The Impression Liu Sanjie is not shown from Dec 26, 2011 to Jan 26, 2012. The show will be open again on Jan 27.
The Chinese New Year’s Day is on Jan 23, 2012. From Dec 26, 2011 to Jan 26, 2012, the show of Impression Liu Sanjie will be closed. All cast memebers take one month vacations for family union. The cast memebers have been working every night all the year round, they need a break. They will come home for family union and come back to theatre to start their performance on the 5th day of Chinese New Year.
Though working as a tour guide for many years, it is the 1st time taking my wife and child to bike in the countryside of Yangshuo.
In a family vacation, child is definitely the first concern. When he is happy, parents are satisfied. Bruno is a child with very good temper, and he is quite happy with every small things. An ice-cream or a bottle of coke can make him smiling for hours.
We ride on the road from downtown Yangshuo to Moon Hill, the green hills on the roadside look so beautiful, some young students are climbing rocks, farmers working in the rice paddies, lots of young students are coming back by bike on the other side of the road, flowers weaving on girls’ head…Yangshuo is always in holiday, 365 days a year…
The yellow rood behind the village in the distance… That was the hotel we stayed last night. A hotel hidden in high mountains, surrounded by rice terraces. When I opened the window of my room in the early morning, the cloud caped mountains and rice paddies formed a perfect picture of parades
The village nearby is “Longji GuZhuangZhai”, Dragon backbone ancient village of Zhuang Minority Ethnic in Chinese, life of villagers is kept in the traditional way as hundreds of years before. Compare with newly built hotels, restaurants and gift shops everywhere in PingAn village, we were so lucky to find a place like this to stay overnight here.
Our hotel was 10 minute walking from the village, the hotel staff told me: the villagers insisted on keeping distance with this newly built hotel from interrupting their daily life, this was the promise the hotel agreed when they started to build this building. It was a brilliant idea for the hotel owner realize this distance, we saw many native culture was destroyed by tourists’ invasion.
In fact, it is difficult to rely on a local map of Yangshuo…the rice paddies and countryside look all the same to me, quite easy to get lost. I rather prefer to hire a tour guide…
I finally arrived in Yangshuo, a small town on the Li River famous for its limestone karst peaks, its rice patties, and its mild weather all-year-round. What I got though was freezing rain, snow for the first time in fifty years, and whole lot of power outages.
The plan was for Erin and her sister Lindsay to meet up with me the day I arrived in Guangxi Province. Since I took a sleeper bus from Shenzhen, I arrived in Yangshuo early in the morning and was able to set us up in the dormitory of the English school we were volunteering at in exchange for food and a place to crash. But what ended up happening was I spent that entire day sleeping in my sleeping bag covered with the room’s three blankets – recovering from a bumpy and adventurous spin on my first sleeper bus experience, running away from the relentless chilly rain and what I’m convinced was my body going into survival hibernation mode to protect itself from the tundra temperatures inside our dorm room.
Cocoon! The problem was that I was below the Yangtze – the national heat line. Once you drop below the Yangtze River, heat is almost non-existent in buildings, per government regulations to conserve energy and more likely, money. This isn’t an insane government regulation because 99.9% of the time, the South is warm enough year-round that heat isn’t required, you just need a couple extra layers of clothing.
Our room was freezing – I didn’t dare get out of my sleeping bag because every time I did, my fingers and toes would cramp up from the cold. I couldn’t take a shower because the pipes were frozen and water barely came out, never mind the fact that the water in my water bottle was turning to ice just sitting on the room’s desk. I eventually did leave though to head over to the school, where I heard a supposed rumor of a fire going in the main office. As I walked along the town’s cobbled streets and white-washed buildings though, I noticed a suspicious amount of vendor’s and restaurant owners lighting up candles. I didn’t really think anything of it since the West Gate near campus in Kaifeng frequently loses power for a few minutes before everything comes back on again. I figured the lights would be on soon enough. But by the time I reached the office and its “fire” (it was just a big wok with some smouldering ashes. The room was heated more by body heat than anything else) people’s cell phones were ringing and beeping every five minutes.
No power!
“God, people are getting a lot of calls and text messages here,” I said to Dane, one of the school’s teachers.
“Yeah, it’s the government. They keep sending out apologetic SMS messages because of the power outage,” he said.
“The provincial government sends out text messages when you lose power? They never do that in Henan!” I said, completely shocked.
“Oh no, this is Beijing. It’s because of the storm. They’re trying to save face before the New Year,” he explained. “People are going crazy because of it.”
“What storm?” I asked, completely unaware that the bad weather wasn’t just where I was, but everywhere.
And then I got my own text message from Erin explaining that they hadn’t left Henan yet and no one knew where their plane was. Henan was getting buried underneath snow with no sign of letting up and no one knew anything about when flights would be able to leave again. After asking around and talking to people, I found out about the storm and how locals in Guangxi were handling everything. The karst peaks were covered in frost, a phenomenon only the eldest locals have ever experienced. No one could remember when power had been out for this long or when it had rained like this outside of the rainy season. Everyone was scrambling to find candles and handwarmers, and none of the students wanted to leave the school to return to their freezing dormitories.
During the random times where there actually was power, I was able to get on the Internet to find out what was happening around the country. I found out about the country’s massive transportation failures that resulted in a million people being stranded in the Guangzhou train station and the 100 tons of trash they were producing every day they were there. I heard about the food shortages, coal shortages, the overabundance of people upset with the Chinese government for their response to the storm and the Chinese scholars predicting that finally, this would tip the scales and ignite a revolution (which by the way, if that had happened, I would have been very upset with the Chinese people for deciding that a storm was the catalyst for change).
