Rolls Around the World 2007: 31 Chengdu to Guilin, China

Sunday, October 14, 2007

We arrived at the airport early for our Air China flight to Guilin. There was a mix up in the airline booking, as we had paid for first class but the computer said business class. After showing the agent correspondence confirming we had paid for first class she had a lengthy conversation with a supervisor and we were issued tickets. The lounge was very basic, but the flight was on time and comfortable. We had the entire front cabin to ourselves. Many flights to coastal cities were cancelled as a typhoon is raising havoc, and it has delaying the shipping of the Rolls as well.

Karl Yin, Assistant Manager of the local travel agency, our guide Yuki and a driver with a comfortable new van were on hand when we arrived. Lunch had been arranged in the airport, but as we ate on the plane we declined. They stopped at a small roadside noodle restaurant for a quick lunch, giving Marilynn and I a chance to wander the street and visit a local market.

The scenic road to Longsheng twisted along a clear river in a deep valley. We turned off to climb dramatically towards Ping An Village through miles of switchbacks. Eventually we had to leave the vehicle in a parking area and continue on foot. A number of older ladies were sitting nearby looking for work as porters, so we hired three. Each placed a heavy suitcases in a wicker basket held on her back by shoulder straps, and headed up the mountain path. We followed, having trouble keeping up with the pace, particularly when the trial turned to hundreds of rough stone steps set into the steep slope. At the top, 820 meters (2,690 ft) above sea level, the wee ladies were still in fine shape, happy to climb the stairs to deliver the bags to our room.

The architecture in the village, where houses huddle together on steep slopes beside terraced rice paddies, is quite unique. Our accommodation is the Liqing Guesthouse, one of the older guesthouses in the village. Traditionally the houses had animals on the first floor, living quarters on the second floor and storage on the third floor, but a few have been converted into tourist accommodation. There was a beautiful view over the rice terraces and down the valley from our room.

Zhuang people live in this area. They are the largest of China's 55 minority groups. Women grow their hair over a meter (3' 3") long, wearing it in a hairstyle that resembles a hat. An unmarried woman wears a scarf on her head, a married woman has a small bun in front and a grandmother a large bun in front.

Marilynn and I went to the room to get some work done after dinner, although she returned to the restaurant to investigate a party that was going with the staff and a group of young back packers. The staff put on a show; singing and dancing up a storm. The rooms in the guesthouse have individual remote control air conditioning/heating units, TV, water boiler for tea and a desk. The shower in the bathroom is the type where one sits on the toilet seat and water runs onto the floor. The standard size, hard double bed gave us some problems in competing for the blanket and for space during the cold night.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Marilynn bravely hiked with Karl and Yuki to the mountaintop to look down on the rice terraces for which the area is famous. My aching knees said no, so I caught up on some writing. The best times to visit this area are in the spring when rice is planted and the terraces are flooded, or before the harvest when they are coloured in yellows and greens. We are too late in the season - most of the rice has been harvested and the fields are being burnt, casting a pall of smoke over the area and leaving the terraces their least interesting colour. Marilynn got some good photos, though, as the morning mist cleared off and the sun broke through for a short while.

Our porter ladies arrived after an early lunch, and we trekked down the mountain - much easier, gravity being with us. Marilynn paid a couple of local women to let their hair down and then do it back up on the riverbank, so she could take some photos. We were under constant assault from swarms of persistent little old ladies selling souvenirs. The mountains in this sub-tropical area are forested in a wide variety of trees, including bamboo.

Near Guilin we stopped at a bear and tiger-breeding centre Yuki recommended. There are over 1,000 tigers of four species, including the Siberian white tiger, and a large number of black bears. Most of the animals live on man made islands surrounded by deep moats, but we were sad to see a number in concrete floored cages. Marilynn was in photographer's paradise, as it was possible to get close to the animals on the islands. The breeding program seems to work - there were dozens of young tigers and bears. There was also a show featuring trained bears, tigers, a goat and a monkey.

Guilin is a pleasant city of 700,000 people. Although it is 2,000 years old there is no old city - new buildings have replaced it. It has wide, tree-lined boulevards, four lakes and two rivers. The banks are landscaped with walking paths through verdant vegetation. Around the city jagged, high rock peaks shoot into the air.

We stayed at the deluxe Lijiang Waterfall Hotel, which is perfectly located across from a lake containing two large pagodas and with a pedestrian shopping street leading to the heart of the city on the other side. The hotel claims to have the largest man-made waterfall in the world. Each night at 8:30 PM there is a waterfall show, where water cascades 14 stories down an external wall about 50 meters (164 ft) wide.

