karaoke in the countryside
if the pedestrian nature of our taxi crawling along the wide road from the airport to the centre of guilin, coupled with the silhouettes of limestone peaks rising out of the darkness, whetted the appetite for the sight of a more rural lifestyle the sudden appearance of yet more neon skyscrapers in the horizon dashed our hopes again. we knew that guilin, as the major conurbation of the guangxi province, was no provincial backwater but this still is one of the less commercially developed states in china and as such it was surprising, and slightly jarring, to find ourselves being driven through yet another identikit metropolis, kfcs on one side mcdonalds on the other.a lot therefore was resting on yangshuo, a touristy but pretty town an hour or so up the li river. abandoning the extortionately priced li river cruises packed with weekending chinese we jumped on the bus and five minutes after leaving guilin were transported to the rural china which we were hoping to see, with concrete giving way to farmers cajoling cows and tending fields. yangshuo is no village, with the colonel and ronald again in attendance, but it is infinitely more charming than guilin. but for how long? we're surrounded by pneumatic drills and the guts of hurried new buildings rising out from amongst the karst peaks in which yangshuo is nestled. soon this place will be another guilin, and the travellers will turn their attentions to yangdi, or ping'an, or some other nearby village which will become the next stop for china's concrete construction boom.
still, yangshuo harboured some hope for us, the river and the surrounding peaks giving some indication of the scenic beauty which we hoped lay around the corner. it was a saturday night and yangshuo was buzzing, from australians getting drunk to giggling chinese walking around holding hands. with such a party atmosphere it should have been no surprise that the little cafe where we were eating suddenly became the venue for some belting, ear splittingly loud, mandarin karaoke. concerned about being left out two canadian lads next to us, who were either drunk or trying to compensate for being not real americans by being overly extrovert, coerced the staff to put on some english tunes. after some stirringly awful renditions of careless whisper and, bizarrely, a martine mccutcheon song, the timeless classic unchained melody came on. one of the canadians was absolutely massacring it whilst looking round for someone to hand the mike too. he eventually happened upon a middle aged chinese man slumped over his beer in the corner and forced the mike into his ostensibly reluctant hand. we were expecting a horror show; we got magic. the old man was a star, intonation, pitch, everything was perfect as he blew the young canadian out of the water in his second language. brilliant stuff, don't mess with the chinese when it comes to karaoke.
next day we boarded a packed local bus to yangdi, a small settlement which marked the start of the walk or boat journey down to xingping, another small village a few hours down the li river. we got off the bus on a concrete rampway by the river and, as all of the chinese tourists lazily got onto their bamboo rafts, started walking. asides from the trio of other westerners which we started and continued our mini trek with the trail was completely deserted bar the farmers working the fields on either side, a welcome relief from everywhere else we had been in china. solitude was not the only virtue of this walk, however, as we flanked the li river and were treated to the kind of scenery for which this region is so rightly famous at every turn. after a few hours we hopped onto a bamboo raft, less romantic than it may sound when the outboard engine tacked onto the back starts chugging away, and enjoyed the views from the centre of the river. the final twenty minutes as we bobbed into xingping reminded us that we were not alone as the li started to resemble an expressway of rafts and clicking cameras but the hour or so before that were relatively blissful as, having fallen out of sync with the hordes who got on rafts at yangdi, we once again were treated to a bit of peace in which to enjoy the sublime views.
all in all then a good day, and yangshuo continues to tick all the right boxes. next stop a long day trip to the dragon's backbone rice terraces.
posted by bicrom @ 8:30 pm
<< Home