Onto Some More Rocks

So the next morning, I got up and ready to go to Yangshuo. I went to the cafe area of the hostel and ordered a sandwich, which was disappointing in the way that Western food made in Asian hostels usually is. Ya Ya, the girl I had agreed to go to Yangshuo with, also got up at the right time . . . I think at about 9:30am we set out for a bus to Yangshuo. It would be a short ride, but I did my best to make it horrible by allowing her to continue to talk to me about Taiwan.

I tried to say no, but ultimately gave in, allowing her to be angry at me because I posed questions that challenged her basic logical framework for the establishment of Taiwan as a part of China as a whole that she couldn’t answer. Good times, right? So I read for the second half of the short ride, until we got to Yangshuo itself.

This was where we got dropped off:

Already it looked like it was going to be a step above Guilin, so that was nice.

I knew where it was that I wanted to go for the hostel . . . I think I had already made a reservation but I’m not totally sure. In any event, the directions were a bit weird, but we weren’t too worried about it. We walked straight down the main street of the town there, which granted was really commercialized:

but still small, and at the end of that was the river running through the area, called Lijiang, not to be confused with the town of Lijiang in the province of Yunnan that I visited in October. The hostel we were staying at was right next to that, just down a back alley.

We checked in, and I took my things to my dorm room, and Ya Ya found out she would be stuck in the same room, which was a first for her. At first she wasn’t too comfortable with the arrangement (it was an eight bed dorm room, mind you). I wasn’t too worried about it, though, and figured she could deal with it. So while she went through her little identity crisis, I went up to the roof. The name of the hostel, afterall, was Showbiz Rooftop Bar Hostel (or something like that), and took in the view. And man, what a view. Here’s some pictures from up top:

The next motion of business was to rent a couple of bicycles and get riding, again. Yangshuo is a pretty wide open area, so the roads are well suited to just getting out and going. We got a tourist map to check out some of the “tourist destinations”, or at least, special sights, and started heading in a direction.

Maybe an hour later, we found ourselves at Half Moon Hill, this attractive little place:

It looked nice enough, so we walked up it. There was a good set of stairs that took us to the base of the crescent . . . somewhere along the way, there was an old lady that tried to sell us postcards and cold drinks. She was really, really, old. Here’s a picture of her trying to sell stuff to YaYa.

She was nice enough, though, and she had an old journal with pictures of autographs and messages written in it from other travelers who had come that way, which was pretty interesting. There were tons, and tons of people who had written in it, actually, which was pretty impressive. She was quite thrilled to have so many “waiguo pengyou” (foreign friends). Ultimately, because she was so funny, I gave in and bought a couple of drinks from her. We walked around to the other side of this crescent place, and soon met some other people . . . two other Chinese youths, about our age, a guy and a girl, and a middle aged Dutch guy.

More pictures of that:

We all felt inclined to give the old lady a bit of cash, and afterwards decided we were all going to try to hike to the top of the crescent on a dirt path that technically was off limits. I was a bit nervous about this, because it was totally unprotected, and slippery, having just rained the day before. They all insisted though, and so I found myself leading the pack, giving a helping hand here and there for the girls in particular.

It really had some pretty scary parts that we had to climb through, where we could’ve easily slipped off and fallen 100 feet or more, but finally we got to the top. It had a pretty astounding view, and we took the chance to take it in, get in a bunch of pictures and relax after the slippery climb.

After that, we headed back down, and got on our bikes. From here, it was pretty much guaranteed that we had to head straight back to town, because the day was already getting darker; in fact, we sort of ran down the mountain to save time. We met a bunch of other foreigners, mostly American, at the bottom of the mountain, who were also on their way back to town; turns out they were in a program similar to the one I was doing in Shanghai, but in Hong Kong, and that they were also on a short vacation; they were even staying at the same hostel! So we all rode in tandem a bit, until something caught someone’s attention and the group split again, with us saying maybe we’d meet again later on.

The main thing was that we were supposed to get our bikes in by like 630 or 7, something like that, and we were at least an hour’s ride away from town, and it was already 530, so we WERE in a bit of a rush, although probably if we had returned them just a little bit late, it wouldn’t matter too much.

We had a fairly uneventful ride back, and didn’t do any other real sightseeing on the way. We got back into town just before sunset, and traded our bikes in. Yaya and I went back to the hostel, while the other two Chinese kids we had met headed somewhere else. We agreed to meet up later in the day for dinner, but at the time wanted to wash up after a day of biking and hiking.