We invited Karl & Yuki for dinner at a restaurant in the pedestrian street, which not only had great atmosphere, food and live entertainment, but the price for the four of us including drinks was only 165 Yuan ($22.25).

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

We left our luggage in the van, which will drive to Yangshuo while we travel by boat on part of the 437 km (272 mi) Li River, a tributary of the West River. The boat terminal has a good-sized shopping centre; understandable when you consider that up to 3 million people a year take this trip. Dozens of riverboats dock here - when we arrived a procession was already moving downstream for as far as the eye could see.

We located our boat and boarded. The main deck had tables and chairs where a large tour group from Taiwan were seated. We were booked on the second deck where tables with four chairs lined each side of the boat. The fore and aft area of the second deck and the top deck were open air standing room - no seats. Most boats had a similar configuration. Our tablemates were an interesting recently retired couple from England.

Eventually we joined the stream of boats winding their way down river, spaced one or two boat lengths apart. The river was low - in many areas the bottom could be clearly seen. The boats only draw a meter (3.28 ft), but through the clear water it didn't look that deep. We touched bottom the odd time, and passed a boat where the crew were in the water trying to solve a problem with the propeller.

The scenery was dramatic - the river wound its way between the strange mountains of this region. They are like the eyeteeth of a tiger stuck up through the ground and soaring to a great height. Some are connected to others, but many are free standing. Towering cliffs often bordered the river. In spite of the huge movement of tour boats, life along the river seems to proceed normally, with net or cormorants fishermen sharing the river with farmers moving produce. Cormorants are bigger than those on the west coast of Canada. Fishermen restrict their throats so they cannot swallow a whole fish, then train them to dive into the water, usually at night under lights, to bring fish to their owners.

A popular form of boat on the river is made of thick bamboo poles lashed together and turned up at the front. They range in size from five poles upwards, and appear to be very stable. Usually the operator stands on the flat platform and paddles or poles the flat raft, although some larger ones have seats and an outboard motor.

The ride down the river took 5 hours due to low water - when the river is high it takes only 3½ hours. A buffet lunch was provided, local wine was sold, and I horrified Marilynn by drinking a cup of potent snake wine, served from a gallon jar with a couple of large snakes curled up in it. At the City of Yangshuo it was necessary to queue behind a long line of tour boats waiting to unload. It is hard to imagine how many thousands of tourists a day are fed into the city by this massive fleet of boats, although for many this is a day trip returning to Guilin.

Having no luggage, we walked about 4 blocks up crowded, touristy West Street to the four floor (no elevator) Regency Holiday Hotel, where fortunately our room was on the first floor. It is in a great location, but although it is billed as four star I would be hard pressed to give it three. It lacks maintenance, evidenced by woodwork crying for paint, stained carpets in the reasonably large, king bed equipped room and chipped furniture. There is a large balcony with table and four chairs, a desk and small sofa. The bathroom is tiny with only a shower that floods the floor when used. Wired Internet is available at a cost of 10 Yuan ($1.35) per day but no one could get it to work. Employees do not understand English, so arranging anything is difficult. There is no individual temperature control, and air conditioning is shut off at night no matter the temperature. Breakfast was not great, earning this hotel the award for the worst of Chinese accommodation this trip.

Marilynn wanted to get at editing her photos, so I bought a couple of containers of instant noodles to heat with water from the tea maker in the room. We ate on the balcony with chopsticks bought in Shanghai and drink gin from Chengdu.

Yuki purchased tickets for us to what was billed as a sound and light show with a large cast. We were not certain we were interested, as it was more expensive than any show to date and I've seen a lot of sound and light shows. The English couple on the boat had decided to give it a miss for the same reason. When we left after the performance we were blown away. It is a shame the show is not simply included in each itinerary, as there is no way to explain how unbelievable it is.

The setting is outdoors on a natural hill overlooking a lake. The higher priced seats are at the back, built up to look out over the huge crowd below. The lowest priced seats are low down in the front. Before the show starts commercials are shown an a giant screen at the front of the crowd, reinforcing the "why am I here?" question, but then the screen dropped and spotlights shattered the darkness by illuminating half a dozen giant, stark peaks growing out of the waters of the lake in a semi-circle around the theatre, providing a spectacular backdrop for what was to come.

The singing and choreography of the show was brilliant. The producer of this show is doing the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games. There were about 600 cast in dazzling costumes, a couple of dozen water buffalo, a dozen cormorants and a large fleet of traditional bamboo rafts. The performance was on boats or on movable wharves used as floating stages, with astonishing costumes and lighting effects. Sometimes there were no lights, just hundreds of boats with torches moving over the darkened lake. Marilynn's photo speciality is reflections, and this was a show of reflections. Yes, once again, we bought the DVD!

