Riding with the Chinese boys from Liuzhou to Guilin

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.