Easy Riders: April 2012

Wednesday 25 April 2012

Three weeks in Guilin

The enforced three week stay in Guilin has given us the opportunity to have a good rest. Mike has given the bikes some maintenance and Heather has been able to resume work on the blog because Jamie from England, who lives here at the hostel while he teaches English at a local school, has a program which bypasses the ban on blogs. This has been great, only trouble is the internet is so slow it takes ages to get anything on. The weather is overcast but not cold, it rains most days but on the whole not very much.

Guilin is a small city of 800,000 people, it is used as a stop off point for people on their way to Yangshou, the limestone structures can be seen from anywhere you go here. We have been able to catch a “stairs” bus( double decker) to get around but we walk most of the time as a change from riding. Apart from people staying at the hostel there are no other non Chinese people here and people find us interesting to look at. We visited a large park here which is well kept with lovely gardens, a couple of waterfalls, wild monkeys and a monastery. There was a lookout which we climbed and from there we had a good view of the city below. While we were walking around on two occasions women stopped Mike to comment on his hairy arms and legs. In Vietnam it was tan, here it is body hair. We are used to entering parks for free but very few parks here are free, there is a charge most times except for small public spaces.

We have been able to find good street food nearby, they treat us like locals and we have been good customers. Noodles are made by hand while you wait and it is fascinating to watch the dough being twisted, thrown, banged and finally pulled into long strings before being thrown in the pot.

Our visas are due for renewal and Guilin is a place which is able to issue them. We were hoping for a three month extension but they have told us this is not possible, one month only with one other one month extension possible. We need to be in Beijing when the second extension expires, which will be 18^th June, we will have to leave the country and re enter with a new visas and the one month extensions start all over again. We will have to pedal very fast to get to Beijing in time and hope that the weather suits us, that neither of us get ill and that the hills are not too big. If not, we will have to just catch a train or bus.

Nearby is the Dragonbackbone Rice Terraces and we were lucky enough to time our trip there on a clear day. Only two days in the past month has been rain free, people coming back had told us how disappointed they were as the mist prevented them from seeing much. We went with a group of eight other people in a minibus and walked for hours along paths which took us along the terraces which were 400 years in the making. Up and down the mountains we walked, stopping for lunch at a café run by local ethnic minority women in traditional dress, the meal was not very appetizing but the rest of the day was fantastic. We took a wrong turn as the paths were badly signposted and ending up walking further than we had intended, we were late getting back to the bus but the driver waited for us and was very good humoured about it.

Three weeks in Guilin

Lots of alleyways in most Chinese cities and towns

The rain and the mist added a mysterious feel to the Li River as we rode on a bamboo raft

Riding Through the countyside of Longshou

A Bamboo Raft on the Li River, Yongshou

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Pavement restaurant in Lipu

Mending punctures

We passed through small villages

We met these Chinese riders on the street at Liuzhou

Monday 16 April 2012

Riding with the Chinese boys from Liuzhou to Guilin

We met three Chinese men in the street in Liuzhou and they invited us to ride with them to Guilin. It was so much easier to find food, accommodation and the right road to travel on because we were with people who speak the local language. Only one, Karl, spoke English and he interpreted for the other two. The men met one another by chance and joined up, two have a year off and are planning to ride to Tibet, the other has a month off and must go home after we reach Guilin. As we left Liuzhou Karl insisted we try the local Liuzhou noodles, they were very spicy but nice. Karl had us trying whatever the local food specialty was in the area we were in all the time we were with him including beer fish in Yangshou.

It took us a long time to ride out of Liuzhou as the suburbs stretched out for quite a way, suburb after suburb but then we were in typical countryside with farms as we rode up and down hills all day. About lunchtime two of the boys had punctures so they mended them while we ate at a market which we would never have found on our own, freshly cooked dumpling soup and a spicy noodle dish. We have been eating well in China, even better since riding with locals. It was a long day, 146 kms and we were all exhausted and glad to get in to Lipu. Our travelling companions soon found a budget hotel and asked where we could find somewhere to eat, before long we were all sitting down to an array of food in a street café. We have not had to look at a map, search for food, or seek out accommodation all day.
We reached the 7,000 klms milestone today

The next day we only had 50 klms to ride to Yanshuo, a beautiful small tourist town surrounded by dramatic karst landscape and the Li River. The towering leafy limestone peaks must number in the hundreds and dominate the skyline everywhere we look and are popular with rock climbers. Unfortunately we arrived during a three day holiday and there were people everywhere, looking up the street was like being in a Moomba crowd. While travelling through South East Asian the only tourists were foreigners, but here they were mainly Chinese out numbering foreigners about fifty to one. This made accommodation expensive. We booked in to a hotel but our travelling companions decided to camp. Unfortunately this was a bad decision for them as they were robbed overnight. The next day the holiday was over and many Chinese had to go back to work making accommodation cheaper and easier, with the help of the Lonely Planet we found a hotel we could all afford. Mr Wei, the owner, also cooked an evening meal which was served at 6.pm, with nine of us at the table from five countries the conversation was lively and we didn't get up from the table util 10 pm. While we were in Yangshou we rode around the small villages nearby which were farming communities, went on a trip up the Li River on a bamboo raft, the first quote we got for this trip was 100yuan each but after much discussion Houton, one of th Chinese got the price down to 52 yuan each, ate both local and western food and wandered around the touristy streets and enjoyed the lovely scenery. Many people hired bikes to get around and the scene was what we had expected China to be like, everyone on bikes. We also saw cormorants who fish on the river.
Riding with our Chinese companions for the last time, we rode 70 klm ride to Guilin in the rain where we booked into a hostel for the first time. The hostel was been a good experience, while not the cheapest place to stay, the friendly atmosphere and the social aspect of a lounge room with a pool table and bar certainly made our stay. We met a lovely Irish couple, Loius and Mary Rose, about our age, who are on a six month holiday including a cruise on the Queen Mary and they always stay in hostels because of the social aspect.