Luckily though, none of that really affected the trip. Erin and Lindsey were eventually able to get on a flight to Guilin, albeit the fact that it was almost twelve hours after they were originally scheduled to leave and yeah, I was forced to read Anna Karenina by the flame of my lighter a bit more than my burnt fingers would have liked. But overall, Yangshuo was able to function as it normally does, just a little bit darker and much much colder. I didn’t really find people livid with the government for their response to the emergency, but I think that was because of who I was around. We were at an English school that was still conducting classes during the Spring Festival. The Chinese who were there had already prepared to be away during the country’s most important festival and the weather just made their time at the school a bit more interesting since classes and the English Corner were conducted in the dark.
So the Chinese I met during the storm were friendly and found their situation to be ridiculous and amusing. I was completely immune to the anger being depicted in Western newspapers.
There were also times when it would stop raining long enough for the three of us to hop on some bikes and head out of the town and into the rural areas. We spent a couple of days taking boat trips on the river or biking along rice patties and stopping in some orange groves to snag some, or several, oranges from the trees to munch on as we explored the terrain. Getting out of Yangshuo and into the rural part of the Li River area was my favourite part. Yangshuo itself is definitely a backpacker’s haven as the Lonely Planet calls it. I would never want to be there during the summer or any high peak tourist season. While we were there on the off-season, it was more of a Chinese town as the locals outnumbered the tourists. But I know that as soon as it warms up, laowai will be crawling all over this tiny town.
Yangshuo was too clean. Buildings that were supposed to be white actually were white. There was no trash on the street. Everything was well-lit in a logical manner – no area was saturated with street lights that were only separated by five feet of space between them and no areas suffered from a complete absence of street lights. Oncoming cars slowed down when you crossed the street and only one (but very obnoxious) China Mobile blared loud music from its outdoor speakers, and even then it was on the outskirts of town. When walking along the stores lining streets, no one hassled me to come in for “a good deal”. Basically, it wasn’t a Chinese town. It was clean and well-ordered and that creeped me out. We also couldn’t find very many Chinese restaurants. The city was overrun with Western-style restaurants that catered to the laowai crowd advertising their breakfasts, their wood-oven pizza, and other types of food containing cheese. Which, ok, Erin and I took great delight in and ate at with reckless abandon.
Cormorants.For one of our meals, we fulfilled every gluttonous American stereotype as we ordered and ate a Snickers milkshake, hamburgers, fries, coffee, Coke, garlic bread, pizza and yogurt. I know it sounds gross (and large), but it was the best meal of our lives. Plus, we had spent the whole day biking so it was ok to indulge, right? But it just wasn’t China. So I was always happy to pedal away, leaving the white buildings behind and head into the little rural Chinese villages that are only spared being classified as piles of rubble by sheer will of the buildings’ inhabitants.
After a couple of days of wandering around though, we decided to try our luck and see if we would be part of the fortunate few in the South that could travel. We heard a lot of the highways were blocked off because of ice and snow, preventing most of the bus lines in the region to cease operations. So, we boarded a bus to Guilin, hoping that we could make it to Ping’an, and left Yangshuo behind.
Yangshuo is a very safe place to go around. But one should always look after your valuables. If you go out on a bicycle ride, kayaking or rock climbing, please leave your keys at the reception of your hotel.
It is safe to walk in the mid-night, after dozens of beers; It is also safe to rent a bike, go to countryside of nowhere.
The problem likes in the shopping behavior. When you are climbing the Moon Hill, girls and old ladies follow you all the way up to the mountain top, trying again and again to sell you some water. It is the culture gap. In our culture, when we say NO, it means NO. And we hope it is an end for someone to totally understand what I mean. Unfortunately it is different in Yangshuo. People have time to talk to you, and maybe you are the only business chance this morning, so they smile, talk, follow you, and try their best to complete a successful business.
In Longsheng rice terraces, you might ask for a good photo by paying a local dressing in traditional costume, be careful…the whole village might go out to cheer you up. One of them might ask if you want to listen to their beautiful songs, or dance for you. You will eventually find 10 girls dancing for you, and everyone is waiting for you buying home-made product from them….well, my suggestion is: prepare lots of 1 yuan notes….pay and go…please do not be rude to either of them…
Guilin is one of China’s major highlights as far as tourism goes. Many people come to Guilin as part of a package holiday.
Guilin is a beautiful city with places of interest, but Yangshou is where you want to be for the really beautiful scenery and laid back atmosphere. Since we have enough time we decided to check out Guilin as well.
When we arrived at the bus station in Guilin there were a few touts trying to take us to different hotels. We just ignored them. From experience we have learned this is the best way to deal with them. If you even start to speak with them, they will never let up. Unfortunately a simple no thank does now work, in fact saying no thank you twenty times does not work! They always seem to have a look of shock on their faces when we actually walk away from them.
We spotted a lady who had just got off a bus. She had a large plastic shopping bag with handles. It had a live goose in it. All you could see was its head sticking out of a hole on the bottom of the bag. It was quite funny watching the lady carry it through the crowds of people. The goose was moving his head around looking at everything they passed.
Guilin has a population of 1.3 million. It is a scenic and green city, most of which lies on the west bank of the Li River. After checking out a few hotels we settled in at the Osmanthus Hotel, very close to the bus station. It is an okay hotel with some staff that can speak English. The price was 280 Yuan for a double, $40 Canadian. For a bigger city like Guilin this was a good price. The hotel had a restaurant, pool, air conditioning and all the other usual hotel amenities.
