From where I left off last blog post we took a mini-bus from Dali to Lijiang with all of the friendly locals and about 10 massive bags of Garlic and other produce that filled up aisles of the bus both with their size and their smell! We helpfully got dropped off just outside the Old Town where our hostel was located. Unfortunately we didn't know this and had no idea where we were so we got lost for an hour in the maze of unnamed streets and markets!
Lijiang is full of picturesque old style buildings, streets divided up by canals and thousands of tacky souvenir shops all selling the same things. As with a lot of China to renovate anything with history it is first knocked down and then rebuilt in the same style, such is true of Lijiang's Old Town 'renovation'. We had a nice time wandering the pretty streets and we visited the Black Dragon Pool Park which gives a good view of the nearby Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.
From Lijiang we crossed the width of China to get to Guilin. This involved an 8 hour day train journey to Kunming where we stayed one night and the next day a 17 hour sleeper train journey to Guilin.
For me Guilin was disappointing. We'd heard that this is the place all the Chinese tourists love best to visit in China for its riverside setting and beautiful Limestone Karsts combined with a wild nightlife and a plentiful selection of Karaoke joints! They love nothing more! What we found was lots of rain and a big city with a brown river. We saw the Sun and Moon Pagodas which were nice in their lake setting and we also went to the Seven Stars Park which had a hill that looked like a Camel.
Yangshuo, which is an hour away by bus, was much more like what I was imagining Guilin to be. The place is tiny! Limestone Karsts surround you at every turn, frequently enshrouded by mist as they rise up into the sky. It's rained everyday but we've managed to enjoy ourselves with a Li River cruise on a 'bamboo' (plastic) raft, a visit to the 'real' Water Cave (there are many fakes!...) and a night out to see a show where the stage is the river!
On the raft, made of plastic pipes but called a bamboo raft (see Flickr for pictures) we travelled along the Li River from Yangdi down to XingPing (where the picture on the back of the 20 Yuan note comes from) with the aid of a local woman and a tiny propeller! We certainly got good views from the river and luckily the rain held off for our entire trip!
The Watercave was very impressive once we'd squeezed through the tiny entrance way, bent double in our little boat. We got shown around the cave by a guide, offered a mud bath which seemed to be dirty water rather than mud and the chance to try out the recently discovered geothermal pools, although more like recently installed plumbing…
Last night we went to the Impression Liu Sanjie show on the river. This show was directed by the same man who choreographed the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony and directed both of the popular Chinese movies 'Hero' and 'House of Flying Daggers'. It was quite amazing to watch over 400 local fishermen and performers take to the river and put on such a dazzling display of colour, light and music. Long strips of red ribbon were raised and lowered in time to music to give the effect of waves. Torches lit up the river like stars and someone even danced on the Moon!
Tonight we catch a sleeper bus from Yangshuo to Shenzen which is a city that borders with Hong Kong. This will be a new experience for us but from the pictures we've seen the bus has three lengthways rows of tiny horizontal beds. Bright and early tomorrow morning we should be off the bus and trying to find out how to cross the border… Assuming everything goes well we'll then be spending three outrageously expensive nights in Hong Kong! £11 per person per night for a box room! Our cheapest room in China was £1 per person per night – admittedly it was also our worst...
Wish us luck!
Chris & Kat. xxx
No comments:
Post a Comment