Unfortunately Heather’s shoulder has not healed as it should and required a trip to the local hospital, one that was allowed to treat foreigners, resulting in some injections into the shoulder and instructions not to ride for two weeks. This has upset our plans, but at least we were in a city where accommodation and food is good.

Our Chinese friends left to follow their own paths. They were great travelling companions, even if they did laugh at the way we used chopsticks. Like most Chinese people we have met, they felt they had to look after us because we were foreigners. Before they left we went out to a restaurant for dinner which was amazing. The food was set out like a smorgasboard, there was a great variety of food to choose from, we wandered around picking out what we wanted which was noted on a slip indicating what we had to pay and the food was already on our table when we returned. We sat down to fourteen dishes to share. We tried many new dishes, some we liked, some we didn’t.

Ethnic minority groups keep their culture alive by performing in public spaces

High rise appartments being built in every city

A chair lift gave us a good view of the city of Liuzhou

Advertising - seen on many walls

Wednesday 11 April 2012

Our escorts in Binyang

A very basic ute

Spring planting happening everywhere- the haze is pollution

Rural and city life are worlds apart

This woman invited us into the kitchen to see her cook our meal

Nanning to Liuzhou, Quangxi Provence

Nanning to Liuzhou

China is very picturesque with mountains and every inch in cultivation, farm workers in the fields doing everything by hand, ploughing, weeding, planting. The roads improved greatly after Nanning, except for occasional road works, and we rode up and down hills all day every day. We had to leave the main road when we got to a freeway and rode along a quite rural road through forests and the timber industry. We were stopped by some workmen who were interested in what we were doing and particularly the bikes. Everywhere we go the men are interested in the bikes. Even with the language barrier with the aid of maps they uderstood our route then gave us fresh water and some sugar cane to chew.
Our first overnight stop after Nanning was Binyan. We arrived just in time to buy dinner from a street café, a great stir fry where we chose what went in. We asked the chef about hotels, with the aid of our Lonely Planet, and he pointed in the direction of a street diagonally opposite, but our nonexistent Chinese meant we could not find it.

We asked a man passing by for assistance. He motioned for us to follow him and he took us to a place he said would be “safe”. It turned out to be a compound for government employees, quite a large complex which included a hotel. The staff did not want to accept us and we were left standing there while the man and reception staff argued, we could not understand a word but got the gist of what was happening. The man told us to wait, so we did. A short time later another man arrived who introduced himself as the head of the city of Binyang. He explained Binyan was not a tourist town and the hotels could not cater for us, he then told the staff to find us a room and give us breakfast in the morning and we were to be his guests, no charge. A young woman who spoke excellent English appeared to assist us and another two arrived soon after, we were overwhelmed. The man we met in the street obviously knew who to call. The next morning the girls knocked on our door to take us to breakfast in a private room set aside for us then asked us to follow them in a van with flashing lights as they escorted us for 10 klms out of the town.

After this film star treatment we headed off up and down hills passing through a number of towns ,where there was a lot of quarrying which created a lot of dust, as if the pollution wasn’t bad enough already. We came across the first hydroelectricity dam we had seen, there are many in China. We stopped overnight in Hesham, a large town, with wide streets and a city square where there was a large screen for entertaining the locals – a bit like Federation Square. Again we were assisted by locals who spoke a little English who took us right to the hotel and helped us book in as staff had no English at all. We found MFC – a copy of KFC and had a western meal, a change from noodles and rice. It was a nice hotel, a little more than we usually pay but some of the budget hotels cannot take foreigners, we both had colds and decided to take a rest day. The weather is very mild, no sunshine, partly due to the pollution, but the temperature is pleasant, we are guessing around 20 degrees. After Hesham it took us a couple of days on ride to Liuzhou, stopping overnight at Datang in a small family hotel where we ordered a chicken stirfry for dinner, it arrived chicken feet and all. We passed through country side, and small towns, stopping for food in one of these towns we discovered sweet dumplings cooked by women at the side of the road, they are delicious when freshly cooked like this and we prefer them to the ones with meat in them.

We hear fireworks going off often, we cannot work out why in some cases. If we see a wedding we know what the fireworks are for. Fireworks are sold everywhere, even the smallest town will have a shop or stall.

The ride into Liuzho from the outskirts was not very pleasant, lots of traffic and pollution, the rural roads are fairly quiet so we did not enjoy battling with trucks billowing out black smoke. Liuzhou itself was a nice place, huge by Australian standards, with the most fabulous shopping. Women in the big towns and cities dress chic and the shops here were full of high end men and women’s clothes. It was like being at Chadstone at Christmas time, the shops were open late and people everywhere. The many shoe shops carry the fancy shoes that the women wear, very high heels and nearly always with a bow or diamentes. An example of just how big the shops are, Mike needed to buy a map and the book shop directed him to the seventh floor. While we were here we went to the local zoo which advertised Pandas, but there were none to be seen, but the gardens were lovely. We took a chair lift ride up to the top of a hill near the city where we had a view, in spite of the pollution, of the area, including large apartment blocks, not the government providing housing but the private speculator.

We met three Chinese cyclist in Liuzhou who invited us to ride with them to Guilin.