by hot air or escalator
we spent our last day in yangshuo surveying it regally from above, as we decided to take flashpacking to the next level and splash out on a hot air balloon trip. i've never been in one before, and the views over the karst peaks stretching into the distance before succumbing to the mist made standing directly underneath a blazing hot gasburner for an hour worthwhile as a one off experience. more, however, one for the photojunkies (you know who you are) then the verbose.
yangshuo to shenzhen was a ten hour bus journey on what we had been told was a sleeper bus. i've had some odd, and strenuous, bus journies in my time but as we followed the conductor's barked instructions and took our shoes off to get onto the laminate floor of the bus it became clear that this was going to be one of the stranger ones. the bus had been split into three rows of bunk beds; so far so normal, even ingenious. what gave it a surreal air, however, was the fact that all of our luggage was squeezed into the thoroughfares between the rows of bed. this meant not only that it was a claustrophobic's nightmare, hemmed in as you inevitably were by bags, boxes and backpacks, but also that any attempt to transit up or down the bus involved foregoing the corridors and clambering in and through peoples mini beds, as they balefully glared up at you. it was actually quite a comfortable and easy overnighter, but definitely one of the odder ones i've done.
so on to hong kong. i don't really know what to say about the place; shops, skyscrapers, more shops. if you had longer there are average hikes you can do but it is the city you visit, not the mediocre countryside. as a city it is certainly bright lights, but the rows and rows of chanel and louis vuitton boutiques made it feel a little distant for me. this feeling of exclusion is reinforced by the fact that it is a vertical city; everything, from bars to shops to schools, is hidden away up vast skyscrapers. you enter innocuous lobbies and gingerly get into lifts to be presented with a variety of mini shopfronts emblazoned by the floor numbers. we were fortunate enough to meet up with a friend of mine who is working in hong kong and so went for a drink on the 30th floor (no windows, just amazing views and overly casual leaning punishable by death) in a bar that we would have never even have guessed existed if we had walked past its front door a hundred times. it's not even that you're an outsider looking in; the places to look are not even at eye level.
it was a good few days of relaxing, dubious bag shopping and fineish dining (7 eleven pop pop chicken, yes please), but hong kong is definitely a city where the amount of money you have to burn is directly proportional to how much you can take out of it. judgment reserved until the bank balance grows a little.
onto the dragon
longsheng is three hours from yangshuo so we had to drag ourselves from bed at quarter past seven and onto a bus which would eventually take us to the rice terraces in the north of guangxi. after various delays and distractions, not least a village where the women only cut their hair once in their entire lives, we abandoned the rest of our tour group and set off for a walk up the steep rock hewn steps to the first of the viewpoints above the terraces. after an extremely, extremely sweaty clamber we got to a sufficient altitude to be blessed with a panorama of the ridged land, the green mountainsides geometrically pockmarked by years of rural endeavour.
we stomped around at the top for a couple of hours before heading back down to our tour group to begin the journey back down the winding roads, a journey punctuated by some hair raising driving from our clearly impatient coach driver and a veritable smorgasbord of road disasters on the mountain roads; first a delay caused by a lorry carrying some form of hazardous goods which had crashed with such force that the entire cab was buckled in almost entirely flat and then the glimpse of an overturned minivan which had clearly approached a corner too zealously. the rice terraces were amazing but, in truth, in a long twelve hour day we only spent two hours doing what we had actually wanted to, so in retrospect the excursion had a slightly anticlimactic feel. a day of dossing before we board the overnight bus to shenzhen and on to hong kong.
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.