Yaya and I also booked a rock climbing trip for the next day; after telling her my plans, she thought it sounded pretty interesting too, so I said she might as well come along if she didn’t mind spending the money. I think we had also talked to the other two Chinese people about it, the guy in particular seemed interested, and the girl he was with seemed reluctantly interested.

The rest of the night was pretty mellow. Another girl staying in the same room as Yaya and I, who actually we had also met in our previous hostel in Guilin, but took a different route to get to Yangshuo, came with us to dinner, so the five of us hung out for the rest of the night. At first, the guy, I forget his name, let’s call him Chris, wanted us to try what was called “beer fish”, a regional specialty, but when he took us to the beer fish restaurants, it was a dish that would cost like fifteen dollars a person, when really we were just looking for something that would be a dollar or two at most, so, we mutineed and forced a move to a cheaper Chinese restaurant nearby. The other girl, American, couldn’t speak or read Chinese at all, so just trusted us to order some thing for her.

The food was actually decent, and I was glad we had made the change over from the other place. Yaya had her first ever beer along with the food, which I guess was a shock for her. Later on, we moved to a couple of chill bars and just hung out while doing normal chill bar stuff, and I found a guitar that I could strum for a little while to pass some time, which was nice.

Yaya got wasted after one and a half drinks, and went off to talk to her brother on the phone for a little bit. I started to get worried after ten minutes had passed and she hadn’t come back, so I excused myself from the bar and started looking around the town for her. An hour later, I still couldn’t find her, and my mood had pretty much been ruined, so I didn’t rejoin the other people, and just went straight back to the hostel and sat at the top of the roof. Those other Americans I had met earlier in the day were there, and I talked to them briefly, but the merrymaking had been taken out of my predisposition at that point. At some point, the other American girl I had met in Guilin showed up, and told me that Ya Ya had found her way back to the dorm room and was sleeping peacefully. So I let it go for the time being, and had one more drink and some rounds of darts before heading to bed myself.

The next day, we got up early enough to go out on the rock climbing trip, and I found out Chris and the other Chinese girl had bailed out on the trip, so it was just YaYa and I after all. We were told which way to go, and went down a few streets to get to the storefront of this particular climbing group. There was going to be one main guide, an apprentice guide, and another lady from Hong Kong who had signed up to come out, so our group was five. Oh, plus a driver. So I guess that makes six. We signed forms, found what equipment would fit us best, then got ready to head out.

It was a short thirty minute ride or so to the location we were going to climb at, but from there we had to walk through some farms and such, to get to this location, which the main guide has named Swiss Cheese, owing to all the holes in it.

He actually has bolted most of the 50+ routes in this particular part of Yangshuo, and has been climbing in the area for maybe ten years, so he is definitely what I’d call an expert.

Over the next couple hours, we did a series of maybe 5 climbs each, something like that, and it felt pretty good. Unlike in Thailand, I was actually able to complete all the climbs, this time, which was nice. A couple of the climbs were just the right mixture of challenge, where it was possible for me to overcome, but not particularly easy to do so, at least at the strength and skill level I have at the moment. Towards the end, I was pretty tired, but did one last climb that was pretty simple just so I could take some photos from above. So here’s the photo montage!

After that, we trudged back through the farms, back through the itty bitty town the van was parked at, and drove back to Yangshuo proper. This night, I was supposed to be meeting with Chu Yang and Le Le, the two girls I had met previously at the caves of Guilin, so I was keeping in contact with them to try to coordinate that.

It seemed that they had been pretty tired from their own travels of the day, so were going to take a late afternoon rest; the most that could be done would be meeting up for a brief time afterwards at my hostel’s rooftop bar. Le Le, though, ended up being so tired that she only stayed for a short time, forcing Chu Yang to go back with her, quite early.

That didn’t leave much for this day, so Ya Ya and I met up again with the other two Chinese people we had met at the hill the previous day to relax for the rest of the night. That’s pretty much it for that day.

The next day was quite simple, since I had an afternoon train from Guilin to Shanghai to catch, which meant I had to leave Yangshuo at about noon to make sure I’d have enough time. I spent some time wandering along the river next to my hostel a bit, but the sights were ruined a little bit by the huge plastic Chinese tour boats going down it.

From there, I went back to Guilin, stopped by the hostel I had been at previously, just to see if the bike monitor had actually paid up, which of course he hadn’t, then sat for about half an hour to recharge my electronics before heading out yet again, to get to the nearby train station.

And so I started another day long train ride that would take me back to the daily life of Shanghai. It had been a nice pleasant diversion from school, excepting the experience with the bike thieves, but even that gave me an interesting glimpse into the legal side of life in China which I feel most visitors would not also be privy to.