Beautiful Yangshuo

Sunday 6^th Oct.

A smoking hot morning when we left the hostel, heading to Yangshuo. Leah and another girl (Livia from Switzerland), was going in the same direction, so we all shared a cab, to the bus station, and took a 1½ hour busride south.

The hostel Cozy Garden in Yangshuo was a little out of town, but at this point we were very desperate to get to a quiet place. We walked for half an hour, to get there and it was just as expected. Quiet and peacefull with only the sounds of bugs, birds and frogs, and the stunning views over the limestone mountains. We booked a 4 bed dormitory room, and luckily they put Leah in the same room as us.

We had a little chat with the hostel manager, and he had a lot of great suggestions of what we should do, while we were in Yangshuo. There’s was a lot of hiking, biking and bamboo rafting to do, but he also mentioned a scooter trip in the mountains, kayaking and bridge jumping.

This was a perfect place for us to stay for some days, since we like all the outdoor activities. 

The first day we started out slowly, with renting bikes and went to the river to have a swim. When we got down to the river, after some steep steps, the view was amazing. There were these massive limestone mountains along the river, and as far as your eye could see, it was just pure nature, really unique surroundings. We were all by ourselves (Erik, Leah & I), except for that digging machine on the other side of the river, quiet noisy actually. But we went for a beautiful swim, and felt new-borned afterwards. 
We biked into town, only 10 min away, checked out the area, and compared the prices on all the different activities. 
We found a nice, and decent priced, local restaurant to enjoy lunch at. We’re starting to like chinese dumplings a lot, it’s just steamed wonton dough with all kinds of filling! Delicious! 

We went to meet up with Livia at Monkey Janes rooftop bar, perfect timed, cause we came just when “happy hour” started. What a coincidence! We watched the sunset from there, while organizing what to do the upcoming days.

When it got dark we walked downtown, which was redicouilious packed with Chinese tourists (the last day of the Chinese holiday). We very quickly got annoyed of all the people, so we ate some spontaneous streetfood, and went to a quite bar afterwards.

When heading home on our bikes, it had become really dark and the last part of our bikeride, was gonna be interesting, cause there was no streetlights, and we forgot our headlamps.

We got extremely lucky, so just when we went from streetlight into the darkness, a car pulled up behind us, and he lead us the whole way to the hostel with his lights. I don’t think I have ever riden a bike that fast, cause all the time we were affraid that he would pas us, and then we wouldn’t be able to see the road. Off cause we could walk the distance, but it wouldn’t have been that interesting and breathtaking.

The last person in our room was a French guy (Olivier) that had arrived when we got back. He was willing to join us the next day on a bamboo raft and bike tour.

Just arrived in Yangshuo, with Livia & Leah

Our neat hostel

The front terrace

Happy puppies, having their first svim on their trip

Monday 7^th Oct.

We booked bikes and the hostel arranged a bambooraft for us, went to pick up Livia, and then we were all set and ready to go.

We got a big raft that could fit 14 people, but we were only the 5 of us. It had an engine on, so it wasn’t really a raft, but that was the only boat that could fit our bikes and us. 
Our captain was a friendly english speaking chinese guy, and second captain was his 5 years old son. 
While we were cruising down the river, he started up a party on the boat with really loud music, all kinds of Chinese club music, and off cause “gangnam style”. It was actually better than the sound from of engine, so we enjoyed it and had a good laugh of him and his kid dancing.
The scenery was stunning and breathtaking, and you just never got tired of looking into the horizon, and on all the beautiful limestones. On the riversides we saw a bunch of water buffalos, and the fishermens fish cages, and their shelters.

We got dropped off in Liugong with our bikes, and had lunch at the only restaurant in town, just by the river. I ordered a seaweed egg soup (by mistake) I thought it came with noodles. But it was just seaweed (that wasn't rinsed properly so it really tasted like sea) and egg. The soup tasted like sticking your tongue out of the window. So that’s not recommendable. And after that I discovered, that they have that soup everywhere. Disgusting!!!

We biked through the mountains and a lot of small villages. We passed a snake on the road, it was alive but didn’t move, and we realized that it had been run over and was injured. So we stopped and helped it out from its misery. Erik threw a big stone towards it a few times, until we could declare it dead. One less to be affraid of, but even though it was a snake, it still hurts my heart to see them suffer.

Well, we biked for a few hours before we got to our next planned stop “Gold water cave”, with both mud and hot spring baths. Our guide took us on a little tour in the caves. Our guide dared us, if one of us would climb through a VERY tiny hole, with an opening in the end. Brave Erik did it (of cause) and he could barely fit in there, and when you first climbed in there, there was no turning back. So we went to the other side, where he came out and seriously, that climb was as narrow as him. But well done.

Off to the mud bath, that was a funny and different experience, almost as the dead sea in Israel, where you float easily because of the salt contents. This was just way thicker, and an undescribeable weird feeling. We definitely felt like our cells had been cleaned out afterwards. The hot spings was nice too.

On the road again back to Yangshuo. We actually got comfortable in the traffic, it’s pretty much just about who’s biggest and loudest, then just follow the traffic and don’t stop. If a car is parking right in front of you, just go around it, cause the people behind you is expecting you to do so. People are walking on the streets a lot, and you just gotta ring your bell, or be loud so people know you’re right behind them, they won’t move to the side but they know you’re there. Quiet funny when you first get into it. We drove directly to Monkey Janes rooftop bar, and got what we deserved from a day filled with activities: A ice cold Tsingtao beer!! Also a great place to watch the sunset again.

