Yangshuo and Back Again

Okay!  Sorry!  Sorry!  Sorry for the delay!  We are fine and happy and healthy.  I haven't written in a while just because we've been busy, and sorry for not e-mailing any of the family.  We spent about a week in Yangshuo and the wonderful thing about it, is that you really can just go there and fall off the face of the earth... which obviously, we did.

So like I said, we were in Yangshuo for about a week.  It's more or less been known as a backpacker's paradise, a popular place for climbers and a place of laid back, local feel.  Every year it becomes more and more commercialised and I think we made it just in time.  Along the road to the Yu Long, Moon Hill Cave, and the town of Xingping they are building three archways which are rumored to charge 80 RMB just to use the road.  It's the opinion of many travellers that this toll is going to ruin Yangshuo.  The reason people love it is because, like we did, you can just bike along the many roads, through the villages, go for a dip in the river, or just wander through the farm country.  With an 80 RMB toll, a lot of budget tourists, like ourselves, will be turned around.  Not to mention, that climbers are not exactly the wealthy amongst them all, and their reasons for visiting Yangshuo will be deterred as well.

That all being said, Darren and I really did love Yangshuo.  I think we rank it second (to Dali) of the Chinese towns we've visited.  We loved it for its laid back feel.  The first few days we were there it rained endlessly.  Our hostel was just outside the main city in a little farming village and the patio looked over a garden of sorts.  It was beautiful, but all that rain meant insane humidity and a lot of mosquitoes.  Darren and I both were bitten numerous times.  Being that the activities in Yangshuo are all outdoor, there wasn't much to do in the rain.  We were happy to do no more than stroll through town the first two days, and on the third day we decided to brave a bike ride.  Darren, myself and Hannah (an English teacher from NY/Oregon) got our bikes while it wasn't raining, and headed into some of the countryside.  Along the way, we met one of the many little old ladies selling flower crowns, and Hannah and I couldn't resist.  We rode around all day with our little crowns on.  It did begin to rain again though, and we did get quite drenched and muddy.  We had planned to make it all the way to the Dragon Bridge, but at one point, the rain got really bad, and we stopped under a tree, alongside a water buffalo, to figure out what we were going to do.  Darren had a strong urge to pet the bull, and despite my warnings he slowly ventured towards it, and sure enough, it planted its hooves and lowered its head and got its horns ready.  Thank goodness it was tied to a tree or Darren could've been in rough shape.  Ha ha ha.  It was wet, we were soaked, and back to our hostel we went.

That night, we ventured out on the town with a couple other people, had some dinner, watched the soccer game and found ourselves in a Chinese bar.  Wow!  That was an experience.  First of all, the Chinese music is terrible, and I don't just mean Chinese pop music, but the Chinese songs done to the tune of "If You're Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands".  Not only that, but the DJ would sing along and then randomly yell into the mic.  It was so loud and so ugly.  The best part of it though, was that every bar in Yangshuo seemed to have a pole.  That was funny.  Still not as funny as the full out hawaiian print outfits.  There were three guys in the bar wearing hawaiin shirts, two of which were also wearing matching shorts!  It was priceless.  They thought they were pretty hot too, and the dancing was fantastic!  It's not like the bars at home where all the girls dance and the guys watch from afar, too cool for school; no, these guys were going all out--dancing the night away.  There was also this one girl, wearing a shirt that said "Too much fun" and she would do this strange girating move around the pole.  She shook her whole body and somehow managed to move forward, spasming all the way.  It really did seem more like a seizure.  I think the person who enjoyed himself the most was Neil.  Him, the pole, and the guy who grabbed his but, all had a great night!

After the third day of straight rain, the sun eventually did come out and it came out strong (which didn't deter the bugs however).  It was HOT!  Very HOT!  We took our first chance to get on a "bamboo" (I put that in quotations because they're really just plastic pipes made to look like bamboo) raft and float down the river (and by float, I mean go upstream by motor).  What I should probably mention, is that the day before our hostel owner told us not to eat any pork.  Apparently there'd been some sort of disease going around and a lot of pigs were dying and ending up in the river (the Li River).  Sure enough, in the course of the hour and a half that we floated upstream, we saw so many pigs, belly up and bloated that we lost count.  We lost count around thirty and that was early on.  It got so bad that we had it down to a science.  We could roughly estimate how long they'd been in the water based on how bloated they were and how they floated (how much of the body was above the water and what direction the legs stuck out in).  Don't get me wrong, the karst mountains and scenery were beautiful and amazing, but it was hard to concentrate with dead pigs floating everywhere. 

The next day Darren and I rented a scooter one day (it was nice not to have to work up any more of a sweat than we had to) and headed through the country to the Moon Hill Cave.  It's a pretty cool mountain.  There is a crescent shaped archway in the top of the hill and apparently has over 20 or 30 climbing paths.  We didn't go all the way to the top of the archway (because we didn't know you could) but the trek to the archway itself was a scorcher.  It was about 20 minutes to a half hour up, and again down and Darren and I were both sweating fiercly.  I can't explain it, but that my shirt became a towel, a damp towel.  We were so hot and so sweaty that we decided to find ourselves a little spot to go swimming.  We took the scooters out to this great little spot by the river where they dock some of the bamboo rafts.  There was a couple there, the girl sitting under the tree while the guy was in his underwear diving off the rafts.  There was another guy, just sitting on the edge, cooling his feet in the water and sipping on some local beer (Liquan).  I wasn't prepared for a swim, but Darren went in for a dip, and after sitting on the raft, sweating bullets, I waited for the swarms of tourists floating by to subside, and I took off my shirt and jumped in as well.  It was so incredibly refreshing!  The river was quite clean and so cool.  It was so clean, that even though I accidentally swallowed a mouthful, I haven't caught any parasite or anything.

