Guilin

With our visa running out and fixed dates in Hong Kong, we turned our journey south from Xi’an towards Guilin. Due to the distance between these two places we decided that a 27hr train journey was not a good use of time and instead would fly with Southern China Airline.

The journey into Guilin from the airport allowed us great views of this very special landscape. The land is flat except for the limestone towers that are dotted across the horizon. These towers are only a few hundred meters high and look like someone has sprinkled jelly tots randomly across the landscape. It is this scenery that draws people to this part of China and so we followed like sheep.

Guilin itself is not a great place. Its purpose is as a jumping off point to see the great sights around it with no real merits of its own. The town definitely had a English seaside town look about it, lots of concrete buildings built in the 1960‘s starting to decay and lots of neon however without the draw of a beach.

Our hostel was the usual fair close to all the action and this is the location I chose to teach Emma a new trick, burglary. Looking at the gap between the door frame and door, I bet Emma I could break into our room without using the key. Slipping a credit card between the gap in the door frame, the door suddenly sprang open. This method of opening the door turned out to be, ironically, easier than using the proper key!

With only one full day in Guilin we decided to take a bus tour into the mountains to see the terraced rice fields. Now I have seen some driving in my life and I have also been driven extremely quickly in all sorts of vehicles, so because of this it takes a lot to scare me but this bus driver was not right in the head. He overtook at high speed on blind bends and if something came along he would pull in and push whoever was on the inside out of the way. I have never seen a 50 seater coach drive as fast or as dangerously as this. Emma took the most sensible solution to the fear…..closed her eyes and went to sleep.

First stop of the tour was high in the mountains to see a village where some women with very long hair live (and when I say long I mean down to their feet). We were also told about this village that there was not much of a gene pool as they all had the same family name, obviously the cause for all the women having the same long hair trait. We didn’t think we should ask what other genetic abnormalities they had!

Next they dropped us further into the mountains at the bottom of a hill ready for the climb to the best view of the rice terraces. On the way up the tour guide took us to a restaurant for lunch where they served a local delicacy which is various food cooked inside bamboo on a fire. We ordered chicken, rice and an aubergine dish that was not cooked in the bamboo. The chicken once opened looked like they had take a whole chicken (skin, bone, sinew) and using a lot of pushing made it fit within the hollow section of the bamboo. Thanks to this interesting local delicacy I had my first bought of botulism for this trip (ok a dodgy stomach). Emma had sensibly kept to the vegetarian option.

As is the norm for trips where there is a small number of outnumbered westerners we started chatting to this nice English couple, Kevin and Chloe and very quickly realised that we had a lot in common. Not only had they landed and started their trip in Tokyo a few days before us, but had pretty much followed the same route as us through Japan and China for the last 6 weeks. And they were also going onto Yangzhou which was our next stop too. Also, they were from Chippenham which is where Emma‘s Dad grew up. After more talking we discovered that we will be doing the same route going forward however theirs is over a much longer time scale - circa 3 years!

Next stop: Yangzhou and a bit of well needed R&R