Somewhere down the grey Li River

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With National Day only a couple of days away, and knowing that many Chinese would be taking the rest of that week as holiday, it made sense to find somewhere to stay for that whole period, as travelling would be a miserable experience with all the extra passengers. Unfortunately Yangshuo was not the ideal place to ride out the storm. Though situated on the Li River in the midst of much misty, karst countryside that has inspired numerous Chinese artists, it turned out to be a popular holiday destination and hence we'd unwittingly (or witlessly?) picked one of the least effective methods for evading the hordes. However the reason we left after just 2 days was our hotel's insistence on jacking up the room rate by over 50%, their excuse being that it was the holiday - as though the holiday was responsible for raising rates rather than the hotel's management. Bizarrely, every other hotel in town was also charging vastly over the odds, despite the fact that none of them were full. I can only assume there was some sort of cartel in action.

Even without the price hike, Yangshuo was a disappointment. The cobbled streets, red lanterns, souvenir shops, bars playing loud music, and multitude of Chinese tourists had a superficial similarity to Lijiang but the atmosphere was flat. There were no singing contests between adjoining bars, no boosters in tribal costume performing cheesy dances to entice punters into their establishments. The many Western families and tour groups seemed to sanitise the place.

I took the opportunity to have a long-overdue haircut in a salon claiming to specialise in dealing with foreign hair. I was unsure whether the many comments that the other staff gave to my team of shampooers/massagers/rinsers/cutters were to express jealousy or condolences. Either way, they had a beat-heavy techno soundtrack blasting away in the background, just the thing to get your head nodding and create havoc for the barber.

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