always early
enough that we could hang out for a bit before the kids were up. Mark was usually up and working, so I made his coffee too before sneaking out to visit with my dad.
We loved the restaurant at our hotel so much we ate almost all our meals there. They had amazing Chinese dishes, but they also had tasty western food. Nathan ate more spaghetti Bolognese than should be allowed in a four day period and I was sure Emily was setting a new record ordering all those margarita pizzas. They were happy, they ate well, and we were able to eat together without any comprises. That’s a huge issue for us on some of these adventure trips so hooray for a place for the travel group with varied palates.
Cool thing about our Inn was that it literally is in the middle of an actual village. The
website explains the history if you are interested. It's pretty amazing how the owner built out his space by renting homes from various local residents. Seems very complicated and as though it could go terribly wrong, but it all seemed to work out. I was impressed. People were constantly
farming, washing clothes, tending to their homes while we came and went from our temporary home in one of the farmhouses.
I am so proud of the fact that I insisted we all bring our rain boots. We wore them almost the entire trip. Even though it didn’t rain the whole time, there was a lot of mud and many puddles, and we all 5 had dry feet the entire trip. Those boots took up a lot of luggage space, but we were all so much happier for having them. Many of the people we met during our trip commented on our preparedness and also on my cute floral patterned rain boots. Those babies have gotten a lot of mileage. One of the best purchases of 2009.
We spent a lot of time during our trip on bikes. Mark and I were on tandems with one kid each and my dad was on his own mountain bike. We went out on our first full day and rode to the city of Yangshuo. It was raining on and off, but we managed to get to town and onto a motorized bamboo boat for a ride on the river before
the first major downpour. We haggled with some ladies for quite a while and talked them down in price. There were no other customers so that had to help our cause.
The boat ride was fun. We just motored around the river, saw the Karst mountains (the fantastic limestone mountains that the area is famous for). It was a bit windy and cold, but we huddled together and stayed under the boat’s roof during the rainy parts.
We left our bikes with the woman who sold us the boat ride, and returned to find my dad’s bike chain had come off. Perhaps it was just bad luck—the bike had clearly been repaired before, but it was odd that as soon as we started looking for a solution to the bike problem, our boat contact person literally ran off and left us to deal with it. I found a guy almost immediately who had a bunch of bikes for rent. I asked him if he could fix it and he said he could do it for 10 RMB. That’s $1.50 US and so of course I said yes. The manager at our hotel later pointed out that that’s about
half a day’s worth of wages for many people in the area. $3 a day? That’s hard to imagine. Though after riding through town and through the small villages in the area, and seeing the living conditions for many people, it’s not impossible to imagine.
We decided to head back toward the hotel, but it started raining pretty hard so waited it out a bit under some trees. Finally we decided to go for it and made our way back through town. We stopped at a restaurant about 5 minutes ride from our hotel for lunch. We’d had our first couple meals at the hotel so we thought we’d try something new. The sign said “Farmhouse Restaurant” and we later saw similar signs all over the area. My dad and I joked that perhaps it was a chain. More likely, though, it became a generic name that was copied by one family run restaurant to the next.
We sat outside on a deck overlooking some water. We assumed there were fish in the water and had we ordered a fish dish we might have watched them pull the fish from a basket in the water below our table.
We stuck to vegetables and beef for this meal. There was no English or photo-menu so we just used our Chinese to discuss what was available and what we wanted. We ended up with a soup fresh noodles, a little bit of pork and veggies picked from the garden while we watched. Emily and I went to watch the vegetables being selected and she posed for a picture with the woman we think was the owner. We also had an amazing eggplant dish and after seeing the pepper plants in the garden, requested it be spicy. It was fiery hot but delicious. The kids didn’t eat much more than the rice, so we fed them lasagna back at the Outside-Inn. They were very patient with us and we praised them for their good behavior.
I should mention that the area is quite heavily populated with a particular type of dog. They are not barkers, which we found interesting. They just mill about, laze outside front doors, and make themselves known in their large numbers. We were told that these are the dogs the locals tend to eat. Of course, we know after living here for two years, that some
Chinese eat dogs. We have never seen it on a menu (except at a Korean place in Shanghai) but nonetheless, I pretty much went vegetarian this trip. As icky as this is to me (and possibly many of you) it just is. It's a food source. We thought nothing of the chickens walking around and then later ordering chicken for dinner. Same is true for the duck dish the men ordered one night. It's a cultural difference I don't want to experience, but it just is.
The next day, we rented bikes again, but decided to take a more rural route. We wanted to avoid the city streets that had caused us a bit of angst the day before. Lots of cars and traffic. We started off well and eventually had to go off road to continue our ride. The paths were a bit bumpy and then a lot bumpy but nobody fell and we all managed to get through the muddy parts and the watery parts without too much trouble. I was nervous my dad would fall and we’d be in the middle of nowhere, but he was very careful and we all ended up walking our bikes
at various points in the 5 hour journey. We had a sort of plan to find this bridge where there was the promise of a bamboo raft ride back toward the hotel. It was not easy to find, but we did find it.
