Yangzi River to Nanning

(3/12/2006-15/12/2006)

Early in the morning of the first day the boat docked at the "Ghost City". Following everyone else up a steep hill we found ourselves in a pretty uninspiring restored temple complex. Once we came down again and took the left fork, we found where we should have gone: the "Ghost Palace". If anything this was even more ridiculously restored, but here there were cool demons , all the souvenir stores had Halloween masks, and inside there was a display like a much more over the top and expensive version of the Chengdu ghost house, although not as fun. We could also see some dark steps leading up to a closed off area that looked alot more interesting and old, but didn't have time to go up to see it. After that we spent the rest of the day drinking beer on the boat, until in the evening we arrived at a temple that had hilariously tacky neon lights adorning it. Back on the boat we were treated to the only film that they seemed to have, which played repeatedly throughout the voyage (when there wasn't any karaoke or tourism trailers): the Chow Yun Fat Hong Kong action classic, "God Of Gamblers' Return".

The next day was gorge day, the first of the three we saw from the main boat, then transferred to a smaller boat to see the Little Three Gorges, which were pretty impressive, although somewhat spoiled by the continuous (really, non-stop, except for when someone disconnected the speaker) high pitched sales chatter in Chinese. Unsurprisingly, we also had a couple of stops at places built specifically to sell tourist tat and you could if you like pay to have a bad photo taken of you at strategic spots. For the last part of this side expedition we were moved to small roofed boats 4 people wide, which meant those of us in the middle couldn't see anything, although apparently there were monkeys, and some Chinese guide chattered away and sang. The Chinese tourist experience was all pretty kitsch and tacky, but you had to laugh, otherwise you'd keep whinging constantly, like the two Irish women on the trip. They were right about alot of the things they complained about, but after a while it got pretty tiresome.

That was it for the day, and pretty much for the cruise. There were more gorges the next day, which we viewed from our room, but they weren't really that impressive. Maybe they were before they built the dam, or maybe I've been spoilt by seeing the Grand Canyon. Anyway, we could have paid to go and see the dam (which a Polish guy encouraged us to see as it is "one of the great engineering disasters of our time") but we decided to just get the bus to Yichang so we could find a hotel and get train tickets for the next day to the Zhangzhajie National Park. Yichang was nothing special, although we did get a great stir fry meal in the street for 4yuan. For both of us. That's about 13p each.

We travelled hard seat to Zhangzhajie City with the two Irish women, arriving at night and having to run the gauntlet of touts who wanted to take us on tours or hotels, but eventually found a hotel. Unfortunately, due to language problems, the girl at reception seemed to tell us that there was only one bus to the village where the park was and it left at 5.30 in the morning, when really there were loads of buses, it was the bus station that opened then. So we had to get up stupidly early to get the bus, and once in the village had to get rid of another load of touts by going to the most expensive hotel and asking them if there were cheaper ones. Luckily a young man working there wanted to practice his English, so phoned up the only other hotel open, then walked us over there, showed us the rooms and negotiated the price for us before going back to work!

Anyway, we then went and got our insanely overpriced (by Chinese standards) ticket, which we then had to be fingerprinted for to enter the park. If anyone wants to go there, don't bother paying, other than the main gates there didn't seem to be any fence stopping you just in, just don't get caught. The scenery was pretty spectacular though, despite the fog and drizzle which really only added to the effect, which was something very close to what you can see in many traditional Chinese paintings, making the huge great limestone pillars look more mysterious. As to be expected, there were some funny signs. One explaining how a particular rock looked like two turtles mating where "one raises its head gladly and the other bears the weight willingly, and you must remember that they are playing and touring" or something like that. Another we thought was a mistake as it claimed the path we were about to walk on was a "bodybuilding" path, but it turned out that this meant it featured stepping stones and other activities.

Later in the day we managed to get lost. After climbing up a bunch of steps, we assumed we could follow the road down, as we had no map, but it turned out that you couldn't. After much difficulty, and with the light fading, we found the only way down was to pay (again) to take a glass lift that they had built in the cliff face (only in China!), which did give as a good view. From the bottom we were told to take first one bus, and then another, but people must have misunderstood where we wanted to go, because we ended up in a different town to where our hotel was. The Irish women, convinced they had been cheated insisted on constantly banging on about this, rather than trying to find a way back. We tried the police, and again they kept repeating they'd been cheated, and when they called a taxi saying they would take us to the village for 100 yuan they decided the cops were trying to cheat us too.

