My host family was nice enough to drive me down. It was about an hour and a half by car. This is what the view looked like most of the way:
In Guilin you see the odd hill but Yangshuo is situated right in the middle of them. We went out to dinner and they ordered may local specialties:
Chicken, rice cooked in bamboo (I also had this in Kunming), stuffed tofu, veggies ...
Beer fish showed up last. 7 plates in all, for 4 of us. Then the mom pulled out 2 whole chickens (another Yangshuo specialty) and handed out plastic gloves, and we tucked in - ripped the chicken apart with our bare hands. It was a lot of fun!
Unfortunately right after dinner it started pouring rain, and my hosts decided to drive back to Guilin. I found a hotel room, then wandered about town in the rain. Did I mention it was a tourist trap? Very crowded, and with all the umbrellas it was impossible to get around. There were blocks and blocks of bars, each about 10 feet wide, each with live music, and each trying to drown out all the rest. You can imagine it was quite a din! I found a German restaurant with a covered patio ordered some dark German beer and salty peanuts, and sat back and enjoyed the show.
The next day it was still drizzling rain. Here are a couple of views of wet Yangshuo in the morning. The crowds from the night before have dissipated.
Even though it was raining, I just had one day in town, so I rented a bicycle to have a tour of the countryside. The bicycle tout told me 30 RMB, and I asked "Per hour?" "No, three hours." Huh, 5 bucks for 3 hours? She also talked me into getting a guide, 100 RMB. I figured what the heck it would be nice to not get lost for a change.
Outside of Yangshuo the countryside was very beautiful and there were lots of small villages. Despite all the mountains the roads and pathways were all very flat.
We passed through farms growing just about everything - rice, vegetables, fruit trees, etc. In some of the paddies we saw farmers planting rice. In some we saw water buffalo tilling the ground.
Here is my guide, twirling her umbrella while she waits for me to take pictures. Since it was raining I rode "Chinese style", one hand on the handlebars and one hand holding my umbrella over my head. She explained to me that 10 or 12 years ago there were very few tourists. The villagers could cut firewood and hunt. But now the government has banned logging and hunting to save the environment for the tourists, so the villagers have to buy food and wood in the city. However they all now have a much higher income and standard of living, selling goods to tourists, opening hotels and restaurants, guiding, and so forth. So a lot of villagers are building larger houses for themselves (like the white houses in the picture above). However the old mud houses stayed cool in the summer, when the temperatures regularly reach 36 degrees, and the new brick houses don't, so now they have to add air conditioning in all the new houses as well.
Here's another popular activity for tourists, sailing down the river on reed boats. The big boat in the middle is actually a floating BBQ and bar.
Most of the time (but not all) we were on paved pathways. They used to be all mud, but the government has paved most of them for the benefit of the tourists.
There are a lot of attractions to see around Yangshuo. I only had one day, so I chose to just see Assembling Dragon Cave, and spend the rest of the day cycling around the countryside. There were other caves in the vicinity but this one had the coolest name.
They actually took s through a couple of the sections of the cave by boat.
Notice all the brightly coloured lights? This cave was so busy they didn't bother turning them on and off when the tour groups when through. You could hear the announcer from the groups ahead and behind us, making it difficult to understand what was going on. (And of course everything was in Chinese. I heard that they had tour groups for foreigners but I didn't bother.)
A big underground store! You had to walk past every single vendor to get through. "Chinese people love to shop," is what my guide told me, but I think they just get strong-armed into it so often they just give up and buy stuff. Even I bought a little dragon sculpture here. However I took this opportunity to ditch my tour group and wander through the rest of the caves on my own.
This is where the cave exits. Or rather, this is where you exit after you walk through the miles and miles of souvenir stalls after exiting the cave.
Next we cycled over to "Sun Moon Hill" where there was a nice restaurant.
I ordered Yangshuo duck and stir-fried greens with mushrooms, yum! This restaurant was a recommendation of the guide, I think she was friends with the owner.
(As an aside, my guide worked the same way most of these kinds of guides work. Their guiding fee is a kind of loss leader, and then they steer you to friendly restaurants and attractions. My guide bought my Dragon Cave ticket for me (netting me a small discount off the regular price), recommended the restaurant for lunch, and signed me up for a cooking class later in the afternoon. I'm sure she got a commission off of each of these.)
More scenes of the Yangshuo countryside.
We were on a part of the trail here that had not yet been modernized. It was very muddy and very bumpy.
Back in Yangshuo. Isn't it beautiful?
As we were biking around my guide was explaining to me all the different activities that were available in Yangshuo. Apparently they even have a language school to teach foreigners Chinese! One thing that caught my attention was a cooking school. "I'd like to do that!" I said, so she immediately called her friend and signed me up.
After getting back to Yangshuo and dropping off my bike (they didn't charge me any extra, even though I was out for over 4 1/2 hours, and had paid for 3, which made me think there was probably some room for haggling) I had about an hour to kill so I picked a different pub and had a beer and a snack. I must be on holiday or something.
At the school they gave us a menu of the various dishes we could cook and we got to pick 2 meat and 1 veggie dish. Of course I insisted on "Beer Fish" (a Yangshuo favourite) and we also picked "Sichuan Beef with Mint" and "Sichuan Fried String Beans". Our teacher then took s to the market to pick up the ingredients.
My classmates. There were a couple of ladies from Tennissee, and some school kids (and a couple of moms) from Washington DC. The kids were all 8-12 years old and in a Chinese immersion program at their school in Washington. Their level of Chinese was amazing. The older kids had been studying Chinese for 4-5 years. Above we are getting a lecture on the various produce in the veggie market.
Next we went to the meat market.
Warning - some of you may want to skip the next photograph (Chinese meat market).
Some of the animals for sale. We didn't buy any of these, however we were gruesomely interested. The lady in the back is burning the hair off one of the animals with a blow torch while her friend sits and texts on her phone. They also had ducks, chickens and geese crowded into cages. They had everything else you could imagine but most of it was pre-cut in chunks.
Chef Ian getting ready to cook.
My class hard at work. First we prepared all the ingredients for the 3 dishes, and then we pulled out the woks and cooked. We each had our own wok on a gas burner and each cooked all 3 dishes.
Local Beer Fish. We used catfish but you can substitute just about any fish. It was sooooo goooddddd, even better than the beer fish I had with dinner the previous night. Probably because I cooked it with love (and extra beer and chilies).
Sichuan beef with mint and Sichuan string beans.
Right after dinner I had to run for the bus back to Guilin. I had a nice chat with my seatmate, who was thrilled to be sitting next to a foreigner, and didn't speak barely a word of English. I got home at about 10PM. It was a good day.
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