The man at the food stall in the night market wasn’t taking kindly to the tourists gathering around his stall. I had arrived first, folding out my camera tripod…then other passing tourists drifted over to seewhat it was all about. More cameras came out, accompanied by much gawking and gasping at the array of meats—snakes, rats, rabbits, dogs, snails, and birds we didn’t re cognize. The man, momentarily d i s t racted by something he had been chopping,looked up—and he looked angry. “Hello,” he hollered, “bye”—and he waved us off with a violent fling of his hand.
“ We are obstructing his business,”
Jack—Chinese name, Zhou Hong Guang—was my guide and interpreter in Yangshuo, the most spectacular province in the state of Guangxi, in China’s southeast. With a degree in civil engineering, Jack decided that being a guide in Yangshuo—one of the top 10 most-visited places in China—held more appeal than building roads.
At the Tribe Bar, my accommodation choice in Yangshuo, we feasted on snails—the best I ever tasted, stuffed with a combination of minced pork and a sprinkling of spices, stir-fried with bell peppers and oyster sauce. It’s a Yangshuo specialty, as are many other dishes—so many in fact that I didn’t have enough time in a week to try them all.
“I recommend snake and chicken soup,” said Li Xue Ping, waiter at the Tribe Bar’s restaurant. After a moment, she added “Chinese people certainly like it, but Chinese people eat everything!”
I could not stomach snake, dog, or rat, but I found the rabbit in a soy-sauce-based soup full of flavor. Every meal in China is a feast. Especially in Yangshuo, where crowds of Chinese tourists fill the restaurants until late, gobbling impressive amounts of food, guzzling beer, and raucously playing card games. For the Chinese visitors, touring is only a peripheral interest—the highlights of any holiday are eating, drinking, and card-playing. Yangshuo—which attracts 3.5 million visitors annually, many of them day-trippers—has become a place of infectious merriment. The small town’s old quarter, a couple of streets near the riverfront, lined with old-style Chinese houses and crisscrossed with canals and lagoons, is host to a steady stream of tourists. In the evenings it’s full of light, especially red paper lamps, and the crowds become more heady and happy with excitement and inebriation.
Cheap, even by Chinese standards
Originally a backpackers’ hideaway and artists’ retreat, mass tourism in Yangshuo spilled over from the more famous Guilin in the past few years. Not that Yangshuo is second to Guilin; Yangshuo’s landscape is more dramatic and the county less developed. The number of foreign visitors increased by 65% to 600,000 in 2005. Foreigners find the town especially amenable for its many Western restaurants and excellent value for the money—the town is extraordinarily inexpensive even by Chinese standards.
All tourists, including me, come to see the classical landscape found in traditional Chinese painting: thousands of karst mountains, arising from the land like stalagmites, set among mighty, meandering rivers. Add to this the small, quaint farmer’s and old fisherman’s villages, built in the Chinese dynastic styles, populated by fishermen who set in their bamboo rafts to catch fish, and you have a microcosm of traditional China. You begin to understand why generations of Chinese artists came to Yangshuo for inspiration.
Yangshuo is also an outlandish pocket of old China, all the more incongruous in the prosperous Chinese coastal region, just 13 hours by bus (and that’s only because the road is bad) from the ultra-modern cities of Shenzhen and Zhuhai. It’s a place where the markets are full of strange foods, herbal medicines, and men yakking over card games. You’ll also find old-style characters—old men groomed and dressed in Chinese traditional style, characters that could have walked out of a Chinese fantasy painting.
Summit up the winding staircase
In a week, I climbed four mountains, panting and dripping sweat in the summer heat. The most famous of these was Moon Hill, which takes its name from the arch cut through the mountain near the summit. Most visitors to Yangshuo walk up to the summit, via a winding staircase, to see the forest of mountains crowning the land. In the other mountains, Jack and I had the summit to ourselves, and we could contemplate the vistas in uninterrupted reverie. Two of them were in the town itself, the best one called the Green Lotus Hill, which we climbed early in the morning, when the world beneath us was a sea of mist that slowly evaporated to reveal details of the landscape bit by bit. The other, in Xingping, was the highest we climbed.
Xingping, 15 miles north of Yangshuo Town, has an old quarter that is 500 years old, full of twisting alleyways, stone houses with interior courtyards, and sumptuous timber doors. Many doors were open to allow the breeze to waft through, and through which we could see groups of Chinese assembled around tables in dim rooms playing cards or mahjong.
