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.