After the program ending banquet on the night of the 27th, me, my friends Sara and Michelle (who also accompanied me on the trip to Zhongdian and Xi'an) and my friend Max caught a flight the next day for the beautiful karst geology of Guilin, in Guangxi province. It was kind of weird just up and leaving the hotel room I had lived in for four months, realizing that the staff would just clean it up as if I had never been there and put someone in there, maybe the next day. But I'm not big on goodbyes, I kind of just grabbed my stuff and hustled out of there.
A persistent feature of this trip was my stuff. I had calculated that it would be cheaper to pay airline excess baggage charges rather than to ship, but of course, the other side of that was that I had to lug my stuff on to airplanes, on to cabs, on to buses and trains. Not an easy task, and in fact, a persistent pain - a literal pain when my luggage began to leave bruises on my body. I had one giant American suitcase about the size of a medium refrigerator that ended up weighing an easy 30 kilograms. I also had to withstand every freakin' taxi driver in the country criticizing me for the size of my luggage as if it were a personal failing of mine. But I was right, it was cheaper. So there, I'm not an idiot. Yeah.
The two hour plane to Guilin was unbearably hot, or so I was told. I don't remember any of it, I knocked out as soon as I sat in my seat and barely woke up to get off the plane. Guilin's airport is very nice, evidently very new. From there, Michelle got us into a twenty rmb airport shuttle bus that would drop us off...somewhere. Near the train station, we assumed. We were uncomfortably wedged in with our luggage, the vast amount of which clearly irritated the driver and other passengers. The ride was so uncomfortable that Sarah declared on the bus that Guilin sucked. Once we got off the bus, we were immediately swarmed by a mob of desperate touts who wouldn't take no for an answer. We took our insanely heavy baggage, which probably shouldn't be moved by anyone on foot for any period of time, and walked in the vague direction of a hostel, until Sarah found a tout who got us a good deal on the "o'clock room" at a fairly anonymous hotel near the train station. That was only the first of the many "o' clock rooms" we stayed at during this trip. They usually have hourly rates, and it was clear from seeing couple who avoided eye contact with us in the hotel hallways what they're usually used for. Whatever, cheap and clean enough.
Touts in China are funny. Some of them are definitely trying to rip you off (especially the one in the big cities), but the other ones, the vast majority, are just trying to make a little money and often do actually have the best deals. It goes along with how most capitalist ventures in China are generally highly informal. We used touts twice on this trip, and did pretty well on both occasions. Our tout in Guilin was a woman who basically just looked like someone's grandma, and as suspicious as I was of her, we used her to find a hotel and to book a tour, and she helped us out and didn't screw us over. So bravo to you, grandma tout.
Once we got settled, we started walking in Guilin, and found a place that looked basically good enough and sat down for dinner. We ate like kings in Guilin. At this place (which had a woman dressed in traditional clothing playing the gucheng...fabulous!), we had probably one of the best meals I had in all of China. Delicious roast goose, perfect Japanese tofu, killer eggplant and a marvelous local specialty, Guilin rice noodles, that have this wonderful chewy consistency...really the kind of meal I'll miss here in the states. After that, we walked Guilin for a while.
Guilin is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the nicest cities in China, and definitely the most pedestrian friendly. Fairly laid back and not overwhelmingly huge, with lovely parks and European style cafes that line the rivers that run through Guilin, all surrounded by dreamlike limestone peaks shrouded in mist. I felt like I was in a European city, and for once in a Chinese city, I enjoyed just walking around, especially along the banks of the lovely Li river. We finished the night with a beer in a cafe on the banks of the river, and then called it a night and prepared to see the various sights of Guilin in the morning.
The next morning, under my bold leadership (I had the guide book), we took off for Seven Star Park on the other side of the Li. Guilin is just one of those amazing Chinese cities that seem to have been plopped down in the middle of unbelievable geography, so sheer limestone cliffs and peaks rise right out of city avenues and around apartment blocks. The Seven Star Park is especially lovely, seven peaks in a beautiful, obviously newly renovated park, with clear signs for once. As soon as we walked in, we saw, to our surprise, that there was a zoo with pandas in it, which was great because Michelle and I had yet to see a panda in China. We tromped through a typically depressing Chinese zoo (concrete enclosures with iron bars, filthy animals going crazy, people actually petting a bactrian camel...), and wandered around for a while before we finally found the pandas, in a fairly grim enclosure that could only be viewed in the panda gift shop. The panda didn't look too clean, or too healthy, and was asleep for the ten minutes we saw it. Pretty fantastic animal, if not the most exciting thing in the world. I liked watching the little Chinese kids brought by their parents to look at the panda. But overall, pretty depressing.
After that, we walked over to Seven Star Cave, a series of caverns under one of the big mountains. The entrance to the cave, typically, had giant graffiti from the Cultural Revolution: "The Chinese Communist Party is the guide and benefactor of the Chinese people"). Also, the cave had sets of cheesy colored lights that could only be activated by a tour guide, but were also the only way you could see a lot of the formations, so we had to stick with the Chinese tour. It's strange to me the way that the Chinese seem to need tour guides to explain everything to them. Even when they're looking at natural beauty, they seem to need somebody to say, this is something worth looking at, this is important because it looks like this, etc. But me personally, I had never really been in a cave, so it was still pretty impressive, beyond all the cheese. Seven Star cave is really big too, and has several fantastic formations. I was impressed, in any case.
