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Guangzhou Park
Typical View from the Park in GuangzhouFirst stop on the Chinese mainland was Guangzhou - a city with a population of 4 million, none of whom it appeared, could speak English. Even asking for a menu took 5mins of gesturing and pointing! However, when we did get our food on the first night it was very good and very cheap so things weren't all bad!
If you read the guide book, you may be led to believe that Guangzhou is an interesting place with a lot to see and do. Don't be fooled, after trawling through several dull museums it soon became obvious that a couple of days in the city would be more than adequate! With this in mind we headed to the bus station expecting to be required to point, shout and gesture for several hours in order to book our onward journey. We were pleasantly surprised however to find English speaking staff and before you could say 'Mandarin', we had purchased 3 bus tickets and were riding out of Guangzhou into the sunset.
Our blaze-of-glory exit from Guangzhou was soon ended with our arrival at our next destination: Yangshuo. With darkness falling, we were dumped several kms outside of the town centre
Keepy-Uppy!
The locals show us how it's done! and with a useless map, we were easy prey for the local hostel tout who insisted on following us down the road, eventually resorting to verbal abuse in the hope that we would patronise his hostel. We were having none of it. Eventually, we managed to flag down a 3-wheel-van-taxi and got a ride to the touristy area of the town. Our intended accommodation being a hostel known as MonkeyJane's. We found the hostel with relative ease and after relieving ourselves of our bags, headed out for a well earned beer.
Yangshuo is a small town of around 150,000 but it seems like there are a million package tourists here also. Western restaurants rub shoulders with clothing shops and ngihtclubs, all nestled amongst huge limestone karsts similar to those we saw at Halong Bay, Vietnam. However, a short bike ride out of the town and the shops and restaurants give way to the fields and small villages of rural China. We spent a day riding through the countryside with our local guide, Tingting, visiting local villages and seeing some of the sights. We climbed to the Moon Crescent and saw the Big Banyan Tree (see photos).
Whilst in
Pagoda
The 17-Storey Pagoda in Guangzhou! Yangshuo, we also visited loads of caves that have been created in the limestone karsts by millions of years of trickling water. At one - the Water Cave - we took a guided tour inside which lasted a good couple of hours (the cave was huuuuge!) until we got to the main attraction - the natural mudbath! After sliding around in the mud and covering our entire bodies in it, as well as floating on the surface (the muddy water is too dense to sink in!), we showered off in the icey ground water flowing out from one of the cave walls and literally shivered our way back out into the sunlight. The hour long bike ride back to our hostel warmed us up again quickly enough, as did more amazing chinese cooking that night.
The last day we also took a Chinese Calligraphy lesson, which really isn't as easy as the instructor made it look, and we left Yangshuo with backpacks full of splodgy calligraphy on rice paper on the train towards central China.
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Daddy Dixon
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duck
Duck breast and San Miguel - heaven on a plate MaD