Tom: Yangshuo (August 11)

Yangshuo (August 11) · Aug 25, 02:15 PM

I slept lightly, waking to curl up, turn over, or uncurl and stretch my feet into the space at the front of the bus. Still, I didn’t feel tired or exhausted after we got to Guilin. I’m excited; the end of my long trip through China is neigh. I walked with my bags to the train station and directly onto a bus for Yangshuo. They asked for twenty yuan, which is too much by far, but I don’t care now. There was just enough time before we left for a bathroom stop; I jumped onboard just as the bus was backing out into traffic. The ride to Yangshuo was a quick 45 minutes, one I shared with with two German women. The bus was playing odd music — when we got on there was a children’s choir rendering Queen’s “We Will Rock You” set to a happy hardcore beat. The songs that followed continued in the same vein.

The sleeper arived in Guilin at six thirty or so. The morning — a hazy one — was still cool, but by the time I arrived in Yangshuo it was eight and considerably hotter — hotter and muggy to death (borrowing a Chinese idiom). I was dripping sweat as I check in for two nights to one of the HI hostels on West Street and unloaded my bags. After a bit of thinking, including a walk away from West Street for jiao zi and wanton soup (which I really love), I changed my reservation and booked a sleeper bus tomorrow evening to Shenzhen — this will add a while day in Hong Kong I would have otherwise spent in transit, without taking many hours away from my time in Yangshuo.

Did I mention soak-your-shirt, brow-dripping muggy? I had to return to my room to change into my contacts because my glasses kept slipping off. I met a large crowd of backpackers from the UK, then two Chinese girls from Guangzhou on their first backpacking adventure.

I walked around, then settled in a back corner of the Red Star Express for two strong cups of bad coffee — I have a couple hours of journaling to do. The lunch crowd came and went as I reviewed my pictures and wrote down the story of everything that has happened since the ninth — the day I drank three times in Xijiang. Eventually a yelling match got started across the street — it went on for a quite a while (backing down means losing face, so it doesn’t happen easily). I stuck around for half an hour after the writing was done, pondering — with too much caffeine in my brain — whether or not to order a pizze. I got up the get-go to get out and hunt down lunch elsewhere, but I didn’t find anything to satisfy my picky appetite, so I returned for the beef chili pizza with a bowl of yoghurt and after that a plate of fried noodles.

While working on the noodles, a woman whos family runs tours for backpackers introduced herself. We talk. I saw her book of notes left by previous travelers and eventually agreed to pay seventy yuan for a tour tomorrow with her son. We will rendezvous tomorrow morning at eight on a corner at the south end of Xi Jie.

After lunch I wandered around more, catching the very end of a tourist market on the riverside north of the main tourist downtown. I bought nearly ten USD in junk bracelets to wear and gift at Burning Man. The riverside was an excellent stroll. Chinese tourists — and a few foreigners, too — were swimming near the bank. Touts offered boat rides. Across the river Yangshou’s famous mountains were hazily silhouetted. I bought a new straw tourist cowboy hat; my Marlboro hat has a couple of points that poke painfully into my forehead. The new hat has Chinese characters on the red band in place the Marlboro brand name. I paid six yuan for the hat; my starting bid was five, and I held firm till six to let the hat seller save face by getting the win.

I spent four hours this afternoon and evening online. I had nearly gone to climb a nearby hill, but tomorrow’s bicycle tour is my designated local-sight-seeing time. I had a lot of transcribing to do at any rate.

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http://tom.spacing-guild.net/2006/09/07/enroute-to-shenzhen-august-12

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