“Use Your Noodle”

(Allison) 

Macy, our super cute and sweet tour guide, met us in the lobby of our Guilin hotel at 8:50 am.  We headed to a boat that would take us down the Lijiang or Li River (named after Lianna of course) to Yangshou. Guilin and Yangshou are two absolutely beautiful places. Their economies are based on tourism and they love westerners..

The weather – sunny, clear skies, 68 degrees – perfect! The Li River is majestic. The stone hills (not quite big enough to be called mountains) pop right out of the ground. (Please google a picture in order to understand how beautiful and unique they truly are). 

This is the dry season, so the river is very shallow and narrow. The cruise was quite lovely – it took us 5 hours…(during the flood season it only takes 2 )but it was so relaxing..it went by very fast.  I stayed outside on the upper deck for a while admiring the hills/mountains, the local people, and the water buffalo. Macy told us that we were very lucky because the water buffalo only come along the river when it is sunny and warm.

The Chinese people love to see objects in their rocks…they have very good imaginations.  Along the river there are various rock formations that people have identified as looking like different things such as a Buddha, a woman waiting for her husband, a fish tail…and Mark’s favorite – Jaba the Hut!  (very similar to the Old Man in the Mountain in NH..Can you see it Becky?) Macy kept telling us to “use your noodle”and our imaginations…

When we reached Yangshuo there was all sorts of commotion at the dock. People trying to sell us things and offering to take us out on the bamboo rafts… Macy had attempted to teach us how to barter before we got off the boat. We walked down West St. ( a tourist street lined with all sorts of shops and restaurants). Yangshuo is a very cool place. It is a very popular destination for backpackers. A large amount of westerners are here…and a large amount of people speak English.

We checked into the hotel and Macy left us for awhile… Our hotel is wonderful…there are courtyards and gardens, and it is a great location -- right at the end of West St. Enthusiastically, we headed right out – back in order to try out our bartering skills. Alex bartered for some sort of rope bracelet. I bartered for some playing cards with photographs of the scenery of Yangshuo.   I know that Lianna mentioned it - but there are babies everywhere in China..and they are ridiculously cute.. they are all bundled up in the poofy outfits! We love them.

We had dinner at this really cute place and sat on a balcony overlooking a side street of West St. We all ordered milkshakes and they were delicious! I had sweet and sour chicken, Lianna had some sort of egg and shrimp dish, Alex had a Chinese portion of steak, and Mark had duck (his favorite!). Oh yes, and lots of rice.  Trying to decipher restaurant bills in Chinese is always a challenge – so we had to work backwards from the menu to figure out what each of us owed – fortunately we were able to borrow a calculator – to our amusement it was a talking calculator (in Chinese of course..) so we were able to practice our numbers…yi, er, san…

Lianna and I made plans earlier to go to the “Realistic Performance with Landscape in Guilin” with Macy. We took an open air electric taxi to get to the show – the people in Guilin and Yangshuo are extremely environmentally conscious because there economy is primarily based on tourists coming to see the natural beauty of the area. 

Amongst a massive crowd, we arrived at the show.  Macy had Li and I stand next to a fence,  while she picked up our tickets. A very large Chinese family enthusiastically approached us…and started speaking to us..except the only person in the family who could speak English was their young daughter..She introduced us to her father and then introduced herself as Nancy! The Chinese are fascinated by us (and vice -versa).

The show is performed on the Li River with a natural landscape background..in Lianna’s words: “I was not expecting this to be so magnificent”.  It was fantastic. A portion of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics was modeled after the show…there are 680 performers (they are all cormorant fisherman or farmers from the local villages) and … 3,000 audience members…attended the show.

(back to my HK blog – I guess the bridge we walked over, at our first Buddhist temple, only added 3 days – not three years to our lives..but that is still pretty good!)