It took a short morning group meeting in Longji (looking out at thick cloud and slow, depressingly lingering rain showers) to abandon any thought of lovely scenic walks through rice terraces. Mainstream tourist Yangshuo and the Li River lay (several bus rides) ahead.
While boarding the express coach in Longshen bus station (loomed over by a luminous blue, 5 storey-high advertising poster for “Guilin 5th Hospital”, with blurry optimistic nurses and portraits of grinning senior doctors. German doctor in the group: VERY unimpressed!)… we realised that this was our last taste of quiet(ish) rural(ish) China.
On the buses:
The usual booming captive-on-coach “entertainment” delights were on offer. From Guilin to Yangshuo was a video of a Chinese “famous comic, recently died” comic. It seemed to be a compilation of two-hander performances in front of Party conferences. A straight-man was reasoning with a slightly ditzy but also somewhat wise woman. It was very “George Burns and Gracie Allen”: conflicts were resolved in a form of funny, convoluted female logic. Candy, our local guide, tried to translate for me, but this only made the viewing more confusing (or maybe it was the 7 hours of buses). Most scenes seemed to be family conflicts about money.
Yangshuo:
Quiet, orderly, clean, starkly cold, dry; electric buses circling the down town tourist precinct, and a grand black granite room with duck shaped taps and feather shaped tap handles: this is “tourist China”. (You can see the demise of real ducks hanging with a stab to the throat at the wet market just beyond downtown, and across the road from the outdoor dentist, if you like).
Breakfast music in this one-party state is Bob Marley: “Stand Up For Your Rights” and soporific Kenny G. A bitterly cold morning: so I purchased a fake Timberland jacket for about $15 for the long afternoon walk along the river through a series of small villages (hand-made sausages in long loops from household windows) and hills and duck farms and burial plots, then back to the Li River to watch cormorant fishers in small, narrow wooden boats with their ring-around-the-neck birds so the fish found in river diving are not swallowed. Return was by local ferry past massed fish farms in wire cages, tethered to the far shore of the river.
The evening “Sound and Light” local history performance, featuring 600 local “actors”, buffalo and wagons, horses and riders, laser projections and metre-wide scarlet silk streams “dancing” between horizontal lines of fishing boats and boatmen placed across the river, and recorded flute and patriotic music. Long lines of women in illuminated bonnets, dancing slowly and swaying with flares on both shores, concluded the brilliance. As bones groaned into action in the invading cold (but rather warmer in my New Fake Timberland Gear) we were wondering: if this is what the Chinese can produce in a regional town, how impressive (and authoritarian) will their Olympic ceremonies be?
11pm: Back in the grand warmth of the black granite hotel with the duck taps, our Tour Leader was waiting for me. I had an unexpected visitor. It was the bank clerk from Liuzhou, where I’d changed a travellers’ cheque 5 days earlier. Her bank had traced me to Yangshuo(!) and she had been put on a series of buses to find me(!!) because her superior had told her that I had signed in the wrong place(!!!) and would need to countersign the front and back of the cheque. She had been waiting for more than 2 hours for me to return from the Sound and Light. At 11.10pm, she departed quickly for the very unwelcoming bus station to find her way back to Liuzhou. And presumably to turn up for a day’s work in her bank in the morning.
Poster in West St, Yangshuo:
Beside a portrait of two rigidly smiling police, under the Party crest: “When your rights to quality food products are violated , or you find out of date foods please call us 12315”
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The “Organised River Fishing Boat Trip”:
On another bitter, grey morning, following a quick breakfast at Yak Café, most of the group was on a cycle trip; two hadn’t appeared after a big night of bar crawling with a People’s Liberation Army officer. I was booked on a river trip with the pink and green 20 Yuan (about 1 dollar) note in hand with its famous painting of the local Li River. I was “led” (actually dragged at a rapid pace through early morning crowds by an energetic old lady who screeched at anyone in her way) then handed (literally) to a local bus conductor who plonked me on a wooden seat at the front. I was now the token foreigner being pointed at and discussed by the capacity crowd of domestic tourists who more than filled the padded bus seats, and the aisle. We roared out of the bus station heading 40 minutes out of town through villages and citrus plantations.
Arriving at Lotus Cave (where everyone else clambered off), I was then manhandled into the supervision of a severe woman in a striking pink puffer jacket. She dragged me by the hand (what is it about hand-grasping, tourist-dragging-while-shrieking, women in this area?) about 400 metres through the rather shabby concrete village streets to a bleak shop-house café. I now joined the family, drinking tea, while they knitted and watched morning TV “soaps” around a large brazier of grey hot coals.
An even more severe pink-puffer-jacketed women stalked in from the street, yelled something at me, then frog marched me to the back of a tuk tuk where I was crammed in with three smiling and well rugged up Chinese tourists and parted with 1 Yuan for the pleasure of the experience. We puttered down concrete streets and muddy lanes and steep dirt tracks to a concrete wharf.
And (dodging the ladies with pairs of “photograph me” bored cormorants and others offering wondrous fried thingies), there it was: the broad river vista of elegant, upended-loaf-like limestone mountains and semi-tropical foliage surrounding the smooth, silently flowing grey waters. This was the painting depicted on the 20 Yuan note. But, on the “Organised River Fishing Boat Trip”, nothing stands still: I was physically pushed onto a small green boat with the three others and cast off. Our boatman commenced compulsory and endless amplified commentary, holding up a 20 Yuan note and pointing vaguely upstream. Chinese visitors smiled and nodded. She nudged my back until I did likewise. I was then largely ignored (but unable to escape the commentary babble) for the rest of the boat trip. Good: I could sit at the stern, camera in hand, and enjoy the “peaceful” scenery, uninterrupted…
There was one stop, on a gravel beach at the small village of Xing Peng. Partly, this was to allow several gaudy tourist cruise boats to pass us, partly so we could head to the (well forested) hills for calls of nature, partly to look at local fishing and villagers clambering on and off the cross-river ferry or paddling across the river on small rafts. One highlight was a lugubrious Chinese “Marlboro Man” in cowboy hat and boots, cigarette dangling from bottom lip, standing on the gravelled river side with his “steed” a rather furry, mid sized and equally lugubrious water buffalo.
And, on return to Pu Yi wharf some hours later, we were recommended a café at the top of the boat ramp: “Three Sisters Restaurant: You would like to walk around town? You can leave your bike here”. Any potential delight or anticipation was quickly quelled by the sight of the cook on the river’s edge, washing gutted dog carcasses.
By the time we boarded the overnight, overly heated, hard class sleeper train to Shenzhen, every one of us had caught the inevitable Chinese ‘group cold’. Any of us who had not yet fully succumbed to the virus from shared-plate banquet meals, did so in the fuggy and headachy heat of the crowded 6 berth cabins. It’s Winter. You have paid for heat. Chinese Railways ensure you get HEAT! Overnight and morning delays were caused by the feverish construction of high speed rail lines into and beyond Guangzhou. In the feverish sleeper, we cared not much.
We were all a tad subdued in the dining car for the dubious “western” breakfast, more so when confronted by the compulsorily inescapable and loud wide-screen music videos of Kenny G.
The crowded plastic-seated local train from Shenzhen into Hong Kong was looking goooood!