The next mountain we climbed, an almost perfectly cylindrical pinnacle, had 1,157 steps to the summit, or 25 minutes of heaving. But the view from the top was worth every step: far below, a wide bend of the Li River and the tight-knit tapestry of Chinese traditional roofs in the old town, and in every direction the rotund mountains marching all the way to the horizon. Back at the foot of the mountain, we knocked on the door of the Japanese man who had single-handedly and voluntarily constructed the steps to the top. Jack wanted to pose with him for a picture.
Where Clinton didn’t go
From Xingping we took a boat 20 minutes downriver to see Yucun, meaning “Fishing Village,” arguably the most atmospheric of all the old towns in Yangshuo County. This stone village, built in the style of the Qing and Ming dynasties 500 years ago, is girdled by a perimeter wall. Inside a maze of alleys within the walls, the stone houses and assembly halls have intricate wooden doors, high walls topped with ornate stone-works, and traditional ceramic roofs covered with patches of moss and bristles of grass. It’s perfectly preserved, thanks to its isolation (with no road access, the village is reachable only by small boats), and it was largely overlooked by most tourists until Bill Clinton’s famous visit in 1998. Now the main alleyway is cluttered with souvenir stalls (where I bought a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book).
But there are many places Clinton didn’t visit—and that tourists haven’t discovered—particularly the entire southeast corner of Yangshuo County. The two main scruffy towns in this part of the county give way to a scattering of small, quaint villages set along two smaller secondary rivers, rice paddies, and more mountains. The roads are rugged and unpaved, and these villages are best reached by mountain bike (available for rent in Yangshuo Town). You cruise past farmers working in their rice fields with water buffalo, and in the villages young children run beside you shouting, “Hello, hello… what is your name?” The easiest of these routes involved pedaling along the main road to Fuli Town, crossing the town and the river, and looping back along an inland route—a round-trip that took me three hours at a leisurely pace. There are other routes; a good map, for sale in town, shows many possibilities.
It was in this part of the county, in Puyi Town, 30 minutes south of Yangshuo Town by bus, that I found the largest and best market. Outlandish characters in a bizarre market, at least for me—my surprise was that so many foodstuffs exist that I had never seen before, despite the fact that I live in Asia.
I was particularly intrigued by the many stalls full of traditional herbal medicines—dozens of different elixirs, most of which looked like dried twigs to me. Jack didn’t know what these were so I had to content myself with wonderment.
Planes, autos, buses, and bikes—getting to and around Yangshuo
The nearest airport is at Guilin, one hour by bus from Yangshuo. Overland, Yangshuo is well connected to the capitals of surrounding provinces with daily bus runs. These include nightly bus connections (13 hours) from Shenzhen and Zhuhai on the southeast coast, which are in turn connected to the regional hub of Hong Kong with hourly high-speed ferries. Within Yangshuo County, there are hourly buses that depart from Yangshuo Town to all the towns in the county; otherwise, bicycles are a practical mode of transportation. Or you can take a day-tour, which costs $50, including guide and car. Independent guides will constantly approach you in town. To contact my guide (Jack), tel. (134)7139-9655; e-mail: iamjackboy@163.net. Jack is a charming, intelligent young man. Another good guide is Shelly, who runs the Riverside Retreat. Contact: tel. (773)882-6879; e-mail: rivershelly@hotmail.com.
Plan your visit for the fall
Fog and rain are regular throughout much of the year. It’s steaming hot in summer, and chilly from November to March. The best time to visit is in the fall, when the temperatures are moderate and rain is sparse.
Eats and sleeps
Accommodation can be hard to find during the national holidays, such as the Chinese New Year, so best to book in advance. The best hotel in Yangshuo is Hotel Paradesa, 116 West Street, Yangshuo; tel. (773)882-2109; e-mail: glpysr@gl.gx.cninfo.ne; website: www.ys-paradesa.com. Price per night from $85.
A cheaper yet comfortable base is the Tribe Bar, Bin Jiang Road, Yangshuo; tel. (773)881-6278; e-mail: jankinluo@163.net. Doubles start from $13.
For a quiet location about three miles out of town, the new Riverside Retreat has large rooms with air-con, wooden floors, massive beds and bathrooms, and minimal décor. Tel. (773)882-6879; e-mail: rivershelly@hotmail.com. Rooms range from $13 to $45. It costs $2.50 to get a taxi into town from here.
Restaurants that stand out in town include Twin Peaks Café on West Street, as well as the restaurant of the Tribe Bar for local specialties. Pizza Place on Xinagan Road (just off West Street) has excellent pizzas.