Yangshuo

The bus trip from Nanning to Guilin was a short one of only 4 hours.  Luckily the bus station (and most of Nanning) has signs written in both Chinese script and English, so we were able to find out which gate our bus left from easily enough.  

Guilin is a lot smaller than Nanning and probably more like what China was like before it’s economic boom.  There were no English signs (or romanic characters) and very few people speak English.  This makes life very interesting to say the least, as trying to follow a map or ask directions is really hard. 

The staff in our hotel spoke no English beyond “passport”.  We have become quite good a charades as we always have to ask for extra pillows and towels – although Caitlin has declared she will never go ask for extra toilet paper!! 

We spent one night in Guilin and then went back to the bus station to catch another bus (this time only an hour & 1/2) to the tourist town of Yangshuo.  The Guilin bus station was a whole new ballgame from Nanning as nothing is written in roman script.  I wish I had taken a photo of the timetable board all lit up in red lights with about 20 destinations for all the buses leaving the terminal – but all written in Chinese. 

There were people milling everywhere, naturally all staring at us as we tried to work out what we to do to get tickets.  Paul went off to stand in the line for tickets while I stood in the middle of the rush with the kids.  Suddenly a voice behind me said “Hello!” and I turned to see a young man with a satchel over his shoulder.  He smiled and asked me the age old question – are these all your children?  I sighed and said yes.  Then he asked me where were we going.  When I told him, his face lit up and said oh yes he was going there too!  I thought – Hmmm..  How convenient.  We get approached by people speaking English like this quite frequently and they always want to sell you something or take you to some shop or some other such annoyance, so by this stage of travel I was quite cynical and did my best to look uninterested.

I saw Paul talking through the ticket window and could see immediately that there was a language issue (in our experience no ticket sellers ever speak a teeny bit of English) – so I decided to use my little friend and asked him if he would help Paul translate to the ticket lady.

He was more than happy to help and as it turned out, he was not a tout but in fact an English teacher who was in Guilin for a conference with a group of other teachers who all appeared suddenly to start practicing their English on us.  He asked us to call him Jerry and he helped us to find the right boarding gate and then chatted to us most of the way to Yangshuo.  It was an interesting conversation about China, the current economic climate and his views on America.  It’s currently in all the Chinese news about the USA and the pressure being applied to China to revalue its currency.  Jerry wasn’t happy about how he felt the western media portrayed China.  He said he believed a lot of what was written were lies, particularly about Tibet and civil rights etc.

So far we have found the Chinese people to be extremely friendly and they try to help as much as possible even with the language barrier.

The scenery in this area is stunning, with 2 rivers running through mountain karsts. Unfortunately, the weather has still not improved and we have not seen blue sky for quite a while now.  We did 2 cruises – one down each river.  The first was on a motorised raft down the Li River and then later we were poled down the Yulong River. 

 The Yulong is much smaller and doesn’t flow as fast and there are a number of tiny dam walls built across it which we had to either sail over or push down the sides.  This was great fun and the kids loved it!  The only downside was that the weather decided to close in and we got a bit rained on and the temperature dropped down to about 13C – so by the time we’d been on the river for an hour we were more than ready to get into the heated minibus there to pick us up.