Saturday 4th July 2009

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The rain still hadn’t stopped this morning, we had decided to move on regardless anyhow as the forecast and the web was saying there is bad weather and floods in most of South China. We went out into the shops again and Mary bought a top she had seen yesterday and we had our deadly breakfast again before getting a taxi to the bus station where I went about saying to random people in what looked like uniforms Yangshou, Yangshou which worked and got us a ticket and on a bus in no time heading out of town.

The journey was the quickest and easiest we have done in a long while and the scenery was spectacular on the way. It’s like Halong bay on Land, Limestone peaks all around and the road just weaving its way through. Yangshou itself is nestled in between some amazing karsts. It just seems to fit in the middle of them as if it was planted down there in an open space that nature had left. We were able to walk to our great little hotel called West Lillys in about 5/6 minutes also so it all worked out pretty painlessly. We didn’t hang around the room for long and headed up to the touristy kind of street called West St. It’s your typical tourist tack street but with a level of tack that only China or possibly Japan could pull off or dream of selling. They had Tibetan silver, tribal dolls, playdough portraits, fans of every pattern and design, chopsticks saying whatever you want, in fact 3 shops just selling chopsticks, and the obligatory shops of fake clothing. A great place for wandering and being entertained by the treasure troves.

We had diner in a nice restaurant in the tourist area too, we decided it was time to sample the inspiration for all those takeaways at home and ate local cuisine. Mary kept it safe and got sweet and sour chicken but I got kind of adventurous and ordered tiny shrimp in ginger, and tiny they were. The plate arrived with about 300 shrimp smaller than most peoples little toes. They were bizarre, I think you are supposed to just crunch on the entire thing, head tail, skin and all but I hate that so was trying to peel them for the crumb of meat you’d get in the end. That wasn’t going to fill me so I reverted to the tried and tested and ordered a beef and oyster. Yangshou is very touristy so nearly everywhere has English menus so it’s all fairly easy here too.

After dinner and a few drinks we waited for the ever constant rain to ease from torrential to less immediately soaking rate and headed to the area where all the bars were. It being Saturday night the place was jammed. The disco bars and Karaoke places were out the door and pumping so we wandered in for a gander. We chose a place randomly and it turned out to be a Tin Tin themed bar with plasmas showing the cartoon and murals on the wall, pretty bug spot and the locals were all jumping around swinging out of poles and generally going mad no matter what they were playing. The music range was so varied; anything from Michael Jackson, Vanilla Ice, Trance, house, some campfire sing alongs, Chinese pop, and every so often an mc would grab the mike and belt out a live tune. It was brilliant, and flashing light shows with lasers, strobes and smoke machines, they had it all going on. We sampled about 3 different bars and it was all the same, all the Chinese loving it and giving it loads on the dance floors. We had one persistent bugger trying to drag Mary out dancing but other than that it was great. We wounded down then in a Karaoke bar where you handed up requests and a live band played while you sang to the audience. They don’t care how bad they are at all and lots of them are atrocious but at least hey give it a go. I would love to have gotten a few beers in and got up and sang a Westlife number or something; they would absolutely love you for it I’d say.

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