Tourist attraction - Us

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We went to a town called Yangshuo for several days to have a bit of a rest. This is situated in a famous scenic area but a big attraction was that it is also something of a westereners ghetto. There are plenty of bars and restaurants that cater to western tastes, serving things like burgers and pizzas and fried breakfasts.

Having said that, most of the chefs etc are Chinese and seemed to have gotten their training from cookery books. In reality, this meant a lot of dishes sounding great on the menu but the actual dish bearing no resemblence to what we were familiar with. Still, by this stage we had already learnt to banish any preconceptions and to just wait for the plate to arrive to see what we had gotten. We called it adventure cuisine.

Yangshuo is also popular with Chinese tourists and they come in their thousands mainly on day trips. There were two docks for boats, one used mainly by westeners and the other by Chinese. The Chinese dock was further away from the town than the other one and there were small electric trains to transport them to the town.

We had found a little coffee shop that served good coffee and tea and we had gotten into the habit of going there on a regular basis to read our books etc. This cafe happened to be the first one which the little electric carriages passed on their way into town. It also had a couple of outside tables which we used to sit at. It was the second day when Linda noticed something unusual. She was reading a book and as she looked up one of the carriages full of Chinese tourists went by us. As it did so, some of them did a double take, looked at us and kept looking as they went up the road, pointed us out to their neighbour and even took photographs of us etc. After this we paid more attention and saw it happening all the time. We realized that a lot of the Chinese came from remote regions of China and had probably not been outside it. We were probably one of the first westerners the had seen and so were a great novelty. After this we took to waving as they went by and were rewarded with waves, smiles etc in return.

On a funnier note we stayed in a small hotel in Yangshuo which also obviously catered to Chinese tourists. In the room was an A4 laminated sheet with hotel information etc. This listed items in the room such as bed, sheets, TV etc and their corresponding price. It informed us that should we decide to take any of the items with us we were liable for the cost shown. It also informed us that bedsheets and towels were not to be used to polish our shoes or to clean the floor. You will be glad to know that we obeyed the instructions,

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