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The program today was a bicycle to tour of nearby villages, but my knees would not have survived, so Yuki rented electric scooters for us. A day's rental is only 40 Yuan ($5.38). We were given the basic operating instructions and headed off after our guide and escort riding a motorcycle. Marilynn was in terror, so the speed was held well down. When we came to the first left turn off a busy street, Marilynn dove for the right hand curb instead of turning, so the escort has to go and get her across the street.

The road we turned onto was a paved, narrow country lane with little traffic, so we formed a column with the motorcycle in front, Marilynn on her bright pink scooter in the centre and me bringing up the rear. Marilynn's confidence increased a little, but bicycles and farm tractors were still whizzing past us at 10 or 15 miles (16 or 24 km) per hour.

We stopped to visit a sweet old lady in her 300-year-old farmhouse that she has opened to tourists. When she showed us the bedroom, her husband was still in bed. There was an exchange in Chinese as he pulled the covers over his head, but she left the bedroom door wide open, so I think there was a message there! After we went through the back of the house he was up and dressed to say goodbye to us. Across the street was a garden open to tourists as well, with many old fashioned but operational rice farming implements.

We next stopped at a river, where Marilynn took a lot of photos and where I managed to lay my scooter on the ground trying a 180 degree turn on a narrow gravel path. No damage, fortunately, and I didn't go down as I had one foot on the ground. While waiting for Marilynn I was disgusted to watch a woman training her two year old son to beg - she was teaching him to say "Hello - two Yuan" in English, sending him back to me every few minutes and then correcting his approach each time.

On the way back Marilynn stopped for a photo. I stopped well ahead of her at another photo point, but as she drove towards me she panicked and froze on the throttle, piling into the back of my stopped scooter, breaking a plastic carrier.

We left the pavement, riding on rough dirt roads through beautiful rice fields along the banks of a river. All around were the giant peaks of rock, shooting out of flat farmland, sometimes hundreds of feet in height, often sided with sheer cliffs. These mountains are unlike anything we have seen anywhere in the world. It is the only place I've seen where roads through the mountains don't go up or down hills - they are on flat ground. The rest of the trip back to the scooter rental went fairly smoothly, except I noticed that a sweater I had on the carrier on the back was gone. We were a long way from the accident site, and as we have no more plans to be outside on cold evenings, I opted not to go looking for it. We returned the scooters, paid for the damage and we went for lunch.

In the afternoon Marilynn and I walked around the town, until the discharge from today's flotilla of tour boats clogged the streets. We retreated to the hotel to read or work on the computer.

Yangshuo is a pretty town of 300,000 on the bank of the Li River. It seems smaller, as it flows between the strange giant peaks for which the area is famous. It was a fishing and farming community that now derives its main income from tourism Overwhelming numbers of tourists have created overwhelming numbers of hawkers and vendors, so it is not possible to walk along the street without having watches, post cards and souvenir books thrust into your face every few steps. Even in the farm country, every time we stopped little old ladies came running from all around to push merchandise at us. The little old ladies are the worst - they will not take no for an answer in any language, persistently and irritatingly pressing their goods forward. Even being rude to them doesn't work! In almost all cases, if someone says "Hello" they are not being friendly, they are trying to attract attention to what they are selling - it is overwhelming and uncomfortable, and the first time we have seen it to this degree in China.

Most restaurants have bi-lingual menus; the notable exception being US owned Kentucky Fried Chicken. The menu is entirely in Chinese, and the employees speak only Chinese!

Thursday, October 18, 2007

We drove to Xinping Town, a pleasant village on a tributary of the Li River. People were friendly as we walked the ancient, quiet streets. There were stalls selling goods on the main street and by the dock area where boats could be hired, but no one was pushy. Marilynn bought a few items for less than half the asking price, quite normal here. She also got some excellent reflection shots along the river. Several groups of art students were painting or sketching scenery in the town.

After a walk through the old section of Fulin Town we returned to Yangshuo for a good lunch on a restaurant balcony overlooking a small lake. In the afternoon we visited one of several Karst Caves. It took an hour to walk through the humid cave on good walkways, but with many steps. The lighting was very well done, and although the track lighting looked a bit tacky it outlined head conking areas. The reflections in some of the underground ponds was amazing - I leaned over the railing to see how far down I could look in one place, and it took awhile to realize that I wasn't looking down - I was looking at the reflection of the roof and the water surface was only a short distance below me. Some of the rooms in the cave were immense - the highest was 48 meters (158 ft) from floor to roof. This is one of the "must see" areas of China. Three nights would be about right to see most sights.

We decided to catch up on writing and photos in the morning, and then check out of the hotel around noon to drive to Guilin for our evening flight to Hong Kong. Hopefully I'll get this away before we leave.