We did have some problems during our stay. We had originally checked in for 2 nights. The way most places in China do the check in is this. You pay one large amount of money up front that they call a deposit. It will usually be the cost of your number of nights stay plus an extra 200 Yuan. At check out you settle up the bill and pay more or get a refund accordingly.
After our second night we went to the reception desk and asked to stay another night. You think this would be a simple procedure. We had already payed the deposit for the original 2 nights, so we should just pay another 280, the cost of one more night. The girl at the counter said we had to pay another 400 yuan. We asked her why. She said you have to pay the deposit. We continued to explain we had already paid the deposit and just wanted to stay another night.
A man now came into the scene who looked like some kind of supervisor. He got into the whole mess and started punching numbers into the calculator to justify the 400 yuan. Then we questioned him and he punched more numbers, now he was getting embarrassed as he started to realize it wasn’t adding up. He then said we were to pay 320 yuan. By this time we were tired of the whole situation and agreed to pay it, even though it was still wrong.
The next day when we returned to our hotel room after a day’s outing, the hotel card would not let us into our room. We went downstairs to the reception desk. The girl scanned our card and said you need to pay more deposit. Jack and I both were getting really cranky with this issue. We said no we did not, we already went through this. A manager stepped over and immediately fixed our card and said it was okay.
Now if we could only have airconditioning! A lot of hotels we have stayed at use the same set up for the air conditioning and the electricity for the rooms. Your key has a magnetic device in it. When you enter your room you place it in a slot by the door. This allows the electricity and air conditioning to work. It stops people from leaving the air con and lights, etc on when they leave. No problem, this makes sense.
Every place we have stayed at does allow you to use the air conditioning all the time while you are in the room, except the Osmanthus hotel. The first day we were there the air con was on in the day while we had been in the room. The 2nd day we were not feeling well so made it a slumber day of hanging out in the hotel. They shut the air con off fairly early in the morning. It was not long before we were sweltering in our room. Jack phoned the front desk and told them it was not working. They said they would send someone to our room to look at it. Within a few minutes the air con magical turned on again. It didn’t stay on for long though. We phoned again and got the same response, someone will come up to the room to look at it. Jack told them it is not broken, someone has shut it off.
A manager called us back and explained they only turn the air con on in the evening. The daytime it is cool with a breeze and we should open our windows. Believe me, it is not cool with a breeze here! We told them while it may be okay down in the lobby, but 10 floors up in our small room it is very hot. We also questioned why the air con was on in the daytime yesterday. He argued with us saying it was not. Jack told him it was absurd we were paying for an air conditioned room that we could only use at certain times.
That evening relief finally came at about 7pm when they switched it back on. We went to sleep that night only to awake sometime around 5am. Both of us were soaked in sweat. Judging by how sick and hot we felt, it must have been off for a while. Jack got on the phone again and called downstairs. They keep trying to send someone up to the room to fix it. Jack said no, just turn it on. Within minutes is was running again.
We ended up booking one more night at this place, heaven knows why, but we did. We did make some stipulations when we payed though. We made sure they were not going to lock us out of our room again, and the air conditioning would not be turned off in the night. The lady we spoke to this time was very apologetic. She said the air conditioning would not be turned off. She explained to us that the scan card for our room would only be set for the original check out time and we would have needed to bring it down to have the date changed. That is why we got locked out of our room, she apologized again.
We spent time just wandering the streets of Guilin. It felt nice to be in a bigger city with department type shopping stores and amenities. It was a strange place though. For such a big city we were having more people stare at us here than ever! People just couldn’t take their eyes off us here. They were so rude about it too. They wouldn’t just take a quick look, it was a good long stare. They would crank their heads around as they walked past us. It was getting really annoying. People just have no tact here. They would gawk at us and sit and talk about us, it was so obvious.
Then things started to turn really ugly. Two days in a row I got touched by a guy. Both times the man was about the same age, I would say in his mid fifties. I don’t know who to heck these guys think they are and what right they have to touch me. Both times they grabbed my arm. The first guy grabbed me and mumbled something. I was so shocked I didn’t have time to react. The second time the same thing happened. Jack and I were walking down the street side by side and this guy was walking past us. He reaches out and grabs by arm up by my shoulder. This time I turned around and shouted at him while I held my finger out. I yelled “DONT TOUCH ME!” It was loud enough to get quite a few other peoples attention around us.
The thing is, the guy still didn’t seem to clue in that what he did was not appropriate. He obviously didn’t speak English, so he wouldn’t have understood what I said. You would think my yelling and reaction would get the message across though. He just looked at me with a stupid grin and mumbled something in Chinese as he walked away. Thank goodness no one else has done this to me again, because the next guy is liable to get knocked out, if not by me then by Jack.
We have to just grin and bare the fact that we are and will continue to be like a freak sideshow throughout this whole country. Otherwise we will never get through the trip or enjoy it at all. So fine, stare, gawk, point at us and talk away, but touching me is where I draw the line! Jack has turned it into a game now when he catches the old perverts who like to gawk at me. He stands in front of me so they can’t see. They get really annoyed, sometimes they try and move to get a view again. Then Jack moves again to block them, it is quite funny.
Another thing that has surprised us in Guilin is the lack of food for us to eat. Of course we didn’t think being a vegetarian in China was going to be easy, but for a big city like Guilin we expected more options. It is not just vegetarian food we were seeking, we were really craving some western food. We had been eating Chinese and Asian food for over 3 months now. The Lonely Planet was of little help for us here, mind you we are finding the LP book to be of poor quality for information on many occasions on this trip. They just don’t seem to be as good as they used to. Two of three places we checked out in the LP to eat at no longer existed, and it is a new edition.
