Longer note from Yangshuo

Hi friends,

Well, I don't know what Peter wrote in the short note since for some reason the computers around here let us post notes to our blog, but won't let us actually view the blog or our own past entries. It's actually been much harder to find internet access than we expected, though we've now found an internet bar on the upper level of some street buildings. We didn't notice it earlier because it has only a small sign saying "interet bar" and isn't on street level. It is a huge, cold space with about 75 computers, all occupied by people playing computer games, IMing, and watching movies in Chinese. Smoking is allowed, which means that breathing is fairly limited. In any event, it costs 2 yuan an hour (about 25 cents) and is allowing me to post a new entry.

Peter and I are having a fantastic time in Yangshuo. On a map, it is about 400km northwest of Hong Kong, and is near the larger city of Guilin. We arrived at 9 in the morning after our overnight bus trip from Shenzhen. Finding the bus in the first place was a bit of an experience. We made it through Chinese customs and immigration with no problem - they didn't even look at my bag, although I am carrying a banned work called Wild Swans with me. When we emerged onto the streets of Shenzhen, we had no idea which way to go. We showed our bus ticket to a policeman, who was immediately surrounded by at least 5 or 6 people talking loudly in Chinese and passing our ticket around. The policeman pointed out the direction and we set off, but we immediately followed by a middle-aged woman who grabbed my bag, pointed forward and started walking next to me, keeping hold of my bag. We tried saying no and walking faster, but she kept on for about a quarter mile, holding my bag with one hand and pointing to her mouth with the other. I was a little unnerved by her persistance and by the immediate immersion into China - unlike in Hong Kong, nothing in Shenzhen was in English.

At the bus station we encountered Chinese toilets for the first time. These are not fun. They consist of a hole in the ground over which you are supposed to squat. The bus stations ones were actually fairly upscale - they had tiled floors and a sort of porcelin cover to the hole, but no doors and of course no toilet paper. The bus didn't have a working toilet. The bus itself, though, was much better than expected - few people smoked on the bus and no one spat on the floor, which is apparently common in buses. We also had some help from friendly westerners in figuring out which bus was ours and learning some tips about bus travel and Yangshuo. Once the kung fu western and bad karoke were shut off, we even managed to get some sleep.

We were met by touts as we got off the bus who wanted to take us to their hotel. The nice Brit who showed us the bus and his girlfriend were taken in by one of these guys, they later told us. Luckily, a friendly Aussie named Brett who had given us some pointers on the bus and who has lived in Yangshuo for 11 months showed us to a place in town. It was a basic backpacker's hotel - fairly clean and very cheap ($5 a night) with a private bathroom (and western toilet), but it was freezing cold and smelled musty. I slept in 5 layers of clothing - pretty much most of what I have with me. Peter and I decided that we're willing to pay a little more than that for some basic comforts - like heat - and moved to a better place the next day.

One aspect of Yangshuo that I'm sure we will find throughout Southeast Asia that has taken some getting used to is touts and bargining. Every place has a tout - the hotels, restaurants, little shops, fruit stalls, scenic tours, bike rental places, etc. If you have bags with you you are hailed by constant "Hallo! Hallo! Would you like a room? Would you like a boat trip?" or calls to that effect. If you stop to look at a restaurant's menu or an item in a craft stall, someone rushes over within 15 seconds and entreats you to come in or buy something. At first I felt badly saying no to any of them, but stayed polite and said no with a smile, which is a good policy. Also, Peter and I both felt a little like we were playing a game without knowing any of the rules - we had no idea what a fair price is for anything, or even when you're supposed to bargin. We've begun to get a sense of how it all works, though. For example, we both needed hats one day before bicycling. Peter saw one claiming to be thinsulate in about 10 stalls. One stall man offered it to him for 35 yuan - Peter countered with 10 since he'd seen it everywhere and wasn't particularly attached to it. The man came down from 35 pretty quickly, but stopped at 15 or 20. We said no and started to walk away. After we went about 10 steps, the man called "hallo hallo! Ok, 10, ok." So that's how it seems to work - offer less than half and pretty much stick to your price, and walk away if you want them to go lower. Now that we have a better sense of pricing, it's pretty fun!

Yangshuo is a fun little town. Shops open up late and stay open late to accomodate tourists and big Chinese groups that come from Guilin for the afternoon and evening. There are many western style cafes and all offer everything under the moon, from pizza to omelets, apple crumble, and onion soup as well as many Chinese dishes. We've found a few places that we particularly like, and are friendly with a couple of the waitresses in one place called Drifters. It has pretty good food and is fairly warm, thanks to a bucket of charcoal that burns in the center of the small space. Despite what Peter wrote about our quickly getting tired of Chinese food, we've found a good balance here - western breakfast (omelet, oatmeal, or yogurt with fruit and museli), and a mix of Chinese and Western dishes for lunch and dinner.

The scenery around Yangshuo is amazing: straight out of a classic Chinse painting. The mountains are short and pointy, with trees and bushes growing out of them. Many look like a hairy green thumb from up close. From a distance, they fade into blue with a fantastic profile. The surrounding countryside is made up mostly of rice and vegetable paddies, with two rivers and many old towns. There are also fresh oranges and what we think are kumquats growing everywhere, which make pretty orange dots on the scene and also mean that all the cafes offer fresh-squeezed orange juice. We took two days to explore the area by bike. All the bikes are made by Giant, which made my bike at home, but these have no gear shift and dodgy brakes. It's only 20 yuan ($2.50) to rent two bikes for the whole day, though.

