Paradise In China

So our long 28-hour train ride from Shanghai to Guilin turned out to be even longer than expected! About 3/4 of the way through our trip I was informed by a new Chinese friend I met on the train (a student named Jeff studying at Nanjing University who was really friendly) that the train was delayed by two to three hours. Oh good heavens! Haven't we suffered enough on this train already! LOL. Actually this train ride went by surprisingly quick, and the scenery was quite beautiful as we rolled along. The only thing that kinda sucked is that both Michael and I were stuck with top bunks, meaning that we're so close to the roof that we can't even sit up straight. You start to feel pretty cramped and more than a little claustophobic after a full day of this. The chairs in the aisle are okay, but too small for our big Western butts (and we're two skinny boys!) Anyway, hearing that the train was delayed definitely brought out some groans from us.

What was cool was that on the train we also met another traveller - a guy named Ryan from Victoria, BC. He'd actually been to Yangshuo before and it was nice to be travelling with someone who knows this part of China. We rolled into Guilin just after 11pm (about two hours late) and then immediately boarded a bus for our real destination - Yangshuo. We got into Yangshuo just after midnight and we were all eager to check into a place and sleep in a real, full-size, non-moving bed.

Yangshuo is a small city in southeastern China inbetween Guilin and Hong Kong. It's located in what just may be the most striking, other-wordly terrain that I've ever seen - and is also a backpacker's mecca. Yanghsuo lies peacefully on the Li River and is surrounded by hundreds - no, thousands - of limestone karst pinnacles. These giant shear-cliffed rocky peaks are cloaked in lush green forest and soar up high out of the sea of rice paddies. It's honestly a very alien-looking terrain but it's so spectacular that you really can't take your eyes off of it. No wonder the Chinese consider this area to be the most beautiful in all of their country!

We spent five days here just hanging out, and after being in the big cities for so long it was great to slow things down and really take it easy. Our hostel was the Bamboo Inn & Cafe and it was a great place to stay. We had a fabulous room - two beds (I got the big one!), air-conditioning, 24-hour hot water, a balcony, and a DVD player. Right on!

We spent the first two days just biking around the beautiful countryside on our own, exploring roads, trails, and rice-paddies galore. It was one of the best parts of our trip, thanks to the warm sunshine, clear blue skies, and unbelievable scenery that made your jaw drop every time you turned around another corner. Biking through rural China is the ultimate Asian experience revealing the kind of landscape that's exactly how you'd expect Asia to look - flooded, terraced rice paddies where workers in conical hats tend to their crops, farmers leading water buffalo across rivers and through fields, chickens and dogs running scattering around your feet, and bright-eyed children racing out to yello "Hello!" to you in every little village. It's as romantic and atmospheric a scene as you can imagine. We even went for a swim in one of the local deep green rivers, surrounded by the limestone peaks. Amazing!

Another day we went to these famous caves where you can hike through to check out all the stalagmites, stalacties, and other strange rock shapes, and take a dip in the POOLS OF MUD hidden deep in the long and narrow cave. It was great fun to plunge into the thick brown goo, and for some unknown reason the buoyancy of the mud makes you float to the surface so it's near impossible to sink all that deep into it when swimming through the sludge. They even had a mud slide you could slither down! Way fun! Thankfully there was also some fresh water streams later on to clean us off, cause lemme tell you we were Dirty with a capital D!

We also went to a cooking class with two friendly Aussie girls that we met at our hostel. There we all cooked up five sensational Chinese dishes on our own - stuffed tofu balls and pumpkin flowers, chicken and cashew nuts, beer fish, garlic and ginger eggplant, and steamed spinach with fermented tofu. And the miracle of all miracles occurred - despite the fact that I'm helpless when it comes to cooking, and generally an all-around disaster in the kitchen, I managed to cook everything the way that it was supposed to be, AND not poison myself! Hooray! In fact, everything was *DELICOUS!* Hmmm...maybe I do have a secret culinary side to me, buried deep deep down?

We had one Lazy Day in Yanghsuo where we did absolutely nothing but sit in our room, pig out on food from the hostel's kitchen, and watch DVD's. It was actually a lot of fun, and we made it into a bit of a party as we had Ryan, Nhiari, and Dheni with us all day. The fact that we were all feeling so tired and lazy *may* have to do with the fact that the five of us drank way too much at a bar the night before....hehe... Besides the communal lethargy it was a good day actually, and the fact that both Aussie girls are really sweet and a lot of fun certainly added to the all-around good times. It's so great to make new friends while travelling!

On our last day Michael and I went rafting. Actually it was a lot more like 'bumper boats.' You get put on this little dingy (only two to a boat) where there's no guide and no oars - only handles - and then shoved into the raging river where you hold on for dear life and you bump and float your way downstream. They've built several small dams on this river to help keep the water level high, but you can only get past them by going down these WATERFALLS off each dam and it was really fricken' scary at times!!! You honestly screamed in horror as much as you laughed in joy on this 'ride.' Also, because there's so many other boats on the river at the same time, you're constantly colliding with other rafters, hence the 'bumper boats' nickname. It was a lot of fun but quite scary at times and definitely painful as the river is rather shallow and you feel *every* rock and boulder that you go over. I really did enjoy the rafting, even though it took forever and a day to get up to the rafting centre, and then back to town, as the Chinese seem to really embody the "hurry up and wait" philosophy. Patience is definitely a virtue while travelling through schedule-free Asia.

All in all, Yangshuo is the kind of destination that a backpacker dreams of travelling to. It's incredibly beautiful, reallly quite cheap, and full of friendly travellers, clean good-value hostels, and more restaurants serving up delicious Chinese and Western cuisine than you could possibly eat at in a month. It's the kind of place you go back to again and again cause you know you're always guaranteed a good time, and the scenery never lets you down. (Just wait til you see my photos - you'll be blown away too!)

Time to move on again... It was goodbye to our new good friends Dheni and Nize, and then we boarded our "luxury" sleeper bus to Hong Kong. Our time in China has come to an end...