The next day was just as hot as the last, if not hotter, and we rented scooters again; Hannah and Margaret on one, and Darren and myself on another.  We got an early start and spent a good couple hours just sitting on the rafts and diving into the water.  It was really the perfect way to spend such a hot and humid afternoon.  Just to put things into perspective, it was so hot, that my hair would start to dry within minutes of getting out of the water and was almost completely dry after no more than ten minutes on the scooter.  After getting back, we headed to Gon's Noodles, a delicious local noodle place, and sat down for a late lunch.  We must've timed it perfectly because all of a sudden, the rain came coming down.  It was still super hot, but not it was super wet!  Thankfully, by the time we finished lunch, the rain was done too!  We headed back to the hostel and Hannah and I showered and got ready to go to a cooking class.  Darren didn't want to come, something about paying to learn to cook Chinese when his mother could teach him for free, but Hannah and I really enjoyed ourselves.  It was pretty fantastic actually.  They picked us up and did a tour through the market, teaching us about different vegetables and spices, and different meats.  At one point, our instructor pointed us to the part of the market where dogs sit in cages waiting to be butchered.  At this point I stayed with her and the vegetables, but from what I was told not only were there live dogs, but hanging pieces of butchered and skinned ones as well.  Bah!  On a lighter note, they took us to this quaint littler barnhouse in one of the smaller villages, set up and equipped for our cooking lesson.  We made pork (or in my case, chicken) stuffed vegetables (one pumpkin flower, one piece of fried tofu, a piece of eggplant, and a mushroom), cashew chicken, fried eggplant, Chinese spinach, and the local delicacy, beer fish.  It was all excellent and so much fun.  We all had our own chopping boards, our own clevers, and our own woks.  Hannah and I really enjoyed being able to cook again.

The rest of our time in Yangshuo was spent shopping and relaxing.  We went to the river and Gon's Noodles one more time, and before we knew it it was time to head back to Hong Kong.  We took a train to Shenzhen from Guilin (and from Shenzhen we took the MTR to Hong Kong).  As another side note, China is overall a very safe place, but it seems the only crime we did witness was in Guilin.  I already mentioned the pick pockets, but as we were walking to the train station, we also saw a very angry man throw his cell phone to the ground, get up and hit a woman across the face, twice.  Darren and I were so shocked we just stood there, frozen.  If someone does something like that back home, the general reaction is one of outrage and people call the police if not deal with it with their own form of justice.  In China though, people barely flinch.  It's not the custom to interfere and it seems that there's no exception.

Well, we're back in Hong Kong now and my first plans on coming here were to cook.  I wanted to cook some of the Western style foods I had been craving, and just generally cook food that didn't involve mass amounts of oil.  Go figure that the first thing I would cook was spaghetti and garlic bread.  I rarely make spaghetti at home and yet of all the things I have the opportunity to make, I make spaghetti.  It wasn't the best spaghetti in the world, but it was good.  That and salad.  It was so nice to have a good salad, with fresh vegetables.  The last salad I had in China, was lettuce, corn, onion and tomato.  The salad I made here, was lettuce, carrot, tomato, cucumber and dried cranberries!  Ooo, and my wonderful friend Laura (who's put us up for a few days) had la dinner party the night before, and so Darren and I were able to reep the leftovers!  She made grilled cheese sandwiches (with real cheddar!!!) , while we ate leftover Greek salad (which is the best kind), and she fed us cake and Doritos as well!  This afternoon, Darren was fortunate enough to have some marinated lamb skewers for lunch with fresh vegetables.

By the way, when we got to mainland China, it dawned on us just how different Hong Kong really is from China, and now that we're back in Hong Kong, the difference is only more apparent.  Everything in Hong Kong seems cleaner, even the people.  Not only that, but after two months of learning the language and counting on it to get by in our day to day, we suddenly can't use it anymore.  Laura was saying that Hong Kongers will actually give you dirty looks if you speak Mandarin and don't speak it well.  It's like reverse culture shock in some ways.  Our first day back in Hong Kong (where most of the people speak English) and we suddenly felt lost and unable to communicate.  I found myself repressing urges to speak in Mandarin.  Certain words and phrases had become a reflex and now we don't need them anymore (for those who don't know, in Hong Kong they speak Cantonese, which is pretty different from Mandarin). 

Anyway, from here, we're leaving for Bali and I can't wait to see what kind of food they have in store for us there.  Everyone we talk to raves about the food in SE Asia.  The satays, the curry... I'm really excited (to eat of course.  As if I starved in China which couldn't be further from the truth).  So it's to a whole new world once again, and like always, I'll try to keep everyone updated, but there's no telling what the internet access will be like on the beaches ;).  We are talking about getting a cell phone for SE Asia, so if I can't always update the blog, family, we will be able to call more often.

We may or may not have lunch with Tom and Rosemary tomorrow (Darren's cousins), and then it's Bon Voyage once again.  It's going to be very different and hopefully exciting!