When we have mentioned that we are vegetarian to other tourists and local Chinese people who can speak English, they tell us that China has tons of vegetables. They say we should be able to get a huge variety of dishes cooked up for us. We have asked for a plate of mixed fried vegetables on many occasions. Sometimes we get a great dish of food served to us, other times we have got a plate of snow peas with a few shavings of carrot thrown in for some colour I guess. Another time we got a big plate of something that was like a spinach, it had been cooked to death. This was from a menu that read fried mixed vegetables. I don’ t know how this dish could have been considered to match its description. If we have managed to communicate that we are vegetarian and don’t eat meat we get looked at as if we have just landed from outer space. As if we didn’t have enough to get stared at, this really tops the cake. Two foreigners, one with weird brown spots all over her face and arms, red hair, big boobs, with a 6 foot 1 tall guy with a mustache and goatee, hairy arms and legs, and now we don’t eat meat. We must come from Neptune!
The fun at restaurants continues…. we found a place on the main tourist drag in Guilin, I think it was called the Coffee House. It claimed to serve pizza and sandwiches. We do eat fish, so we were excited to see Tuna sandwiches on the menu. We ordered them and waited in anticipation. When they showed up we were a bit surprised. We each got only half a sandwich cut into two triangles. There was even less because for some bizarre reason everything you order in China with bread has the crusts cut off. There was a sad amount of stringy looking fries on the plate as well. The big surprise was when we opened the sandwich to take a look at it. It had a bit of lettuce, some cucumber and then a bit of creamy looking sauce with some onion bits in it. We called the waitress over to tell her we could not see any tuna in our sandwiches and they must have forgot to put it in. She looked at it and started to point at the sauce saying it was mixed in it. Jack and I just looked at each other and smirked, okay I guess this is how they do tuna sandwiches here. I think they may have put some tuna juice in with the sauce, that was about it. We could not see the smallest bit of tuna no matter how hard we tried. We were really hungry so we devoured what little there was and asked for our bill. We then set off to find dinner number two. Sad that you have to get two meals to fill you up. The darn sandwiches were not cheap either, I think it worked out to about $6 or $7 Canadian each!
Can you take any more restaurant problems, here is one more. I ordered Pumpkin soup at a restaurant and got a corn chowder brought to the table. I questioned the waitress about it. It was not that they had given me the wrong soup, she explained they did not have any pumpkin soup. Wouldn’t you normally tell the customer this and give them other options. Then after we had been seated for 15 minutes, got drinks and placed our food order the waitress comes to our table. We are made to lift everything off the table, our cups, teapot, salt, pepper, cutlery, napkins, etc, so she can put a table cloth on it. We are completely baffled by this, nothing was wrong with our table, no one else got a table cloth that was eating, and there was even another couple of westerners sitting behind us that didn’t get one? We were warned about how many things here are done very backwards from other countries, we are certainly experiencing this.
It was a big effort to find every meal here it seemed. Yangshou at a mere 300,000 was easy, they really catered to westerners there. We would find many restaurants in Guilin, but even the ones with extensive menus had meat in everything. Even a bakery is not safe here. They put meat into the buns. A lot of the baking has this stringy sawdust looking stuff stuck all over it. At first I thought it was a sweet sugar looking substance, but was quickly turned off when I found out it is shredded pork. It’s not that we try to find western style food everywhere we go. What would be the point of traveling around the world to do that? You do have to keep in mind that everything at home that is a pet here is eaten and a lot of the other food is not identifiable. It’s just not a country we are very willing to experiment with the food!
In desperation we went into KFC to have some fries. KFC is everywhere here. Even the smallest most remote place will have one. As does the rest of the places we have traveled. Small places in Africa had them too. If you eat chicken you can literally survive around the world off KFC. They are like full size restaurants here. The one we went into was huge. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough, tons of kids running around, people everywhere, then the staring of course, like they have never seen a foreigner eat fries before! It was the blaring music that we couldn’t stand. We had to yell across the table to hear each other. It seems everywhere in China is noisy. They love noise here, they can’t get enough of it.
Then we made the ultimate sacrifice. For the first time in over 10 years we dared to enter a McDonalds. Ughhhhhh, we can hardly look at ourselves. We were starving for something other than a bowl of rice or noodles. We ordered fries and in great fear decided to try a Filet O’ Fish. It was just like I remember them years ago. A square fish stick cooked up and globbed with tartar sauce and put in bun. At least it was something different.
We did manage to find some good food at a place called Rosemarys. It is also in the main tourist section of the city. We ate there several times. The pizza, risotto and soup were all good. The veggie pita was not, don’t try it. It was stuffed with potatoes and fried onions, it was all very greasy. This was yet another place we have been to that has a picture of Bill Clinton when he was here. This guy really gets around.
While walking around we came across the Sheraton Hotel. We decided to go in and check out their restaurant, surely they would have some descent food. Our meal ended up being about $50 Canadian, but it was worth every penny of it. Jack had some spinach and ricotta cheese ravioli with tomato sauce and I had a piece of baked salmon imported from Norway. My plate also had garlic mashed potatoes and a bunch of vegetables cooked to perfection. Yummmmm.
We went into a grocery store, well what they call a grocery store here. First of all every place like this seems to have more candy than anything else in the store. There’s aisles of it. I guess nutrition is not important. There happened to be a sale happening at this particular shop. I can’t begin to describe the chaos. I have some of it on video, so ask to see it when we get home. There were two main sale items, these large containers of fish oil and fresh packages of large squid. You would think the world had come to an end. The till line ups were going to the back of the store. People were pushing and shoving in all directions. It looked like there was more than enough of this oil to supply half of China, but the people were attacking the displays like vultures. I would have loved to have taken a decibel reading of the noise level.
