My Life in China

As I mentioned in my previous post I went to Yangshou after two days of relaxing at home during our one week holiday. Yangshou is known to be very touristy but the scenery surrounding the city is the reason to go there. On the 20 RMB notes the landscape of Yangshou is depicted with the Li river flowing gently through the green limestone peaks.

I took a 50 minutes flight to Guilin from Guangzhou, and then a 1 ½ hour bus to Yangshou from Guilin. I took me some time and wandering around to find my hostel which was located outside of Yangshou, a twenty minutes walk by the river.

The colourful hostel.

The city itself is not very pretty or charismatic, it’s busy with loads of traffic and tourists, I was therefore glad that my hostel was outside the city. The city has a nice tourist street called West Street and that’s where one will find all the restaurants and the souvenir shops, on West street it was easy to find a good place to sit down and enjoy a fried rice dinner. Outside that small street the city itself wasn’t worth any exploring.

Yangshou, outside West Street.

A part of West Street

I quickly rented a bike and cycled to “Moon Hill”, a limestone peak with a hole in the middle which was located some 9 km from Yangshou.

Moon Hill in the distance

View from Monn Hill

After Moon Hill it was pretty late so I headed back for town and walked along West Street, then went up a hill and took some photos, I was invited for some tea by the Chinese couple who lived on top of the hill. We drank tea and chatted for a while but my limited knowledge of Mandarin coupled with their limited English made any lengthy conversation hard. Next day I asked the guy running the Hostel about a tip for cycling and he gave me a map and pointed out a route along the Yu Long river which would take about six hours to get around. Off I went and it was tough in the beginning as it was a lot of uphill cycling. It was good to get out on the countryside to see some more authentic than the touristic water caves everyone was trying to sell tickets to.

Farmers

Rice fields

Some kind of vechicle.

In the afternoon I came across a couple of girls who I asked if they knew where the path following the Yu Long river was, they didn’t but it turned out they were Swedish! I haven’t met any Swedes in Guangzhou and only heard someone speak Swedish in Hong Kong but it seems China is attracting more and more tourists from “the west”.

Maria, after crossing a "bridge".

Me and the girls, Linnea and Maria, finally found the path and cycled together and they told me about their backpacking trip through Asia. We parted when we finally reached Yangshou, I was exhausted after about seven hours on the bike so it was nice to relax and enjoy some reading in the hammock.

Me, on a photo not taken by myself!

On the third and last day I checked out and walked along the Li river for a while before taking the bus to Guilin where I explored a beautiful park. I then went to the airport and went home to Guangzhou. All in all, I enjoyed Yangshou for its amazing scenery but was disappointed by the city, probably because a lot of my colleagues had hyped the place quite a bit.

A bridge made mostly of glass in the background.