Zhuhai Adventures

We were lucky with the weather yesterday, as today it has turned. It is cold and wet. We have not experienced these conditions in China as yet and it would be quite a pleasant novelty if we weren’t booked onto a 4 hour river trip.
It’s a very, very early start and we wait outside our hotel in the rain for our coach transfer to the boat. Never mind, we can get some shut eye on the way to the quay-side a 45-minute journey. Once on the bus, however, we are ‘assaulted’ by an extremely loud amplified tour guide, for the entire trip, in Chinese.
At the dock I lose my passport, it’s not in my bag, I took it out to show the bus driver…panic. Rob waits patiently, here it is, in a different pocket of my bag, relief.
We board one of 6 large cruise boats with hundreds of other tourists, this is the best way to get to Yangshuo, a town in the heart of this territory, and it is a famous and well-travelled sightseeing trip as the River Li cuts through the most spectacular parts of the Karst mountain terrain. We have a comfortable seat at a table on the highest deck of the boat, we share with a Chinese family and an English-speaking tour guide. Our boat is 4 star holding around 100 guests, buffet service is laid out in the centre of each cabin two up and two down and later a hot help-yourself lunch is served which is very nice.
The Li River is probably at its lowest at this point in the year, before the rainy season and following a hot summer. At times the Pilot has to guide the boat through a very small channel of deep water. All boats travel in convoy spaced out so that the river never feels crowded. At several points along the way, we come across small jetties where the electric bamboo boats take tourists on shorter trips to more targeted areas of the river.
The River Li winds majestically down through these spectacular mountains. A mile downstream from Guilin and we are out of town and cruising gently along. At times the banks are wide, gently sloping up to the feet of the mountains; then we can see people fishing, cattle grazing, and ad hoc campers. Once we are well underway, we are really in the wilds, apart from a narrow strip of bushes and phoenix-tail bamboo the cliffs rise sharply out of the river. The guide tells us: See the discoloration on this cliff face, this is called the fish cliff as it is shaped like a fish. Do you see the shapes in the rocks ahead? This is Nine horse mountain; they are the forms of nine horses look! All around us the mountains undulate up and down in pyramid shapes one after the other like the spines on the back of a sleeping dragon, and these are repeated for layer after layer into the far distance. Apart from the sheer cliffs all of these hills are wooded deep green with white slashes of rock face, limestone chimneys with crumbled pinnacles create incredible shapes amongst this vista. It is breath taking, well worth getting up early and rained-on to see.
At a particular point on the river bend we are urged up on deck. Here is the point where a painting on the Chinese 20-yuan bank note of this exact scenery can be clearly seen in the landscape. Everyone wants to get this angle of course and we meet a lovely family from New Zealand who lend us their bank note.
When we arrive in Yangzhou it is still raining, we find ourselves in a covered terrace full of stallholders selling pretty much anything and everything with pictures of the karst mountains on it. It’s impossible to find a Didi so we walk the 30 minutes to our hotel the Green Lotus, where we make a cup of green tea and dry off in comfort.
Rob sources us tickets for a spectacular and famous outdoor show that evening, Impression 3rd Sister Liu Show. Should we eat before or after the show? The hotel assures that they will be able to cater for us when we get back before 9pm.
Yangshuo is much smaller than Guilin, under half a million as compared to 5 million of the bigger city. It is in the heart of the karst mountains territory and lies alongside the Li River, which makes it a very popular tourist destination. At the centre of the town is West Street -full of restaurants, western boutiques as well as Chinese style stalls and decorative features. It has a much more artistic avant garde feel to it with many music venues and kooky bohemian bars.
Rob and I are walking out of town in the rain toward the mountains and riverside- it is dark and we feel quite adventurous. Once inside the show ground we find ourselves in a covered promenade featuring many differing musical groups, these are the warm-up act. A 10-metre-high woman is singing Cantonese Opera- what is she standing on? A small group of women musicians invite me onto their stage, we are the ‘Spice girls’ Rob quips. Then we are buying popcorn to stave off the hunger pangs and going through the turnstiles where we are handed a large rain poncho and helped to our seat in a massive auditorium. The show has been designed by Zhang Yi Mou the director of the Opening Performance of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The presentation involves 600 participants and happens at least 4 times a week. Many of the performers are the local inhabitants of Yangshou and it features the bamboo boat captains and school children as well as professional opera singers, musicians and dancers. The auditorium is built for an audience of 3,000 and it seems full to us. The majority of people here are with guided parties and there is a good mixture of international and Chinese faces.
We are facing a lake-sized bend in the river with a backdrop of karst mountains and forested areas to each side. The stages that appear throughout seem to be floated there as they appear and disappear with the participants.
It is not just raining now, it is pouring. I am nice and dry under my coat and poncho- but Rob who acquired a puddle on his lap manages to empty it onto his feet.