The first time we rented bikes we ran into Esther, who was touting her services as a local guide. At first we were inclined to just say no straight off and do it ourselves, but two things changed our mind. First, we got a bit lost in the town while walking around the day before, and found ourselves walking for a long stetch on a horribly busy road. The road had endless motorbikes, buses, put-put tractors on three wheels belching smoke, bicylces, and other general traffic. It was very clear that neither emmission control or strict traffic control has reached China, or at least not Yangshuo, and we had no interest in spending most of our ride on more busy streets. Second, Esther has cleverly asked all of her satisfied customers to write testimonials in little books she carries around. When she sees you, she asks where you are from, then pulls out her book and shows you notes from other people from your country. All of the notes praised her skills and were very complimentary, so we hired her for 60 yuan. We realize now that this was a very high price, and she accepted it immediately.

As promised, Esther took us on local paths. She is very funny, and speaks quite a bit of English that she's picked up through her work. She never went to school, since both her parents died in the Cultural Revolution, but she's managed to put two daughters through college and support a husband 21 years her senior through her guide work. We spent about three hours going to Moon Hill, a local sight of a moon shaped-erosion in one of the karst peaks. We arrived too late to climb it, which is usually the thing to do.

The next day, we hired Esther again to take us up the Yulong River to Dragon Bridge. The bridge is somewhere around 1000 years old, though we couldn't get an exact date. Along the way Esther stopped to show us a huge stone house with amazing woodwork but no roof. It used to be the home of a very rich man who had 4 wives. There were 4 large sections to the house, one for each wife. Now peasants occupy the whole thing, and there is a picture of Mao hung in a prominant place in the main room. When we got back from our ride, we decided to pay Esther 110 yuan (she just told us to pay her whatever we wanted to). In total for two days, we had given her 180 yuan. She was shocked, we think, looked very odd, and even tried to give 10 of the 110 yuan back. At first we thought we had offended her, but now we think that we gave her so much more than expected that she was taken aback. A guy we met the next day told us that he had asked a hotel manager in Shenzhen (a larger city with presumably better wages) what he earned, and learned that he earned 30 yuan a day, working 12 hours a day. That's about 30 cents an hour. Anyone in America would laugh if someone wanted to hire them for 30 cents an hour. What we paid Esther was probably more than a week's wages for her.

Esther arranged our day trips for the next two days. She sent us to her friends, who we assume gave her some percent of what we paid them. The first day we took a three hour bus trip to see rice terraces near Longsheng. Hopefully the picture we'll post on the blog will give you some sense of what we saw. The mountain minority people have spent centuries creating terraces on entire mountains as far as the eye can see from their village. One sign we saw along the way said that over 60km are terraced. The terraces are perfectly level and of nearly uniform height. It's winter, so most of them were brown, but many were filled with a layer of water which shines when you look at it from above. It was too bad not to see them green with rice, but on the other hand, it was easy to see the truth of Burton Singer's descriptions to my Woody Woo class of rice terraces as major mosquito breeding grounds during the warmer months.

In Longsheng, the touts were again prominent. This time, they were local women dressed up in traditional jackets. They met us off the bus with silver bracelets and embroidered bags, and proceeded to follow the group throughout the day. They kept their wares in baskets on their backs, and took them out to show them too us at every opportunity - during lunch, at all the viewpoints, along the walk through the terraces, and expecially at the end before we got back on the bus. The driver, who probably was getting a percentage of all of the end sales, made us wait at the bottom in the cold for over an hour until the women decided they had sold enough (or couldn't sell anything more). If you showed any interest at all in something, you were instantly surrounded by women all trying to get you to buy an identical thing from them. This was enough to discourage us from trying to buy anything. The one thing we wanted and would have bought, they didn't have: a written brochure describing what we were seeing, the history of the terraces, and the system of upkeep. No one really spoke English, so much of what we saw was awesome but very mysterious. We plan on doing some online research to learn more.

The second day we went to Xingping, which is on the Li River a bit north of here. We were to meet Esther's friend whose husband owned a small wooden boat for boat trips. Boat trips had been recommended to us as a great experience, and the scenery near Xingping was even more spectacular than it was in Yangshuo. On the way to the boat, Esther's friend pulled out a 20 yuan note and showed us the picture on the back: the scene was exactly the same as the view in front of us. The boat was beautifully made of wood; the people around here seem to be very skilled at woodcraft. We were joined by 5 Korean tourists and spent 2 hours cruising up the river and back down, very cold but enjoying the beautiful scenery all around. Even this trip, though, was not free of touts - the boat driver pulled up to a rocky stretch of land in a bend of the river, where some people were waiting with baskets filled with water and very pretty shaped rocks. I couldn't resist when two cute eight-year-olds followed us to where we were admiring the view, and bought a heart-shaped one.

We arranged with three of the Korean girls to meet them back in Yangshuo to see cormorant fishing at 7:30. This involved getting on a boat in Yangshuo and watching an old man in a boat with bright lights beside us fishing his cormorants. The birds take 120 days to train and are amazing fishers. They would dive beneath the water with a graceful flip, and, more often than not, emerge with a fish in their throats. The old man tied red string around their necks to keep them from swallowing. When they caught so many fish their throats were bulging, the man would pick them out of the water with his bamboo stick and make them spit up the fish. Someone told us that one good cormorant can feed an entire family with fish. On the whole, we thought they were getting a pretty rough deal.

Today we spent a lazy day in Yangshuo, catching up on sleep and reading. Wendy recommended my book Wild Swans, which is a fascinating true tale of three generation of women in China. Tomorrow we leave for Lijiang in Yunnan province.

Hmm, there's still no obvious way to post pictures at the moment, but we'll keep looking.

Hope all is well at home,
Love,
Meryl