Yangshuo - "The Chinese - a great bunch of Lads"

16th January 2011

We've been in Yangshuo the last few days and it's a really nice spot but VERY cold. I'm really starting to like this place now and the Chinese beer isn't bad at all! Venture off the main tourist trap and a large bottle is yours for 6 Yuan (about a dollar). We were due to get a sleeper train to Xi'an by now but the travel agents were acting the prick about the trains so we looked up flights and got flights for the same price as a soft sleeper and the flight is 3 hours as opposed to 27 hours :).

We'll Yangshuo, a ginger tea is advisable for the cold here..and every little hovel of a Chinese restaurant has a bottle of Jameson & Bailey's! Yay for the Irish..This town is surrounded by limestone pinnacles that are breathtaking. The food is A1, we had a Sichuan Hotpot the other night, apparently enough to feed 2....there was enough food there to fill five John Doherty's! It was great, lots of fresh meat and vegetables in it and you cook it to your liking.

We took a bus out to Xingping where we were (thanks to the bus lady tipping them off) followed , correction stalked by a woman for about an hour trying to sell us a bamboo raft trip. We ended bamboo raft on the Li river after a bit of negotiation and saw the sights on our way back to Yangshuo, unfortunately the prick dropped us about 2 kilometres off the town, which we should have realised but no harm done it was a nice walk and we eventually found out how far away we were by getting a Chinese man to point on my watch how long it will take to get to the town, and he was bang on the 15 minutes away. 

We spent most of one day sorting out the logistical nightmare of getting to South America from Toyko, the handiest route (and cheapest) seems to be to Santiago, Chile via Canada with Canadian Airlines...so in the next few days we'll sort that out. Our ferry to Japan has been booked, hope we encounter no pirates! We met an Irish couple...[small world] in the mist of all the Chinese People who were just on the start on their trip (similar to ours) and on their way to New Zealand for the year, a nice pair we swapped travel hints over a cuppa.

 

As for the Chinese, so far I've found them to be a very social people, playing cards in the street, knitting together in a pub and they generally are always in company of other people. Even with the little English alot of them have they will do their best to help you with a few gestures, and a game of shirades it's easy to communicate and no where near as bad as what I expected. The food is the best out of all the Asian countries we've travelled so far. So as Father Ted once said: "The Chinese....A great bunch of lads"

As for 'The Great Firewall of China'... a multitude of sites are blocked (conventional methods) here: Youtube, Facebook, Blogger and Google works about 70% of the time! 

Tomorrow we're going to cycle the locality