Anyway, we set out around 10:00am on a route that is supposed to take 1.5 to 2 hours. It goes through Yangshuo, out into the countryside, through some tiny villages, and then back to Yangshuo. Up until then I hadn’t ridden a bicycle for a very long time but I still had the hang of it. Like they say, once you learn how, you never forget. Still, there’s a big difference between the pre-teen girl bike I had back in the olden days and a cheap Chinese rental bike. I had to have the seat lowered all the way because of my short stumpy little legs, but I practiced until I felt confident enough.
As soon as we drove out into the Yangshuo city traffic, I immediately lost all that confidence. I know why China’s currently having a problem with 3-day-long traffic jams near Beijing. Even riding a bike around the streets of tiny Yangshuo is taking your life in your own hands. As if things weren’t scary enough at that time, I got cut off by a semi and temporarily separated from my group. The semi also kicked up a fairly large rock which, of course, hit me square in the face. A group of 3 Chinese tourists who were riding bicycles from the same rental place saw it happen and rushed over to make sure I was OK. It turned out we were going to the same trail so I rode with them until I caught up with my group who, thankfully, were waiting on me.
Now that we were all together again, we passed all sorts of sights: rice paddies, fields of lotus blossoms, giant limestone mountains, and villages so rural they resembled the pictures you see in National Geographic of the Calcutta slums. It was practically 3rd world, but the people there were extremely friendly and talkative (maybe because they kept trying to sell us stuff).
We ended up spending more time in one of the rural villages than we originally anticipated because one of the tires on Mike and Clarke’s bike blew. Thankfully, the village had a “bicycle repair shop,” which basically consisted of an old man with cataracts and almost no teeth sitting on a stump smoking a marijuana joint beside a heap of bicycle parts. Despite our doubts he had their bike in workable condition within 10 minutes and for very little money.
Of course, while we were waiting, we got swarmed by people trying to sell all kinds of useless stuff. They even brought out the sad-looking little kids in order to play the sympathy card. For the most part, we held out, but a few girls bought some woven flower-wreath crowns. Using English here was practically useless, but it turns out the best phrase to know in Chinese was: Duibuqi, wo zhende bu yao!—Sorry, but I really don’t want to buy that!
With Mike’s tire fixed, we biked a lot more, coming across some pretty bad roads. For my family’s sake, allow me to conjure up the image of the backwoods trails at Wright Hunting Club just after a big rainstorm. At some points, we had to get off the bikes and walk them around the large puddles and potholes while our feet sank ankle-deep in thick brown mud, which later dried and flaked off some as we rode. From those isolated country roads, we later found ourselves biking alongside highways at astonishing speed, swerving around people on motorcycles and mopeds as well as around cars, pedestrians, buses, and farm equipment. Let’s just say that I finally understand the stereotypes about Asian drivers…and they’re all true. I also know why Guilin people call the taxi driver shifu instead of siji (like most of China). Shifu means “master,” indicating someone with great skill in his area of expertise, like a chef, a blacksmith, or even a kung-fu master.
Thanks to our detour, we took a little over 2 hours to complete the route, and we worried the whole time that it might rain. All day the sky was full of clouds and very overcast. It was also a little windy and unusually cool for August. However, the weather stayed fair and we were able to return the bikes without a problem.
After our cross-country bike ride, we had all worked up a pretty big appetite. It seemed, though, that we had vastly different cravings, which were oddly split along gender lines. The girls wanted to go eat some of the local dishes which are famous in and around Yangshuo. The guys wanted big greasy salty McDonald’s hamburgers. So we split up, and Lao Cai came with us girls. She took us to Cloud 9 Restaurant, and we ordered sautéed broccoli, braised eggplant, baked pumpkin in garlic sauce, rice, tomato fried eggs, lemon chicken, and Yangshuo’s famous beer fish.
Here’s the beer fish, which is made with carp:
Everything was really delicious and we also enjoyed not having the boys there. No offence to them, but when we have Chinese-style meals together, the boys always turn it into a competition and leave no food for the girls. Once we finished lunch, we went to the market for a little while to kill time because we were all meeting up at 2:00pm.
Once we were all back at the hotel, some of the group members decided that they wanted to go back to the bike rental place to rent motorcycles for the afternoon. It’s good that I decided to pass on that one because they ended up stranded halfway up a mountain because the electricity in their motorcycles ran out. They had to call Lao Cai to get her to call the rental place. She and one of the staff drove out to get them. As for me, I explored Yangshuo some more…on foot. Around dinnertime, I was in a bit of a rush because we were going to a show at 8:00pm and had to leave around 7:10pm. Since I was in a rush, I didn’t have time to get adventurous with the restaurants and ended up eating very tasty but also overpriced sweet & sour chicken. It was about the price it would be in Hong Kong—not too bad—but definitely overpriced for China.
Those of us going to the show at 8:00pm met in the lobby to catch the bus. We were all very excited because the show was a live impression of the works of China’s famous movie director, Liu Sanjie. It seems that the impression group does 2 performances every night, all of which sell out of seats a day or two in advance. Yangshuo is very famous for this show. Here’s the venue:
And this is the group that went:
Unfortunately, right before that picture my camera decided to malfunction in a really weird way that it hasn’t stopped yet. Thankfully, it doesn’t keep me from taking pictures. All that happened is that now my screen is blank when I try to take a picture. I can still use my digital camera like a traditional camera though and look through the lens to see what I’m taking a picture of. Also, I’m able to view my pictures on the big screen after I take them. I think this malfunction is very strange, and if it doesn’t stop by the time I get back to Hong Kong I think I ought to take my camera to a Sony store and see if they can fix it.