On top of the volume from the sale, in certain areas of the store there are demo stations. These are much like we have at home, a lady with a table of products that you can taste in hopes that you will buy it. The difference is at each station there is a mega phone with a blaring pre-recorded speech about the product. It repeats over and over. Unfortunately this was the only place we knew of to get a few items we wanted so we stayed through the madness. You can imagine the anxiety level by the time we finally made our way through the checkout.
Line ups…… No space can be left at anytime. That is if a proper line is formed. I don’t have enough writing space to start on the complete lack of how to queue in a line here. To add an update to this, we have been told it is one of the main thing being taught to the public for the Olympics in Beijing. How to form a line for something! If you are standing in a line here, even if it is at the ATM machine, you can not leave a space. Someone will budge in front of you.
Personal space…… In China forget it, you have none. Your little personal space bubble you have been living in is gone! People will sit almost on top of you in seats. You have to learn to push and shove your way through people. No one says sorry if they bash into you. When you first arrive you find yourself standing and waiting to get through somewhere. You have to soon give up all politeness you have brought with you from home. It will get you no where here.
Washrooms…… All dignity and privacy will go out the window. You will develop a great tolerance for smelly washrooms. Smells that would be at the top of your gagging list at home will be placed as acceptable on your tolerance level. Some of the weirdest signs are in the washrooms. No flushing of paper for smoothing of pipeline, we had in our hotel room bathroom. This toilet is for urination only a 50 Yuan fine for other was in a restaurant washroom. One squatter I went into had the entire stall covered in mirrors from floor to ceiling, you can bet this gives a lovely view of yourself.
I don’t know how many times I have been shocked to be in an upscale place and find that they have squatter toilets. The other thing is you must carry tissue with you at all times. If a place supplies western style toilets there is usually paper supplied, but hardly ever if it is a squat toilet.
We have witnessed all kinds of strange things on the streets here. Apparently foot procedures on the street are quite common. Small surgeries are even performed. We witness this several times. Some guy sits on a small wooden stool and has the patient do the same. He has a small selection of sharp metal instruments. We saw one guy that must have been getting something like bunions cut off, his foot was pouring in blood. All this was happening right in the city on a sidewalk along a major road.
The driving is crazy, even how the people walk is very different. All the ways in which you expect someone to respond or move are not what you would expect. Jack got hit by a girl on a scooter. Jack was walking along the SIDEWALK when this girl just came up and ran right into him, her tire stopped in between Jacks legs. Luckily she wasn’t going to fast or there could have been some injuries. If you are walking people will not move out of the way, you have to move. If you keep going they will walk right into you. When the walk signal goes on for pedestrians to cross the street, the traffic keeps turning through the pedestrians. You have to try and weave your way through it to get across. At first we would just stand there in shock as it looked like people were going to get killed. Now we can weave our way across any busy street with the best of them. You have no choice, otherwise you would never get anywhere.
Quite often on a busy road you will see a couple of people that tried to cross the lanes of traffic only to get stuck. They stand in between two lanes of speeding vehicles waiting to get across. I can’t stand to look. We love watching the intersections when the traffic is waiting for the light to change. There will be a group of sometimes a hundred or more bikes that have made their way up to the front of the cars. Then the light changes and you see the bikes and other vehicles all weaving and dodging each other through the intersection. Surprisingly they all seem to avoid hitting each other.
There are some interesting fashion styles here. I think they are eternally stuck in the 80′s. The hair do’s are crazy. The more dried out, frizzed out, fried and bleached your hair is the better. This goes for guys and girls. All the clothing has to have as much stuff stuck on it as possible. They cover everything in lace, buttons, zippers, snaps, bows, sparkles and crazy pictures. Short knicker style pants or skirts with knee high fish net stockings and high heels with a puffy laced shirt seems to be a big hit!
Then there are the welders masks that the women wear. They are a huge sun visor with a dark plastic shield. It swivels down to cover the entire face and neck area. These are worn while walking around and riding the scooters and bicycles.
We witnessed an armored car and the crew picking up money from a bank. The guys came out carrying the bags while several other men surrounded them holding pistols up in the air with both hands. This was a little disturbing to say the least!
While we were walking one day it started to downpour suddenly. It got really ugly there was tons of thunder and lightening going on all around us. There was barely any pause between the thunder and the flashes of lightening. We knew the storm was right over top of us. We huddled under a stores overhang with many other people. The streets started to flood instantly. We couldn’t believe the amount of water coming down. It was a long time before we could leave the overhang to continue to our destination. It finally let up a bit, but we were still getting soaked as the rain was coming at us sideways. We found out later that day on the news that the area around Guilin had received 18cm of rain in a 6 hour period!
We took a boat tour of the water system. It is called the Four Lakes, Two Rivers Project. They have connected the lakes and rivers for ease of travel around the city. The rivers flow into the lakes keeping the water in the lakes fresh. It was a nighttime tour, so many things along the lakes and rivers were lit up. It was really enjoyable, we definitely recommend it. There are two locks that the boat has to go through because of the different heights of the lakes and rivers. One is a lift type lock where the boat is raised or lowered in the water on a platform. The other one fills up the lock with water and raises the boat up. We got to cruise along seeing all the lit up pagodas and buildings, as well as many bridges and water fountains in the lakes.