The backdrop lights up a huge karst mountain in many coloured lights and suddenly hundreds of characters in full make-up are crossing the lake. These are followed shortly by many bamboo boats dragging red cloths that rise and dip. Music is played over loudspeakers. It is such a spectacle. The designer plays with the light effects. The lights go out and appear only on the lake, then back to the mountains. The performers sing and dance. A giant moon cruises on to the water with a gracious solo dancer on board she gently manouevers around the moon creating balletic shapes. We are less impressed when a poor bullock is walked onto the stage by a ‘farmer’ looking like it would rather be in warm dry cattle shed. The grand finale includes hundreds of characters crisscrossing the lake on floating stages, they are all wearing some kind of costume that lights up and changes colour, we particularly like it when one person is glowing the wrong colour! They are walking very slowly and there are many of them. The rain becomes even heavier, whole groups are leaving the auditorium, but we manage to hold out until 5 minutes before the end.
We arrive back at the hotel with 15 minutes to spare but the hotel is not forthcoming, food has stopped, no room service, nothing. This is a huge 5-star hotel and they can only offer us a free bowl of porridge. We leave in disgust, back out into the rain and head for West Street where we find an Indian restaurant and have a feast.
The next morning is our second Wendy Wei tour day and we find Eric and Mr Li’An in the foyer waiting for us, Eric has brought our favourite longan fruits (which are a bit like Lychees) and lots of snacks for the journey, we love Eric! Today we are travelling by bamboo boat, hiking up two mountains and then on a cycling tour.
The ‘bamboo’ boats are really metal and plastic versions made to look like bamboo, an electric motor propels us. Rain has been predicted, but there is none and it stays this way for the whole day…we are blessed. Although we are cruising on the same river as we travelled along yesterday, it is quite a different journey. We can hear waves lapping, birds in the phoenix-tail bamboo and we are so close to the water that we can see how clear and clean this river is as fish flicker through the water weed beneath us. We are now gazing straight up the cliff faces and we have more time to take in the extraordinary shapes of the landscape. Eric sits silently behind and allows us to enjoy the peace and quiet and our boatman smiles and smokes at the rear of the boat. It is a lovely morning activity, which terminates at Nine Horse Fresco Hill.
Mr Li’An takes us to our next destination Xianggong mountain or husband hill. Eric explains that this is the site of a local legend, where a wife waited for her husband to return from battle and the mountain is the shape of her soldier husband’s army helmet. He advises that this is the destination for anyone wanting to take photos at sunrise. It is a steep climb and very busy. Concrete steps all the way lead to three tiered viewing platforms. At the top we jostle for space to take photos without lots of other tourists in the way to give the impression that we are the only ones there. Putao ancient town is down below hugging the sides of the river. The mountain has a fabulous vantage point over the Li River and a 360-degree view of the many, many karst mountains disappearing into the blue misty distance. It has the wow factor. We take photos and then just spend time gazing over the view and pondering on how wonderful our world is… ‘Hello World…Hello Fotherington -Tomas!’ Obscure allusion! Naturally we visit all three platforms and the restrooms before joining Mr Li’An in the car park below.
Before our next destination we head to a noodle bar in the small local town of Baisha. It is a slurping kind of meal and a very basic café. We get the feeling that it is Eric’s favourite as he eats heartily although Mr Li’An has gone elsewhere.
Mr Li’An is inching the car across a road that has steep drops either side, we are next to the Tortoise river and we are aiming for Cuiping Temple and Hill through the tiny and beautiful rural village of the same name.
Cuiping Temple was built in honour of a great Chinese warrior. Eric tries to emphasise how famous he is in China but it is lost on us, we nod politely. We start to climb the well-worn steep stone path. We are alone. The only sounds we can hear are the crowing of cockerels in this very isolated village and some engine noises from other rural activities.
At the top the view is very different from the panorama at Xianggong. It is a more gentle landscape, the karst mountains here seem softer, more equally spaced, with lush trees covering. The village below blends through the countryside very empathetically, with fields and paths following the curve of the Tortoise river and the pattern of the hills. Eric tells us, this is the place to take photos at sunset. There is a 360 degree panorama of hills and mountains, layer on layer reaching as far as we can see, each direction provides a different yet still beautiful view. We fall in love, this is our favourite spot. Rob and I spend some time designing a film-scape whereby an army enters the valley through a particular gap in the hills and sweeps majestically alongside the river into view on a large grassy plain…at sunset obviously. It also reminds me of the film set for Hobbiton in Lord of the Rings, or rather the New Zealand terrain- lush, green, wooded and majestic all at the same time. We linger a long time, and Eric doesn’t hurry us, he loves this view too. We take lots of serious photos and quite a few silly ones. Reluctantly we make our way down to Mr Li’An who will drive to our final destination for the bike ride.
Our particular section of the Yulong river runs through an area that seems to combine green tourism with a farming commune. We hop on a bike as soon as we arrive and set off following excellent bike paths alongside the river. Still surrounded by the beautiful karst mountains we are now riding amongst fields of rice, vegetables, flowers and fruit. Bamboo boats are giving tourists a more adventurous trip downstream over small weirs and gentle rapids. People are working in the fields and we do come across a small herd of cattle with a frisky calf that threatens to plough into our bikes. However, it all looks a bit staged, as these are also interspersed with tourist attractions, stalls, pleasure gardens, a children’s ride-on train and giant decorative teapots pretending to drain the river. It is a purpose-built tourist park with hotels and a campsite, but it is not crowded here at all and we are able to cycle for an hour enjoying the countryside in peace. It is a lot of fun and a great finish to our day. As we drive back to Yangshou it begins to rain and doesn’t stop until we leave on the bullet train the next day.