Maybe they were, but we were then stuck in a strange town trying to flag someone down and explain to them where we wanted to go. Eventually a minivan stopped, and although they didn't speak English, they took us to the school where an English teacher could talk to us. It turned out that they were the school bus, and for 200 yuan they would take us where we wanted to go, which turned out to be a pretty fair price really, as they had to go along windy mountain roads in the dark and fog. The Irish women were still complaining, saying they would go to the customer complaints officer the next day or something, but me and Sally decided to lie in and then had a nice quite walk on our own in the park the next morning up and down a mountain (or "fantsatic mounpain" as the poster in the office in Chongqing had called them) before getting the bus back to the city where we had already booked our onward train. Without the women it was much more relaxing, and at the station we were befriended by three Chinese girls who studied English and were going on the same train, who then escorted us to our carriage before running down to the other end of the train to theirs.

As the train approached Guilin the next day, we noticed that the air was a bit clearer, and we could see in the distance the tall, mountain like karst formations the area is famous for, though not as thin as those we'd just seen in the park. From Guilin we got a bus to the little town of Yangshuo in amongst the mountains, the centre of which is a hilarious island of Western tourism. We managed to find a really good room with the most amazingly powerful shower (the Bamboo Inn's new building, if anyone plans to go there), then had pizza and some of the really bad local beer. It didn't taste too bad or strong, but after only a couple we both passed out and woke up with a horrible hangover.

We got up late, so after breakfast/lunch we decided to go for a walk along the river. As we passed through the town though, who should be coming in the other direct but Luca! After 10 minutes of surprised greetings, we let him go find somewhere to stay (he managed to get a bed in a drafty dorm for 10RMB) and continued our walk out of town to some fields and woods where a tiny woman was walking her water buffalo. In the evening we had dinner with Luca and then later in a bar a small boy came in trying to sell us flowers, so Luca gave him a piggyback and ran through the streets trying to sell people flowers.

The next day we went on a cookery course. First we were shown around the local market where they had various vegetables, meats and live fish. There was also an area where they killed and prepared dogs, which I refused to go to but Sally went and had a look. After that we were taken to a farm house where they taught us and 4 others how to cook five very tasty dishes that we then ate: stuffed pumpkin flower, tofu ball and mushroom; chicken with cashews and chili; beer fish (a local dish); aubergine; and green vegetable. We spent the afternoon climbing some of the hills in the park, which also included a "lotus pond" that was just covered in green stuff. We ran into Luca again who was looking for somewhere to warm his bones, apparently.

For our last day we went for another walk in the opposite direction to before, through small villages, fields, past some ruins, to an area where in peak season they did demonstrations of cormorant fishing but not when we were there, although the cormorant guy still posed for us, then along a bamboo lined path that didn't seem to see too many other tourists, up to some huge stadium lights aimed at the mountains on the other side of the river. To finish our stay in Yangshuo we tried to do some shopping, but couldn't get the price of the Mao bags down low enough or decide what else we wanted, so instead we had a party with Luca and the randoms he'd managed to collect around him.

Our final destination in China was to be Nanning, which we reached by a super luxury bus with only three seats in each row, passing more karst formations all the way through the province of Guangxi. Even though we arrived a bit after the Vietnamese Consulate was meant to close, they still let us put in our passports to get visas for Vietnam, which we picked up the following evening. Nanning was actually a pretty nice city. Not a lot for tourists to do, but it as nice and spacious to wander around, plenty of trees, wide avenues, a river through the middle with pleasant parks to walk in, and the air was much clearer than any of the other major Chinese cities I'd been in. We tried to do some shopping again, but here there wasn't any tourist tat, so we ended up just getting some more tea jars (plastic jars that you put your tea leaves in, then on trains or in hotels or anywhere with hot water you add it and there's a gauze thing to stop the leaves going in you mouth and the lids are watertight, so everyone has them) and food for our bus trip into Vietnam the next day. To round off our visit to China nicely, we found an all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet, which had pretty good food too. After that we went to bed, as the bus the next day left pretty early.