There is one village near the end of the trip that is quite impressive. There are lit up pagodas and buildings everywhere. Two glass enclosed buildings have special performances on the water just for the boats when they come by. One has Chinese violin players and the other has some traditional dancers. We passed by two pagodas that are quite well known in China. The sun pagoda which stands at 42 meters high and is made of copper. The moon pagoda a bit shorter is made of marble. They are quite impressive whether you see them in the day time or lit up at night.
We also went to a place called Jing Jiang Princes City. It was an ancient walled city, and is now a park and Guanxi University. We climbed up many stairs to Solitary Beauty Peak in the Park. We got a great view of Guilin in all directions from the top.
We went to Seven Star Park as well. It had very nice grounds for walking around. We climbed the peak here too. The entry fee to the park includes the entry into a very large cave. It used to be full of water and was used a long time ago as a transportation system with small boats. They have set up coloured lights inside to give some neat effects with the stalactites and stalagmites. Apparently this gets very repetitive with the parks here, they all have a peak to climb and a cave to see. Once you have seen one, you have seen them all. They made it very cheesy inside the cave by putting photo set ups in two spots. They try and get you to shell out money by taking your picture near some of the nicer areas of stalactites.
We took a taxi back to one of the areas we really liked on the night boat tour. It is called Mulong Lake Park. It was quite different looking in the day. It was a very tranquil place to wander around when we were there. The park is situated around a lake. We basically had the whole place to ourselves. We have been very pleased with getting taxis in China so far. All of them have used the meter and taken us to exactly where we asked them to go. A big change from what we experienced in Thailand. In the park there were some students practicing to do a play of the Sound of Music. It was quite funny to be walking around and hearing Doe A Deer being sung.
There is a place called the Waterfall Hotel that is worth checking out if you are in the area. Every night at 8:30pm the entire back side of the hotel is turned into a gigantic flowing waterfall. Music is played while the water flows for about 10 minutes.
At the end of our stay in Guilin we took a cruise down the Li River. It goes one way and actually took us back to Yangshou. The price includes a bus trip back to Guilin. They only give you about 40 minutes to spend wondering Yangshou before you have to get on the bus. That’s such a shame for the people who will have this as their only opportunity to see the town. Since we knew Yangshou well and how to get the bus back to Guilin we decided to take a local bus back ourselves. We took the opportunity to stay in Yangshou and have some lunch and make it a much more relaxing day.
The boat trip was about 3 hours in length. We could have done this river cruise while we were in Yangshou. It is a lot cheaper than doing it from Guilin, but we didn’t have very good weather while we were there. We also heard the river cruise from Yanshou is not very well organized and you spend most of your day waiting around. The boat cruise from Yangshou is much shorter as it only goes on a portion of the river that the one from Guilin does.
The boat cruise gave us some incredible views along the Li river. We coasted along as the water wound through tall pointed mountains. It was amazing how they towered along side the shore. There were waterfalls coming down the sides of some of the Karst cliffs. We passed by other tourist boats. Some areas of the river had grass islands with grazing water buffalo.
The trip included a lunch, but it wasn’t very good. It consisted of a big plate of corn and peas, some rice, dumplings and bananas.
We passed by fisherman in small boats as well as guys trying to sell us stuff. You have to picture this, we are in a big boat with two levels. It holds about 100 people. Some of these guys are on either a bamboo raft or a small wooden canoe type boat. They catch up to the boat and grab onto the side of it. They reach up to the people on the deck holding out items they have for sale. You would barely be able to reach the items they were so far down. They had things like carved wooden buffalos, marble Buddhas and many other trinkets.
We had a great time, if anything it was a great opportunity to meet people from all over the world. It would be nice if you could get onto some of these areas of the river at sunset or sunrise, you could have some incredible photo opportunities. I have seen some beautiful pictures done at these times, but I don’t know how the people got them. Maybe they hired a private boat to take them out.
Guilin despite being a bigger city is still a nice place to visit. It is a very pretty city if you take the time to get out of the main areas and out into the many parks and green spaces it has.
Yangshou has a small town area that has been developed for tourism. It even has a street called West street named for the westerners that come there. Even though it is touristy, it has a charm to it. There are many restaurants to choose from as well as guest house accommodations and hotels. Our hotel is still on a main road but a bit away from the West street scene. I think the hotels there would be too noisy.
We were warned that as foreigners we would spark curiosity while traveling in China. It has been a bit more than we care for at times, and down right annoying. We often become an attraction while we are eating our dinner at one of the open air restaurants. We have had anything from people standing right in front of us watching us eat, to having a person blatantly take a picture of us.
Then there are the photographers who think they are being sneaky. They stand across the street pretending to be taking a picture of the restaurant we are sitting at. Or they place their friend just a bit in front of us and off to the side and take the picture so we are in the background. It is so obvious! We will try to cover our face with a napkin or turn our head. They either try to wait us out and snap the picture as soon as we expose ourselves again or they get frustrated and try a different angle.
We had to start laughing one time when two ladies thought they would try it. They sat one lady at the table just in front of us to get her picture. There was nothing nice to photograph about this scene so we knew it was for us. We kept obscuring our faces, we could see that the lady trying to take the picture was getting really frustrated. We finally broke out laughing and then waved at them. They quickly left!
Another time we were walking down the street and a guy was trying to take a picture of me. I caught him before he did it. I pointed my zoom lens back at him and then he chuckled, but as we kept walking we caught him poking his lens around the corner to try and get me again. They are very persistent!
