Pete & Rach's Big Trip: Yangshuo: 28 Sep

Walking in the beautiful Chinese countryside

Rach says:

The 24 hour journey to Yangshuo was to be the most epic of our journeys so far and we weren't looking forward to it. Also for some reason, my backpack was causing me some serious shoulder pain. But it turned out to be not so bad...as ever, it was nice to sit down and do nothing! Each leg of the journey seemed to pass in a manageable chunk. The flight to Greece will feel like nothing after this trip!

Our rural retreat for 10 days was the Outside Inn, an old converted mudbrick farm in the heart of the Chinese countryside, owned by Ronald from the Netherlands. I fell in love with the landscape as soon as I saw it...beautiful green and rocky karsts against a pure blue sky, lush rice paddies and lots of farmers, buffalos and chickens! We enjoyed our stay so much - it was really relaxing and felt like a proper holiday place. Good food, friendly staff and lots and lots of sleep to help me get over my illness. We borrowed DVDs to watch in the evenings, read books and caught up with our journals as well as walking and cycling to local villages.

On our first night there was a party to celebrate 10 years of the Outside Inn. We seem to have a knack for arriving at party time (Chengdu dumpling party...Wudang Moon Festival). There was lots of delicious food and lots of free drinks. Ronald and his friends sang and played the guitar - lots of blues, Beatles and Bowie - yay! Was a great night, mainly attended by local expats.

We took a long hot bike ride to a local beauty spot known as 'Moon Hill' due to a huge semi-circular hole at the summit. There were 800 sweaty steps to climb, leading us to one conclusion: if Moon Hill has 800 steps, Wudang must have had more like 8000! And not the rumoured 3000. As ever, throughout the hills and mountains of China, there was an 80-ish year old woman climbing up and down the steep and uneven steps all day - in the intense heat and humidity - all whilst laden with heavy baskets of drinks for sale. I don't know how they do it, though I know it's out of necessity. Our old people can barely get out of their armchairs to go to the toilet! Due to the over-ambitious nature of the day's trip (neither of us having ridden a bike for 10 years) we got a tuk tuk back. They drive like the blazes and we experienced not one, but two little bumps. One involving a scooter that saw my hired bike smash to the ground :-( Luckily we managed to bend all the bits back into place.

China is the country where I have seen the greatest contrast between rich and poor. Glitzy designer malls, Lambourghini and Bentley showrooms in the cities; tumbledown houses in the towns and villages around Yangshuo. Standard living conditions, whether old, or new and half built, is a bare concrete room with a few plastic chairs or wooden bench, the occasional fridge, always a TV (strangely) and the main light coming from the wooden front doors, which were left open giving us a view of the families gathered around eating and playing cards. Toilets are shared between the villagers and water comes from a well (or the river). We continued to be amazed that the most prominent feature of these drab unfurnished rooms was a large and colourful portrait of Mao. Many of the older people here will never have heard anything contrary to the fact he is a hero and probably know little of the world outside their own village. We also saw loads of old communist slogans painted in huge red hanzi on the walls around the area, which I thought was quite interesting. I wish I could have understood what they said. Many of the villagers supplemented their farming incomes by running a small shop (I say 'shop', more of a small cabinet) in front of their homes selling a very small and often peculiar selection of goods :-)

Wildlife we witnessed in Yangshuo...a wild stick insect, huge butterflies as big as your hand that would fly into your face, a massive spider, and Pete had a giant cockroach run across his face in the night a.k.a The Roach Incident.

Arriving in Yangshuo

Yangshuo town

Fields across the road from our hotel

The perfect Chinese farmland scene

We were invited in to an old lady's house to
look around and take photos (for a small donation)

On the bike ride to Moon Hill

Bamboo Rafting is the most popular activity in Yangshuo. You can't
walk for more than a few metres without hearing shouts of "Bamboo,
bamboo?" We passed on the option - with it being Chinese National
Holiday week, we couldn't find it cheaper than 30 pounds!