YANGSHUO, GUANGXI
Pop 300,000
Famous for backpacking, limestone peaks and trips up/down the Li River.
We arrive by bus at 5am, stepping out into the bitter rainy darkness all we want to do is sleep.
Arriving when it's pitch black is one of my least favorite things when traveling. I love being at the touts mercy when I don't know East from West. And they know this too and don't give you a moment to think, or discuss what to do next.
Fine, fine, fine take us to your damn hotel, bend me over the counter and pound the dollars outta me, see if I give a lick. He makes us take a covered bicycle carriage to his hotel which is about a 5 minute walk. He himself walks and meets us there. Getting taken advantage of already, things are looking up. Oh well it's good for the local economy, after all wouldn't you help your brother out?
After he finds the right key we labour up 5 flights of stairs and introduces us to our 3 bed room. "This is all we have right now." He assures me, when people check out later this afternoon you can change rooms. I think the room is the same temperature as outside. How about heat? Turns out it's 30RMB extra. About 5 bucks Canadian. At least we have hot water.
We pay for 3 nights, 90RMB / night. $13 Cdn.
Turns out he's the manager and he starts into us immediately about how many days we want to stay and what kind of tours we want to go on. I look outside and say I'm not going anywhere unless that rain lets up. So you best come back when the sun is out, and it's 5am, can we please talk about this later?
He's back at 9am, and it's still raining.
He comes back at noon, and it's still raining, and the price is dropping substantially, and he's now making himself cozy on the corner of one of our three beds. And I'm still telling him that I'm not riding a bike or taking an overpriced ferry ride in the rain.
He calls my room a couple hours later and asked if we've made up our mind. I tell him yes I have, no thanks.
Not much to do in the rain so we buy some umbrellas and go for a walk down main street find a cafe, buy a coffee and check our mail. We find out that it's true, access to facebook, wikipedia and youtube is forbidden. Find out later that about 10% of all sites on the internet are a
ctually blocked.
The next day it stops raining for a couple of hours so we rent some bikes and drive into the country, starts raining turn around and go back.
We stay our three nights in the rain and move on. Never end up going on any treks.
And on our last day, the day we're leaving, wouldn't you know it, that big ball of burning fire came out to wish us off...
Back To Guilin...
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