There was one restaurant we ate at frequently. It is called Drifters. They had really good food and friendly staff. They had apple crumble for dessert, it was so delicious and one of the first things we have had like that in ages. Another place we went to had a pot of cold rose tea, just slightly sweetened with honey. It had such a nice flavor and was very refreshing. We tried some of the local specialty called Beer Fish. It is a fish from the river cooked in a beer sauce. It was not that good. We found it pretty easy to get vegetarian food here. We had lots of vegetable fried rice and one place made delicious sweet and sour tofu. Jack could not get enough of this stuff.
We spent our second day in Yangshou wandering around the streets. It was another day of drizzling rain. We checked out some of the shops. There were some typical Chinese items for sale. Small mud men, painted fans, fancy chopsticks, and painted scrolls. We purchased some big rainproof ponchos with hoods for $5 each. It made walking around a lot more pleasant. We didn’t have to carry umbrellas everywhere we went.
We ate dinner at a restaurant that had tons of old Chinese artifacts displayed along the walls. It had many large pictures of Chairman Mao. We had some excitement at the table next to us. The peoples hotpot dinner suddenly burst up in flames. At first they just kept eating keeping a watchful eye on it. The staff didn’t seem to think too much of it either. Then it started to get out of control. There were now over half a dozen staff standing around looking at it trying to figure out what to do with it. The customer got up out of his chair to get away from it. They ended up getting it extinguished after a few minutes.
We have seen all kinds of interesting food items on menus here as well as strange things to eat in the night market. This restaurant had beef penis on the menu as well as snake prepared in many different ways. Dried rat is one the the local specialties as well as fried squirrel.
We went to the Bank of China to see about getting some more Chinese currency. Yuan means dollars.(RMB) Renminbi is the official name. It is very close to the Hong Kong dollar in value. About 100 RM equals 15 Canadian dollars. We couldn’t get an answer of whether or not the ATM machine will take foreign credit or debit cards. I guess we will have to try it soon or we will run out of money. We have yet to find that China takes bank cards, only credit cards can be used to get money out of the ATM machines. Here and Laos have been the only places so far where we haven’t been able to use our bank card.
There is a funny device is at the front counters of the banks, one in front of each teller. It is a small box that has the tellers picture and bank ID on it. You can press one of three buttons on it. Satisfactory service, fair or unsatisfactory service. You do it right while you are standing in front of them. Maybe we should have stuff like this at home!
We rented bikes one day and rode out to a village called Fuli. It’s recommended to go to the outlying villages on market days. Trying to figure out when the market days are for each place can be challenging. There are several villages that have markets, the market is held for one day in each place on a rotating schedule. It comes to each place usually every 3 days, but sometimes every 4 days, There are also some days when there is no market. So it gets very confusing. Obviously puzzles some locals too, as we were told the wrong day by someone for one of the villages.
The ride out to Fuli village was very scenic. Lots of farm land with the usual tall pointy mountains in the background. We have discovered drivers love to honk their horns here. They honk for every reason and no reason at all sometimes. It can be very annoying. The market was not anything special. It was mostly produce, clothing and odds and ends for sale. We got stared at by a lot of people while we wandered around. One guy looked at me, then at Jack who was following behind and gave him the thumbs up and said okay. I guess he liked me. We only saw one other tourist couple at the market. We got stuck down a skinny passage way with a bunch of caged chickens. We made sure not to breath and walked through as quickly as possible. Don’t want to catch the bird flu! On the ride back we stopped to take in the scenery for a moment, we both had a reality check that we were riding bikes through the countryside of China. It still seems surreal!
We ended up staying in Yanshou longer than we anticipated. We asked our hotel if we could have a discount for staying longer. They said yes we could have 20 Yuan a night cheaper if we moved from our room with a double bed to another room with two twin beds. This was fine with us. We ended up being thankful for changing rooms. Our new room was not damp at all like the last one. Something must have been wrong with that end of the building.
We climbed up Xilang Shan Mountain to the small temple. This was the temple we could see from our hotel room. It was several hundred stairs to get to the top, but well worth it. It gave a great view of Yangshou. The town doesn’t seem that big until you get up there and see how far it spreads. The mountain is in Yangsou Park. It is a nice place to stroll around.
We also went to Mountain Water Garden which surrounds Green Lotus Peak. It again has a lot of sets of stairs to get to the top. This gave a lovely view of the Li River. We bumped into a Chinese family who wanted us to take their picture with their camera. I took it, but it was very back lit, you could not see their faces. It was a simple point and shoot so not much I could do but try to take it with the flash. No one could figure out how to make the flash go off. We said sorry and started on our way. We kept looking back and could see the family continue to struggle with the camera trying to make it work. We felt bad, thinking they must really want the picture of them with the river and mountains in the background.
The camera would not use the flash because of the bright light behind them. We went back to them. The parents could not speak English at all. The younger daughter was having a lot of difficulty understanding us, but I finally got her to understand. I was asking if she had an email. She said yes so I held up my camera and said I would take a picture and send it to them. They seemed a bit nervous, but posed while I took it. I showed them on the screen and they seemed happy they could see their faces. The Dad nodded in great appreciation. She wrote down her email for us. We emailed the picture later that day and hoped they would be able to receive it okay. It was about 2 days later and we got a thank you email from the daughter. It was very sweet. She had tried very hard to write it in English. It was hard to understand, but we got the general idea of how thankful she and her family were to get the picture.
We experienced a lot of rain while we were here. One night we thought we were going to be carried away in the water. We were seeing news footage of people and homes being swept away not too far from where we were. It just never seemed to stop. It kept up like this all night. You would think there would be no water left to release, but it rained more throughout the day as well. We kept seeing footage of massive flooding in Southern China on the news. People were having to be evacuated and rescued in many areas. We were starting to get a bit worried. Although the streets would get a bit flooded at times, it never got to that extreme.
