Western Batteries

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Our escape from Hong Kong was a two hour express train to Guangzhou east station. Pulling into the train station I noticed there was no English signs anywhere, the first indication that we had arrived in China. We got off the train based on time more than fact and followed everyone else.

We helpfully did not have any Yuan so in order to get a taxi we had to deal with a local tout to change money. We kept the amount to a minimum so we wouldn't get ripped off too much. Once in a taxi we headed out to our hotel, Xin Hua Hotel situated along the Pearl River. We got a good discount of nearly 50% off the rate however had to settle with a fairly noisy and cold room.

The german owned 1920 restaurant just down the road seemed to take most of our food budget but it was a nice reprieve from the rest of town. Guangzhou was an ok city nothing special to write home about although it does have a nasty market which sells kittens, puppies, owls, bats and snakes for eating! Not nice and just our luck we were staying right near to it.

Guangzhou main train station had recently been put on the map for housing 40000 stranded chinese folk trying to get home before the new year holiday. The weather had been cold and snowy, enough to affect travel during this time although now the lunar new year celebrations were coming to a close and the weather was getting warmer most of the strandee's were gone but everyone else had to get back to work which meant the station was busy with a capital B.

We set about trying to arrange onward travel. The main train station was a seething nightmare and after wondering around for a couple of hours we headed to the apparently less congested east train station. After a few minutes in the ticket queue we were issued two suspiciously cheap tickets to Guilin and were seated in a number configuration that didn't make sense. We were happy to have landed some tickets although we couldn't work out what we had been issued as most of it was written in chinese.

A bit of research lead us down the path that we had hard seat tickets, apparently not the best but that didn't really concern us, we were more interested in just getting there. The train was to leave at 17.40 so we arrived at the station around 16.45, bought some supplies and tried to find where the train was. After a lot of searching we resorted to customer service who after several attempts explained we were in the wrong station. We had bought tickets from the east station however the train left from the main station, about a 30 minute taxi ride away.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out we weren't leaving on that train so we headed back to the ticket office to purchase more tickets for the following day. Half expecting to have lost the money the nice lady at counter 12 swopped our tickets for new ones for free - what a result!

We headed over to the the main station and stayed at the Hotel Elan nearby. The hotel was lovely; big beds, warm room and a see-though glass walled bathroom. Having to watch No sit on the toilet was the only down side. We ate at the hotel restaurant reasonably cheaply for about 5 pounds enjoying a banquet of tofu, dumplings, fried sweetcorn, steamed rice, fried banana, and two beers.

We got a free late check-out until 2pm after which we spent the next few hours in the lobby on the internet trying to waste time before the train. This attempt at the train was going surprisingly well; we arrived on time, found the platform and train, however we also found our seats....in cattle class. No has his standards so we fought our way off the train against the flow of people getting on and tried to ask the conductor for an upgrade. He didn't understand but waved us in the direction of a quieter carriage.

We sat in two seats and expected someone to come along and ask for more money however it never happened. But rough with the smooth our once quiet carriage slowly started to fill as people freely moved about the train. It seems you can sit anywhere between hard and soft seat carriages but we concluded that if caught you had to be willing to pay the upgrade or simply get off someone's reserved seat.

It seemed we weren't going to be immune to this as each time the train stopped more people got on than got off and at one point we thought the people sat next to us were probably meant to be in our seats however because they couldn't talk english and we couldn't talk mandarin they didn't question us. In fact they were quite polite and even helped us figure out when our stop was. We all became the best of friends and in true chinese style where there is no such thing as personal space we all fell asleep huddled together for warmth.

13 long, twlight, hours later we arrived at Guilin station. Our bums were aching so much from the so called soft seats I thought I may have bruised mine. The walk from the train to the bus was freezing, luckily a tout saw us and took the thinking part out of getting to Yangshuo. No sooner had we paid we found ourselves on a mini-bus driving through thick fog, quite often on the wrong side of the road overtaking slow vehicles slowly.

We were dropped just outside town straight into the arms of the next tout. We had already dog-earred the guide book page on where we wanted to stay so there was nothing that was going to persude otherwise. Bless him he did follow us for awhile then eventually gave us directions to the competitor - nice man.

Morning Sun Hotel right in the centre of town was really nice and didn't have any problems with us checking in at 9am. Having not eaten properly for a day and a night it was time to feed ourselves. The 7th Heaven cafe next door supplied a big set breakfast for about 2 pound each. No had to satisfy a craving so ordered apple crumble after his breakie, much to the surprise of the cook.

Later that afternoon we wondered to Li River and took in the sights of the huge surrounding limestone peaks. Yangshuo is like a little slice of the Med; touts, bars, restaurants, touts, tours, shopping and touts so we felt quite at home here although the tourist trap has somewhat diluted the point of the area but was a good place to chill out in for a few days.

Just while we're at it we forgot to mention why we have entitled this entry as Western Batteries. We were in a shop getting Caz's photos onto cd when an old english guy and his wife came into the shop and actually asked for western batteries for his camera. We couldn't keep the smiles off our faces.

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Photos

Guangzhou Main Railway Station
This Was A Quiet Day!

No Smoking, No Spitting, No Littering
All Of The Above Are Generally Ignored But At Least People Go To The Toilet In The Toilet