Nanning

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Day 35

Today was spent largely on the bus from Yangshuo to Nanning, the city nearest the Vietnamese border crossing. The journey was about 7 hours altogether but at least the coach was nice, with big leather seats and air con. As we left Yangshuo at 9am we were pretty hungry when we finally pulled into the service station at 1pm and as the driver said we had 20 mins (as far as we understood for he was speaking Chinese) we rushed off to get some pot noodles. However thankfully Joe noticed 10 mins later a frantic bus driver waving for us to get back on the bus. Apparently the break was only 10 mins after all so ran back to the bus and spent the rest of the journey trying to slurp our noodles without spilling hot water on ourselves and trying not to think about the fact that we still needed to use the toilet.

When we arrived in Nanning we checked into a hotel, as the hostel we were looking for seemed to have mysteriously vanished. However at only £13 for a hotel room it was a nice little luxury to treat ourselves to. We spent the rest of the afternoon pottering around the city looking for any vietnamese guide books or pocket dictionaries but to no avail. Though many people we have met don't really like Nanning and leave as quickly as possible we really liked the place as it reminded us very much of our first impressions of China. It feels very authentic, there has been no government makeover here, there are no tourist stalls and there is very little English to be found.
It seemed like a challenge again and gave us a chance to utilise all the Mandarin that we have learned on the way.

In the evening as there were not many restaurants by our hotel we decided to take a recommendation from the guidebook and take a taxi across town to a bar called JoJos (how could we ignore it with a name like that?) However, this also seems to have disappeared and we are beginning to question if the Lonely Planet has infact been to Nanning in the last few years? At least we found ourselves on a busy street with lots of other restaurants to choose from and as this part of China is quite a fan of eating dog meat we chose one of the classiest restaurants we could find in the hope that they would be most likely to understand our order and not try and pass off the cheaper meet to the stupid foreigners. Though our restaurant of choice couldn't speak English we still felt we had made a safe choice as they had a very nice menu filled with pictures, we asked the waitress to point at which meals were beef and wich were chicken etc. before making a final selection of about 1 beef dish and a couple of vegetable side dishes and some rice and drinks. She showed us what she had written down (in Chinese – not very helpful) and we nodded and sat back to wait for our first real meal of the day. All was going well and we were enjoying our food, when suddenly the waitress appeared with an additional beef dish, one of those we had looked at on the menu but not ordered, but as the food wasn't too expensive we just shrugged and thought it would allow us to taste some more genuine chinese cooking. It was when the chicken dish arrived 5 minutes after that that we began to panic – our table was covered in food! We then had to explain to the manageress that we hadn't ordered half of the dishes and she quickly ran off to the kitchen to cancel more dishes; it seemed that the waitress had ordered every beef & chicken dish on the menu for us!! It took quite a bit of explaining on our part but we think we finally got our point across, the manageress was perplexed as the order had been written down on our tab, but as we pointed out there was far too much food on our table for 2 people and she finally relented and eventually we were billed only for what we had eaten. We made a swift exit after that as we didn't feel like the most popular customers of the evening.

Day 36

Following the long bus ride yesterday we decided to spend an extra day in Nanning and leave the long bus journey to Vietnam for tomorrow. We spent the day wandering around the town centre and searching out wifi cafes so Joe could repair our lap top (we seem to have picked up a little computer bug in Dali). We could not find wireless anywhere but found some of the biggest internet cafes imaginable. There must have been about 300 computers in each one, all filled with Chinese teenagers playing online games. We are not sure if these kids don't go to school through the week or maybe its school holiday time.

In the evening the bar we tried (as recommended by Lonely Planet) was now a karaoke TV bar, and all the Chinese girls in their little glittery dresses just laughed at the western couple who rocked up by themselves and walked straight into the building only to emerge a few minutes later asking “where's the bar?”. So we moved on to the Thai restaurant down the road and had one of the loveliest meals we've had in China.

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