Anyway, here’s more about the Liu Sanjie Impression Show…the crowd:
The opening song:
Scene 2:
Scene 3:
What’s neat about that 3rd scene is that it’s done by real local fishermen and not professional actors. During the day they fish, and at night they perform in the show to make extra money.
Altogether the show was well worth it. Now maybe I ought to check out Liu Sanjie’s movies. The scenery and music were as beautiful as the seats were uncomfortable, and there were practically no white people there besides us. That might explain why people were taking as many pictures of us as they were of the show itself. I even got into a conversation with one local lady who thought I was an English teacher in Yangshuo. When I told her I was a tourist and a student, she looked very surprised. Apparently, the general assumption around Yangshuo is that white people who don’t speak Chinese are tourists, and those that do speak Chinese are English teachers. I also ran into some little kids and, believe me, they always have the funniest things to say. My favorite was a girl, probably about 6 years old, who ran up to me, stopped, and gaped at me wide-mouthed for a full minute. Then she yelled back to her mom, “Mommy, I found a princess!” When I looked confused, she took off her pink backpack which, it turns out, had Disney princesses all over it. She pointed to Belle from Beauty and the Beast and said “That’s you!” When I told Lao Cai about this incident later, she laughed and said that all the princesses in fairytale books (even in China) are usually white, so she wasn’t surprised that a little girl might jump to that conclusion.
We got back rather late—at least too late for me to feel like blogging. Also we had to get up relatively early this morning so we could be checked out of the hotel at 8:00am. Our destination was a remote village called Longsheng, which is known for its large proportion of ethnic minorities—namely the Yao and the Zhuang (Lao Cai is Zhuang, but she didn’t grow up in the Zhuang culture or speaking the Zhuang language). Random side-note about ethnic minorities in China: 95% of Chinese are Han ethnicity and the other 5% is split between 55 minor ethnic groups. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the concept of China’s one-child policy. It turns out, though, that there are a lot of loopholes. Firstly, the one-child policy applies only to Han. Ethnic minorities can have as many kids as they want. If you’re Han and you marry a member of an ethnic minority, you can also have as many kids as you want. The same goes for foreigners or people married to foreigners. That basically means that I could have 8 kids in China and the government wouldn’t lift a finger to stop me. Secondly, if you have enough money, you can always go to Hong Kong to have the second (or third or fourth…) baby. You can have any number of kids in Hong Kong but it is still part of China. Side-note over.
To get from Yangshuo to Longsheng actually took a good 4 hours by bus so it was pretty tiring. On the bus, people slept, listened to music, and polished off 3-4 big bags of taro chips (tomato or barbeque flavored) as well as immense quantities of Want-Want rice crackers. The latter part of the trip consisted of winding mountain roads and literally being stuck in traffic by chickens in the middle of the street. The people in this part of China are, in many ways, still living the same way their ancestors did 100—200 years ago…maybe even further back. It’s truly astonishing to come to a place like Longsheng.
The first thing we did when we arrived was go to a show put on by the local Yao minority. We had to cross a rather unstable-looking rope-bridge that swung like mad around the middle:
Finally, we got inside and the show began. As I was filming the beginning, a Yao lady was trying to give me rice vinegar and glutinous rice ball snacks. I’m not big on rice vinegar by itself, but the glutinous rice was good because it was rolled in sesame powder:
By far the most amusing part of the show was Justin “getting married.” Early on in the show, 4 men from the audience were invited to come on stage to participate in a traditional Yao wedding. Justin was the only foreigner who volunteered. You can see for yourself because it seems I was the unofficial wedding photographer. First, he had to pick out a “bride” and then don the “wedding clothes:”
Next, the girls came down for a part of the ceremony not involving the guys:
Finally, the guys reemerged:
After that clip, the girls all sang love songs to their “husbands.” The “husbands” were supposed to respond with their own love songs. While the Chinese guys were belting it out, Justin managed to come up with…Happy Birthday. Not too romantic, I guess but, hey, he was put on the spot. It was forgivable. Finally, he came back and we got to watch the girls change their hairstyles from that of young girls to married women. The Yao minority is also known as the “Long Hair” minority. Even the name of the village “Longsheng” means “long hair.” Amongst the Yao, long hair is a sign of longevity. Therefore, the girls all keep their hair ridiculously long, as you can see below:
Eventually, the show came to an end. On our way out, we got a little bit of an unexpected “goodbye”…pinches on the butt! That’s right. As we started walking out, a whole bunch of Yao women ran up and began pinching us all mercilessly on our rear ends. Supposedly, in their culture, this is equivalent to saying “We like you” or “Thank you for visiting.” As if my butt didn’t hurt enough already from that 2 hour bike ride yesterday. Still, it was more funny than painful so I just laughed about it…especially when some other people were so surprised they squealed.
Next on our agenda was visiting the world-famous Longji Terraces, which translates to English as “Dragon’s Backbone Terraces.” Ever seen terraced rice fields in movies that take place in China? This was the mother of them all. According to Lao Cai, it was going to take us 2 hours to get up and back down the mountain where all the terraces were. We decided to go on foot, but there was always this amusing option:
What we didn’t expect was that our path was lined entirely with village:
Here are some of the sights along the way:
Check out the view from the very top:
Aiya! Look at that tacky tourist in the USC shirt blocking the wonderful view…
We climbed back down the mountain, very hot and sweaty and tired. It took another 2.5 hours to get back to Guilin, where we checked back into our previous hotel, Osmanthus Hotel. After a tasty dinner, we generally settled in for the night. Since this is our last night in Guilin, I decided to see the Sun and Moon Pagodas at night because I’ve heard they’re really beautiful when they’re all lit up.
I got there right as the lights turned on at 7:30pm:
And then I stayed long enough for it to get a little darker:
Overall, time well-spent.
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