Guilin, China, Asia

I got up this morning and had a pretty decent breakfast at the hostel before getting picked up by the tour group at 10:15am. It was a full bus so there were about forty of us heading down the road to Zhujiang pier to get on our boat. It was already not exactly what Greg and I had expected as the English tour guide, was actually a Chinese tour guide who tried to repeat everything in English. His English was pretty poor though, so we were only able to pick up about half of what he was saying. It seemed like he wasn’t really saying anything important, so I ended up just ignoring him anyway.

The scenery as we got closer to the Li River was amazing! It looked a bit like Halong Bay with huge rocks jutting out from the ground and they looked completely out of place. We were really fortunate that we got a nice day to see the river and all the sights. The previous few days had been very rainy, so others weren’t quite as lucky. We got to the pier, and the “bamboo” boats were lined up along the shore waiting for us to board. Only four people could get on each boat, so of course we didn’t have the tour guide with us, and we didn’t hear any of the stories or history about the region as we were going down the river. Our boat also was not made of bamboo like we had been told it would be, it was made of PVC piping. All the boats looked the same except for a different color awning on the top, and they all had motors on them, when we were under the impression that we would be floating downstream on a traditional bamboo boat.

The scenery was amazing to see, but we had the unfortunate luck of being in the back bench on the raft, and the Chinese girl in front of us was standing the entire time. It was difficult to see what was straight in front of us, but it was still nice. The thing that wasn’t so nice was how many boats were out on the water. There had to be 7,393 boats out there, it was mental. It was also like they were all trying to race down the river, so that didn’t really add to the serene tranquility of the whole situation. We stopped about 40 minutes down the river at a little rocky shore where there was a line of stalls set up with Chinese people selling crap. It wasn’t a really beautiful area or anything, so the whole point in this 20 minute stop was just to waste time and try to get us to spend money on things we didn’t need.

We got back on the boat and cruised another half hour down the river to Xingping pier, for a total of 1h10m on the boat. I wasn’t impressed as we had signed up for a two hour bamboo boat ride with an English guide, and we get 1h10m on a PVC piping boat without a guide at all. I guess that’s what I’d been warned about in China, you pay for things and then are disappointed with them. I see that now. At the pier we had to pile into three little golf carts (36 of us, we were really piled in) and drive ten minutes down the road to get to another bus that would bring us down to the town of Yangshuo. This ride was pretty nice looking as well, but in the bus we couldn’t take any pictures because the windows were so dirty.

We got to Yangshuo which looks like a nice town, but it’s much bigger than the little village I had in mind. I’m getting the idea that with China having 1.3 billion people, there is probably no such thing as a small village. They are all big cities, which makes sense because all those people have to live somewhere. I’m just sick of big cities that don’t have much to look at, but I think I’m going to be seeing them for the next month, so I better get used to it. Greg and I left the group in Yangshuo, even though they tried to sell us on a second tour for the afternoon, that would be better than the one this morning. We didn’t really trust anything they were saying at this point, because they had fed us a bunch of lies today already. We grabbed a bite to eat in the town and had a little walk around. It is a nice looking town, but we were a bit disappointed in how the whole day went.

We found the bus station in Yangshuo and bartered to get on a bus back to Guilin for 15 yuan ($2.50). We probably should have paid for a better bus. We got on and got a seat, but we didn’t drive directly to Guilin as we had expected. We stopped probably twenty times on the way there picking up and dropping off locals, most of whom had to sit in the aisle on the bus on little stools that they had up front. It was a little ridiculous, especially because these locals all just finished working in the fields or something and stank like you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t the best two hour bus ride I’ve ever been on, but we survived.

We walked back to the hostel from the bus station and had a bite to eat. On a pretty cool note, the Li River that I saw today is the 50th thing I can cross off on my list of 100 things to see. I’m pretty happy with that accomplishment, but the other 50 I have left are going to be a bit more difficult I think…