You will never run out of bizarre things to keep you entertained in China. Like babies and toddlers with strange pants. They are completely split open throughout the crotch and backside. You can’t really see the split too much if a toddler is walking around in them, but when the babies are carried sitting on the parents arm their whole bottom is exposed. We can’t figure out the concept of these pants. Does the baby just poop or pee all over the parent?
We had a t.v. in our room but only got a Chinese news channel broadcast in English, the rest of the channels were in Chinese. By the end of our travels we would come to hate this English channel! We had another channel with almost non-stop tennis, which of course did not matter what language you watched it in. We got sick of tennis really fast!
We like to watch the hilarious Chinese info commercials though. Some of them are just too funny to believe. Does anyone actually buy this stuff. One of them sells an item that is like a traction board. You lie on it and strap yourself in and it pulls apart. We guess it is for straightening out your back, but it looked like it was something to make you taller. Then there was one with some kind of super magnetic underwear. Of course all of this is even funnier to us because we can’t understand the language. We make up our own ideas about it and our imagination runs wild. They kept showing the magnets which are strategically placed to sit over the mans genital area. The man would stand in the underwear in a superman type pose and the magnets would be shown working in animated motions. Then they would show the wife very happy next to him in bed. It wasn’t to hard to figure out what this one was about.
There was also one for some kind of cream to rub on yourself to get rid of fat. They showed people slathering on the stuff. The thin after pictures of the person would be shown. The before pictures were obviously taken of the same thin person and had been digitally stretched width wise to make them look fat. It was all quite entertaining.
We had more fun while wondering around the streets of the tourist areas or sitting in one of the sidewalk cafes. We eventually just turned the photo taking of us into a game. You would continually have street vendors coming up to you while you were eating. One lady made us laugh all the time. She had a very excited sounding voice and would approach us almost everyday. She would say the same thing all the time. She had a basket of fruit and would come up to us and say Hello banana! All together as if it were one word. Then she would start in on the other fruits, but they would all have hello placed in front of them. Hello peachy, hello apple, hello lychee, etc.
Sometimes the sweetest little old lady would come up to us with a basket of stuff we had no interest in buying. Then she would crack the most innocent smile and you were hooked instantly. How could you say no? We bought a little trinket from one lady. She was so happy she gave me a big hug, then she wanted Jack to take a picture of the two of us. She smiled and waved goodbye. Then after a minute she came running back, she must have felt bad she left Jack out, he got a big hug too! She was so sweet, she couldn’t have even been 4 feet tall!
We got to know lots of the regular vendors and musicians in the street. We would see the same flute player everyday. He would nod and smile at us. The restaurants we went to recognized us when we came back and were always very welcoming. Nice to see you again they would say. This was a very pleasant town to hang around for a while. The scenery in the surrounding areas is really beautiful. We even noticed that on the Lonely Planet site someone posted a question to experienced travelers. They asked them to name the most beautiful place they had ever traveled to. Yangshou came up on many people’s responses. Just make sure to get out of the touristy area and see the beautiful countryside!
We tried our first Chinese massages here. They were quite nice. You just have to be careful what you are getting into. Jack had been approached a few times on the streets being asked if he wanted a special massage! One massage place we went to had a large tank of crabs outside of the entry door. A small crab had escaped and had come in the door and was heading towards the front desk. The manager of the shop said, look he wants a massage too!
Shine Clothing Festival in Longsheng will be held as scheduled on the June 6 of lunar calendar in Longsheng Rice Terrace in Longsheng country.
Reported by Chen ShanHua and Liu Guiyang on July 2, said that the county government of Longsheng of Guangxi reveals today: The forth Jinkeng Hong Yao ” shines clothing festival ” will hold as scheduled in Longji terraced paddies. Thousands of Chinese and foreign visitors, will gather and celebrate festival with the Yao Ethnic Minority compatriot together herein when the time comes.
Yao ethnic girls are famous of red gaudy clothes of exquisite color and luster of that embroidery art, live in this land of Longsheng rice paddies from generation to generation, this offspring of the Yao ethnic has passed by the trials and hardships.
On red clothing festival, Hong Yao girls all put on theirselves newest and most beautiful ” red clothing ” to participate in the activity. They wear silver necklace, the plaited skirt gently is swinging , their clothing look like pieces of red cloud.
shining clothing festival is the the seconed important traditional festival of Hong Yao people ( the first is the Spring Festival). Today, it is unusually boisterous that have endless arrival of guests in the stockaded village, married daughters are heading to their parents’ home, they brought duck, wine and gift, Children received piggybacks, every household make Zongzi (rice dampling wraped with bamboo leaf), every girls all dress up, show their best clothings, singing and dancing party after party!
shine clothing festival in conformity with this too and gain the name. Putting up the good play platform in the middle of the stockaded village this day, Hong Yao masses of every stockaded village competitively perform the traditional program of song and dance, the program is rich and colorful, unusually brilliant.
The stockaded village of Yao became ocean of the song and dance in the daytime. It is more fun after nightfall. When the time comes, thousands of torches on the terraced fields, one pieces of torch enclose Olympic flag pattern. There also are two flue that soar respectively in about two side. Form one harmonious pattern of “The compatriot of the Yao nationality meets the Olympic Games, Longji Jinkeng Rice Terrace”. The pattern of night scene will last about one week. The fireworks will be put over the terraced fields, gorgeous.
