Wuhan stay - short and not so sweet

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The bus took 5 hours to get to Wuhan from Yichang, 1 hour of it spent crawling through Wuhan traffic. When we arrived, no taxis would take us to Wuhan Pathfinder Hostel; eventually a woman in a private car who was hanging around the taxi rank took us for 20Y, which is way too much for the length of journey. She didn't know where it was and we had a badly printed map from the internet. We took a wrong turn and she seemed to be getting exasperated. Bet she was wishing she'd charged 30Y! We knew it was somewhere near an art gallery and had the Chinese words for 'Beijing National Art Gallery' in the text of our Rough Guide. She sussed what we were trying to convey and got us to where we needed to be. There was a tiny little 'Ýouth Hostelling International' sign - it's no wonder no-one knows where this place is!!

Still, the room was fine, the staff were friendly and we were glad that, somehow, all the arrangements had fallen into place over the last few days.

We went to dinner at a restaurant just around the corner from the hostel that evening. It was a really nice-ooking establishment but they didn't have a menu in English. They had photographs of the food though and a lovely waitress who spoke a little English. We chose a couple of dishes and she explained one was chicken, the other pork. They looked good in the photos. When they arrived, they still looked good. In fact, the chicken dish was good. The pork on the other hand..... We each had one chunk of meat - it all seemed like gristle and we had to spit them out. Tried another, same thing. Another, same again. In China, they use every bit of the animal so we were used to having plenty of fat attached to the meat but this wasn't even edible. We hadn't found any meat. We decided we couldn't eat it and would have to order something else. We called the waitress back and explained we didn't like it. Then she said, "Pork. I'm sorry. I don't know in English" and pointed at her knuckles. Pork knuckles! Yuk!! No wonder we couldn't eat them!


We were luckier with our food the next morning (26th). We found a fantastic noodle soup place on the main road, not far from the hostel. Two young guys were making the noddles fresh before our eyes, which was brilliant to see. We asked to take a photo which they agreed to but found amusing. They probably find our fascination with their daily activities just as funny as we do when the Chinese are interested in what the weird tourists are doing.

The noodles were delicious and set us up for our journey to Yangshuo. We got a local bus to a bus station, where we picked up an airport shuttle bus. The shuttle bus was only supposed to take an hour but we stopped at some agency's office en route and didn't move for a while, so an hour later we were still going with no airport in sight! We started to get twitchy about missing the flight but after an hour and a half we were dropped at the departure lounge. We'd added a little contingency time so were still ok to check in for the Guilin flight.

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Photos

The finished product!
The chefs in the background preparing the dough for more noodles.

Our hostel shower
Be careful not to fall into the toilet while having your shower!!