From there, we visited one last peak, Solitary Beauty Peak, a sheer outcropping with an almost vertical cliff facing, and insanely steep steps that Sun Yatsen apparently climbed by night in 1923. After huffing and puffing on the way to the top, we took a breather and took in the fantastic views of Guilin, a modern looking city surrounded by these dreamlike, unearthly peaks. It is just so hard to believe that places like Guilin exist, but there are just so many of those places in China. After we came down from the mountain, we booked our tour of the Li river with Grandma Tout (actually, Michelle booked it. I'm glad I traveled with the girls, because although I can negotiate in Mandarin if I really have to, I usually can't be bothered). Then, we went to have another Guilin specialty: beer fish, fish marinated in beer and cooked in a skillet right on your table, good stuff.
We then went to a shady webbar and planned the rest of the trip. It was Sarah and Max's plan to just kind of go with the flow and plan things as we went along, which of course, unnerved me to bits, but I kept my mouth shut, and in any case, things more or less worked out. We quickly figured out that we wouldn't be able to visit Wudang Shan and get to Shanghai on time, and so we played a funny game of seeing if there was any point in between Guilin and Nanjing that would be of any interest at all to us. Finally, Sarah found a cheap air fare from Guangzhou to Nanjing (really cheap...around 35 dollars American), so we figured we'd take a night bus from Guilin to Guangzhou, hang in Guangzhou for a day or two, and then fly up to Nanjing. Which is what we did.
We ended the night with a trip to a club in Guilin. Chinese clubs are ridiculous. Part of it is because I never go to clubs in the States, and I tend to think clubs are inherently ridiculous to begin with. But there's something about Chinese clubs...just the way that they're all sort of the same and all over the top and nuts, loud as hell, filled with scantily clad dancers and singers, just the desperate aping of Western conventions. The nightclub in Guilin was notable because it had the worst DJs I have ever seen anywhere, two guys on CDJs who were so incapable of mixing that they just used the submerge effect between every single song, as if to trick us into thinking that they mixed the songs. Also, they played Aaron Carter, "The Time I Beat Shaq". Even the group of Chinese B-Boys, who were desperately trying to keep the party up, left in the end. Also, we saw a three year old running around the club for some reason, I guess the whole family decided to go to the club. It was really bad, but I had fun, anyway.
We got up early in the morning and rushed desperately to get our stuff behind the counter and catch the bus for our cruise down the Li river to Yangshuo. I still think I left my cell phone charger there. Chinese tours are a little nerveracking because you're never quite sure what the procedure is, and if you've explained yourself clearly to the touts and to the tour guides.We could only hope and pray that we'd get on a boat and somehow get back to Guilin in time for our night bus to Guangzhou. Somehow, somehow, we did get on a boat and spent four hours sailing down the Li river. I'm really glad we did that trip: the karst topography that lines the banks of the Li is simply unbelievable, just amazing, and not quite real. It's crazy to see people live in the shadows of giant, towering limestone peaks, as if that were a normal place to live. At one point, the boat seemed to head for a collision course with a small reed raft, but actually, it was a scheme by the guys on the raft to almost collide with the boat in order to pull along side the boat and sell us trinkets. Easier way to make a living, guys. Of course, the boat owners had to blare at us through a loudspeaker half the time, selling tourist photos and other trinkets and explaining just which rock looked like a donkey and why. Also, we fell asleep for the last hour since we were tired from the previous night, earning laughs from our neighbors. The boats were nice little tourist ferries (think nicer circle line boats) with a giant wok in the back, where they made us a half decent lunch. Very nice morning overall, recommended to anyone who visits.
Yangshuo the town was also nice. It's even more romantic and insanely placed then Guilin, an old town very literally built among a set of limestone peaks. Also, it had pizza. We walked along the river, and then shopped in the old town, and then I had a bad chocolate milkshake and a burger that had shao kao spices. Kinda weird but also kind of good. After we found out that our return bus was running late, we took the always fun Chinese option of jumping on a bus that was heading in our direction for fifteen kuai. We watched a great, strange movie on the bus about Jackie Chan landing in jail and then killing people for some reason.
Once we got back, Max and I traded in our tickets for the more comfortable sleeper bus, and quickly went and grabbed our luggage, which was more of an ordeal than you might imagine. They had given us the wrong check tag for our bags, and the fact that Max had his ID on him that matched the name on the bag and that we were the only damn white guests that hotel had probably ever had, it took way too long to convince them that those were in fact our bags. From there, I had to argue with the cab drivers to get them to agree to take our bags to the bus station (at one point, one driver actually started mocking me). Finally, one agreed, and we got to the station, where Sarah and Michelle came with ten minutes to spare to give us one last bowl of Guilin mifen. Then, with a panic and full hands, we rushed onto a bus.
The sleeper bus was mostly fun, and kind of nice. I sleep like a baby on buses, especially when I'm in a bed. Of course, the ride was not without problems. My iPod gave out, and for a few hours, there was a constant beeping from some mechanical alert that threatened to keep me up and drive me insane. A few times during the trip, the Cantonese men seated near me answered their cell phones and seemed only able to scream their reply to their friends and loved ones. When we arrived, our luggage was trapped for about a half an hour as the driver and a mechanic with a cigarette clenched between his teeth (even when working near the gas tank) worked to wedge open the door.
But it was worth it all to travel through the Guangxi karst at night. At night time, those giant limestone humps become even more surreal and dreamlike. It made me think that although we love to call landscapes like that unearthly, all the most unearthly places are really here, on earth. This is a hell of a planet, at the end of the day.
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