Relaxing in Guilin

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Guilin was where the natural beauty of China started to become apparent for Nick and me. We had seen some gorgeous scenery up to this point but Guilin is where it started to become hard to get away from it. After our brutal overnight bus, we spent two nights in Guilin city and used it as a jumping off point. That part of the country is know for some of the most beautiful rice terraces so we took the two-hour journey to the village of Ping’An. That trip alone deserved a blog entry to itself. Not necessarily because of it’s beauty (and it was beautiful) but because of the death defying trip we endured to get there.



The two-hour ride to Ping-An was nice enough. We even met a French guy staying at our hostel and he came along with us. When we got to the village, however, we were all loaded up in a bus, which was way too small. There were probably about 20 seats and 50 people on the bus. This is a common theme in China if you haven’t noticed yet… There were a few sharp turns where I didn’t budge too much because all the people were keeping me in place. The truly terrifying part was when we started to climb elevation and our driver was taking blind turns in the middle of the road without slowing down to anticipate the possibility of traffic coming the other direction. Ah yes, did I mention it had started pouring down rain living up to China’s famous monsoon season? We followed along a river that was surely at flood stage and we got to see land slides every few hundred meters that had taken out at least one lane. Once we got to the top about 30 minutes later, Nick and I decided it was safest to get some lunch, snap some pictures, and get back down the mountain as fast as possible. Luckily the ride down was fast and relatively smooth.



From Guilin city, we went to a small riverside village called XingPing. It took us a mere 10 minutes in the village to decide it was by far, our favorite place we had seen up until this point. The hostel was cheap, clean, had amazing food, cheap beer and the scenery was picturesque. So picturesque in fact, that the landscape found on the back of the Chinese 20 yuan bill was taken from there. There is even a little platform on the river that you can stand on with your 20 bill and take a picture. On the river, they offer bamboo raft rides, which Nick and I took advantage of. It was a nice little 30-minute ride that took us up and down a little section of the river and we got to see the karst landscape and water buffalo. One of my favorite moments however, was getting caught up in a monsoon just outside of the hostel. We took a walk down to the river as it was dumping rain so hard we could hardly see. The locals were giving us thumbs ups for braving the rain.



Another fun thing we decided to do was to head to the next town over for an authentic Chinese cooking class. We were two of seven, so it was a nice, small class. We were able to pick out the dishes we wanted to cook as a group and settled on Dumplings, Beer Fish, and Sweet and Sour Pork. One of the more interesting aspects of the class was the fact that once we picked out our dishes, our Chinese chef took us to the local market to scout out our ingredients. Unluckily for me, that included having to see rabbits, cats and dogs in the butcher section. Unfortunately that is a way of life here and those animals aren’t uncommon in dishes. On a happier note, our class was fun and educational and I think our dishes turned out pretty good. We left with recipes so I will let you know how it goes when I try to recreate it. To round out our day after our cooking class, we traveled back to XinPing and rented bikes. We rode about five miles to a famous rafting point in the river and got the opportunity to take in even more of the amazing scenery. It was fun to race the forming thunder clouds heading towards our village and pass through beautiful, quaint farm land.

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Photos

Rice Terraces
We made it to the top!

Me whipping up some Sweet and Sour Pork
As you can see, not as good looking as Nick's dish...