I somehow got into negotiations for the boats and the guy I was negotiating with did not like my low ball bargaining attempts. He said he wanted to talk to Mark instead. He said my Chinese was bad and Mark’s was good—which I found really interesting since Mark had yet to speak to the guy. I know he was trying to sweet talk Mark into a better price but I stood my ground. I said I was the boss of the group and kept bargaining. Of course after we finally reached a price, I had to tell the guy to go get the money from Mark. I had no money. He thought that was hilarious. The bikes came on the boats with us and we need 3 boats to accommodate the 5 of us.
My dad was impressed with our continued banter with the boat pushers (these were like gondolas and had people standing up
with long poles that they used to push us down the river). Emily and I ended up on the boat with the guy who sold us the boat rides. He was a really nice guy and he had fun practicing his English with us. He particularly loved the phrase “No way!”.
During the ride, we had to go over some very minor drops. But minor or not, we were all whooping it up and screaming as though we were on a class 5 rapids. The guides thought we were nuts but that’s okay. We had so much fun. It was so incredibly beautiful we had to remind ourselves it was natural beauty and not a Disney sponsored river ride. This has happened to us in all the countries we’ve visited. We did see a lot of garbage in the river and alongside it, which was likely an unfortunate result of all the tourism in the area.
We were let off at what we had expected to be a place from which we could easily ride back to the Inn. It ended up being another 40 minutes, and a very muddy, difficult 40 minutes to reach the main road
and ultimately home-base. But we had fun along the way and the boat ride gave us time to rest up. Our
guides helped us get our bikes back to a trail and we said goodbye to them.
We had heard about the Yangshuo light show from the staff at the Outside-Inn. It was created by the person who created the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics. We took a van to town with some other guests at our Inn and had to walk a ways to reach the theater. The theater is on the water and the performers are on the land as well as on boats in the water. There was singing and all sorts of complicated choreography with over 600 performerst (including many children) and it is put on every night, sometimes twice a night. My favorite part involved rolls of red material being pulled all the way across the water—from one shore to the other—by men in boats. I actually didn’t realize they were in boats at first. It seemed like they were walking on the water, it was so smoothly performed. It’s hard to explain this very visual performance with words, but if you are
in Yangshuo, make sure you go see the show if you can swing the rather steep ticket price. The adults all found it to be an impressive show, though the kids were drowsy (Emily) and snoozing outright (Nathan) by the end.
On our last night, Mark and I were offered a night out by Papa and we took him up on it without pause. We went into town and wandered around the West street market. Lots of vendors and shops with some ordinary Chinese trinkets and a few new things we don’t see in Shanghai. We found and bought a few blocks of sugar for my dad. It’s the kind they use to make this amazing ginger tea at the Inn . It’s not tea, but rather sugar and tons of ginger cooked up into a hot, sweet gingery drink. We drank pots of it over our few days and it may have prevented me from getting a cold that was threatening me before we left Shanghai.
We ran into some friends from the Inn walking around town and they took us to the massage place they were just coming from. We ended up getting full body massages—pretty
intense, but they took all the kinks out after two days of bike riding on bumpy roads. Then we grabbed a quick dinner before heading back to relieve Papa from kid care duty. There was a huge rainstorm at this point, so getting a taxi was not easy. We finally found one but the driver didn’t know where the hotel was. We refused to get out of the taxi—something we learned after being stranded by taxi drivers who refused to take us where we wanted to go in other parts of China. We didn’t discuss it, but we both stayed put until the driver flagged down another taxi and ensured us that driver would take us.
Nathan got a little sick after breakfast but it seemed to clear up with a few hours of rest. The sun was out, and he sat in the sun while Mark worked and Papa, Emily and I went to town. Papa got a foot massage (same place we’d been the night before) and Emily and I roamed the shopping area in the sun, buying some very cheap treasures to remember our trip by.
The flight home was bumpy but we made it
back to Shanghai where we were greeted by Driver Johnson who took us back home.
We had such fun sharing an adventure of this kind with my dad. I was so impressed with his ability to adapt to what has become our travel style. We had our share of problems to solve (broken bike, finding our way back to the hotel when we weren’t sure where it was), dealing with the rain while riding bikes on traffic filled streets, and he was a trooper. He told me he was impressed with how Mark, the kids and I handle ourselves as we negotiate tricky situations and solve comically challenging problems. All in Slaven-style Chinese. That was nice to hear. I am proud of us too.
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Larry Townsend
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Best read yet
Your immediate NEV nabes found this one to be the most interesting of all. Hope you have lined up an agent for your book! See you after we get back from Alaska. Larry and Carol