Yangshuo is about an hour from Guilin and has amazing scenery with plenty of rivers and lakes. Yangshuo was China's first tourist town so everywhere you look there are stalls galore selling every type of souvenir available. The week we visited was China's National holiday which means the 1.4 billion people in China have a 7 day public holiday. The place was so packed with Chinese tourists with their latest gigantic cameras all taking pictures of everything it took us 45 minutes to walk 800 metres. Mental!!! We booked a cool little hostel off the main strip and unfortunately like the past couple of days have been, the heavens had opened up and it poured rain for two of the days. We were able to source some Western food thankfully after five weeks of Chinese food we needed a break!! Oh Chinese food is not at all like at home which is what we expected but we didn't expect rice, noodles and black eggs for breakfast!! Yes I did say black eggs oh they have a green yoke too!!!(Apparently a delicacy.......) So a bit of sweet and sour pork was much appreciated!!
We made our was along the river and the lakes which are stunning and again surrounded by those unusual limestone rock formations. We witnessed some local fishermen with their cormorants sitting on their bamboo rafts floating along the Li river. The fishermen use the birds to fish for them by restricting their throats with string so that when they catch any large fish they will get stuck in their throats and the fishermen pull the bird out of the water and take the fish out…..pretty cruel and kind of gross, the fishermen also seem to make a good living using the birds as a tourist attraction and for 50 cent the two birds will sit across your shoulders. We hit the town that night and took advantage of the local ‘Happy Hour’ offers with a bunch of Canadian teachers.
Nanling National Park
The National Park is in the Guangdong Province of China, and we arranged for it to be our last stop before leaving China for Hong Kong which is still Independent of China for the next 35 years.
To get to the National Forest we had to take an overnight sleeper bus which more resembled a prison cell for midgets as I could not fit in the aluminium beds (too narrow and too short), Sara had no such issues. (And I think the sleeping tablet helped). The bus brought us to Guangzhou where we stayed overnight before travelling on to Nanling on a local bus. The town at the entrance to the national park is tiny so food choices were very limited. Your choices are random fruits or....rice basically. For such a tiny village there is only one hotel so we had no choice where we stayed. In saying that the accommodation was lovely. We got to walk the trails through the park including a waterfall trek which was stunning, plus watch a poor game of rugby!
We were glad to get back to civilisation and find some normal food : ) We got the Express Train to Hong Kong on Sunday leaving China behind, whch was a little sad as we really did spend six amazing weeks here having some unreal experiences. China is rapidly growing and building new infrastructure which in some case is destroying the natural beauty. Our highlight was the Tiger Leaping Gorge Trek and apparently there is a hydro dam proposed for this area which will destroy the gorge. Our advice is if you plan to travel to China do it soon as it you will get the more authentic experience and it will be a lot cheaper as prices are rising dramatically. We had the most fun and unique experiences doing the tours ourselves because we met the local people and tried to make sense of the language to no avail. We had some hilarious conversations in Chinese (thanks to the phrase book).
On to Hong Kong and bye to China only 5 weeks left of travelling very scary because we will have to go back to the real world again!!
Hope all is well at home keep safe
Roy
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