Dinner got enjoyed at the same restaurant as lunch the day before. We found that very good and everything was homemade.

Fishermens (not the drink) shelters

Local fisherman having lunch

Beautiful young people

Chinas answer to "babybjørn"

My overwhelming seaweed egg soup

This guy wanted money from us for taking this picture - but now we're making him famous instead.. Share!! 

Gorgeous Guangxi province

APPROVED China

DECLINED China

Erik and his sweet escape

96% immigrants (negerbasser)

The Yangshuo gang 

Yangshuo Boat & Bike Tour

Sunset Yangshuo

Tuesday 8th Oct.

Early in the morning we rented scooters from the hostel, went to pick up Livia. 

We had a route that we should follow, cause otherwise we would get lost. Paul (the hostel manager) told us, that whenever there’s an option to go left or right, you always should choose right and then we wouldn’t get lost, so that’s what we did. 

Our first stop was at a tea plantation, we got there really early in the morning so they were barely opened yet, but the girl there, was happy to see us, and told us a little bit about the plantation. 

We didn’t want to pay for a tour around there, since we could see all the trees already. She invited us to a so called tea ceremony, which we agreed to do. 
Before we got to taste the tea, there was a bunch of different traditions that we had to go through, one of them was to wake up the leaves with hot water, the weirdest thing was, when she finally had made the tea and put it in our cups, she immideately took the cups again, and poured the tea out on her tea-pet (a wooden frog in the corner of her table). Apparently it’s for good luck. We were looking at each other, and didn’t know if we should laugh or cry. 
Eventually we got to taste the tea, and it didn’t taste of normal tea, that we’re use to, but more like the seaweed egg soup I had the day before. But we forced ourselves to drink it, and pretended that we enjoyed it, kept reminding each other that it was free.

We almost didn’t meet any other tourists on our whole way through the mountains, small villages and huge fields. It was an amazing and untouched part of China, and we enjoyed it a lot. Erik even let me drove some of the way, which is a big step for mankind!!

We stopped by a bridge (dragon bridge) cause Erik, Leah and Olivier wanted to jump from it (I didn’t dare). I just wanted to go for a swim. After a while of re-thinking it, the tough guys, and even tougher Leah, did the jump (Oliver and Erik did it twice). It was around 7-8 meters. I must say, it seemed higher, but you gotta start slowly and then work your way up.

In the evening we went to a very famous, and well known show called “Impression of Sanilje”. A water show where they use their unique surroundings (the limestone scenery), and there’s about 600 actors. We were impressed the first 5 min, and a few times during the show, but only for a very short period of time. There was no story told, it was just different scenes with no harmony, it had absolutely no action, and the music was just putting you to sleep. We were surprisingly impressed of how boring it was, even though they had the best opportunities, to make the best show in the world, they still screwed that one up. 
We had really high expectations and 4 of us walked away very disappointed, while 1 thought it was the best she had ever seen. Maybe it’s all about the expectations, or maybe it’s just a lame show. 

Me & Erik went out for beers/drinks afterwards, and ended up finding a place, where we could smoke waterpipe (shisha), and had a great time there. This night we had brought our headlamps, so didn’t have to worry about biking in the dark. We got home around 1am.

Retards

Scooter Trip

Bridge Jump Syncro

Wednesday 9^th Oct.

Slept in and stayed in bed until noon, this day was a resting day, and time to accumulate all our impressions from the last couple of days. 
We made some research for our next destination, which was suppose to be the Yunnan province, but we changed the plans, because we realized that we wanted to see, the panda sanctuary and breeding base, in Chengdu. We still want to visit the Yunnan province, but we can do that on the way south again. 
Erik went to buy train tickets for us, to Chengdu, but the office was already closed. 
We agreed on leaving the next morning, and hoped that there would still be, some hard-sleeper train tickets available by then. 
It was our last night in Yangshuo, so we deciced to eat at our favorite local restaurant, together with Leah, Olivier & Livia (and a guy she met).
We went to smoke waterpipe again, and after a while both Erik & I wasn’t feeling good, so we decided to drive back to the hostel straight away.

The whole night we got more and more sick, and none of us had a prober sleep, we spend most of the time in the bathroom. We definitely had food poison and even from our “favorite” restaurant. We all had shared the same dumplings, and Olivier was sick as well, but in a better shape than us, Leah didn’t get sick at all.

Our "favorite" restaurant

Last night in Yangshuo

Thursday morning we very quickly agreed, that we were NOT gonna be able to travel anywhere. So lucky that we didn’t get the train tickets the day before, cause they wouldn’t be refundable. 
And actually also lucky that both of us were sick, it makes it more understandable when you feel the same way. 
We dragged ourselves to go for a swim in the afternoon, which was refreshing but we still felt exhausted. Time to say goodbye to Leah, that we spend the last week with, and Olivier that we spent 4 days with.

We had the room to ourselves, and got all our stuff packed, ready to leave in the morning.
Went to bed with fingers crossed, that we were gonna feel total fine the next day.

To be continued.....