Yangshuo

After visiting the big cities of Xi'an and Guilin we were looking forward to moving on to Yangshuo, a small town (at least by Chinese scale) in southern China.



I was expecting a sleepy little village, but as it turned out about a million other tourists had had the same idea before us and we found ourselves in a Chinese equivalent of Torremolinos; the main street had shops selling everything from fake watches to t-shirts with "I'm Mental" printed on them. And of course there were bars around every corner offering English breakfast.



But even if the town was not very authentically Chinese, at least it was really beautiful; there is a river running through the town and all around are karst peaks rising almost vertically from the ground. The weather was also lovely and warm, so we thought this was a good place to chill out for a few days, and not do any temples or museums.



In Yangshuo we also bumped into Janne and Hilde from Norway, who we had met earlier in Beijing. We all went on a kayak tour on the Li River, which turned out to be a fantastic day. We paddled downstream for about 3 hours and stopped for lunch in a little village on the way.



In the village I got talking to a local woman who wanted to practice her English. She had a little handwritten book of phrases that visitors had taught her. My favourite phrase in the book was "Do you need opium and hookers?" I wondered what she thought that meant, but I didn't have the courage to ask - after all, there's a limit to how much opium and hookers you can get into a kayak.



After kayaking we happened to notice a sign "English teachers wanted" in Yangshuo. We thought that this might be a fun thing to do for a few weeks and went in and asked about the job possibilities. They seemed pretty interested in our services and we got ourselves an interview for the next day; they wanted us to teach a class and see how that went. So, there we were the next morning, standing in front of a class of Chinese students doing our best to get them focused on learning English and not on the fact that we are not married (this seemed unthinkable to them). We ended up teaching two classes, and we had a lot of fun doing it. The students were really nice and curious about us and where we came from. In the end we didn't stay on as teachers because the school was only able to offer us part-time positions, but we had a great time nevertheless.



The next day we went back to being tourists again. We rented bicycles and drove to another river nearby. There we got our bikes on a bamboo raft and sailed down the stream for a couple of hours. After the rafting we picked up our bikes and headed off to Moon Hill and the Water Cave.



Moon Hill is a semicircular hill that you can climb in about an hour. The day was very hot so the climb seemed pretty long but once we got on top of the moon the view was worth the sweat and tears.



The Water Cave was also a great experience. You take a boat to enter the cave through a small hole in a hill, but once you are inside you can get off the boat and walk around. The place was absolutely huge, I've never seen a cave that size, there were enormous stalagtites and stalagmites everywhere and little streams and pools here and there. We even got to go swimming in one of the pools, which was nicely refreshing after climbing the Moon Hill.



There would have been even more to do in Yangshuo but we felt that it was time to move on and head to the west. We are now back in Guilin, trying to find the best way to travel to Kunming, Lijiang and Dali in Yunnan province of China. But that's another story...