Spiky limestone peaks, as far as the eye can see

I'll mostly let the pictures do the talking in this entry. Fortunately the weather cleared up, so the other day we took a cruise down the Li River from near Guilin to Yangshuo. Not knowing whether it was going to be bucketing it down or not, we decided to go for the slightly more expensive all-in tour, including bus transfers and lunch on the boat. The boat was quite large for a narrow river - but it felt tiny, rammed full as it was with Chinese tourists of all ages. We were the only Westerners aboard, and not a word of English was spoken by anyone it seemed. To make up for this, there was an almost constant commentary provided in Chinese over the PA, at a volume high enough to be heard above the Chinese tourists - loud. So coming up is proof that the camera can sometimes lie. In the first two tranquil, serene scenes, the camera spares you the audio, not to mention the pushing and shoving for a space at the side of the boat.





Still, who am I to complain about tourists, and at least these people were in their own country. After a while I realised that it was more satisfying to stand at the edge of the boat and look inwards rather than outwards, observing both the massed video camera-wielding throngs and the beautiful scenery behind them.
And in that sense the camera isn't lying - it really was impressive. These countless near-vertical spikes cover a huge area along the Li River and around the town of Yangshuo.

Yangshuo town centre


The following day, we hired bikes for a pittance and cycled around the surrounding countryside. The river below is the Yulong, a smaller tributary (I might be making that up) of the Li. Virtually every local we passed replied "Bamboo!" to our "Ni hao!" (hello), in a vain effort to sell us a tour on one of their ridiculously basic-looking bamboo rafts.


We climbed up Moon Hill...


...so called because of this crescent-shaped hole


Then we cycled along the Yulong river (it's just off to the left of this picture)




And finally relaxed in the very pleasant, touristy but not tacky centre of Yangshuo


As you can see, the area doesn't lack for crazy scenery. Yangshuo is a good place to relax too - there are loads of cafes, and you can get good quality Western food (ie not McDonalds or KFC). Call ourselves intrepid travellers, eating bacon and eggs for breakfast? Well, you have to have a break sometimes from the incessant worry about the components of the odd-smelling concoction you've just been served.

Falling out of love with overnight train journeys

Before this trip, I had done three overnight train journeys in comfort, and by that I mean with a fully horizontal bed. First there was Krakow in Poland to Budapest in Hungary, via Slovakia. That was the best - I was in a cabin for two, but the other bunk was empty. It seemed glamorous and exotic to be woken up in T-shirt and boxers in my own private suite twice in the middle of the night, first by armed and uniformed Slovakian border guards, and then later by Hungarians. (I had a sheltered upbringing.) Then there was a Moroccan train from Casablanca to Tangiers, and recently Faye and I took an overnight train back up towards Bangkok from southern Thailand.

Those second two weren't quite as glamorous, as we were in large compartments sharing with numerous other people, but they still had a huge appeal. I don't know, I think it's because I struggle so much to get any sleep on planes or buses, whereas on a properly horizontal bed, and with the gentle rocking motion of the train, I sleep like a baby. And also, you wake up and look out of the window at somewhere entirely new, a long way from where you closed your eyes.

So I was looking forward to our onward journey from Guangzhou, an overnight train westwards to Guilin. More so than Faye I think, who was rather more concerned about the number of strange people sleeping within about two yards of us. Getting onto the train was a feat in itself - the Chinese are apparently now being taught how to queue by the authorities, who are worried about what foreign visitors will think of them during the Olympics next year. And of course few of the signs at the fantastically huge train station were in English.

We got hard sleeper bunks, second in the pecking order of Chinese rail classes behind soft sleeper, but much cheaper, and not actually that hard. The bed was comfortable enough, though extremely narrow even before you place your small bag of valuables against the wall, and just not quite tall enough for a (Western) adult to sit up on. So to cut a long story short (sorry, it's raining here in Guilin and the internet is 35p an hour), I didn't get much sleep, and in those restless hours, realised that the prospect of several more of these epic train journeys wasn't quite as exciting and romantic as I'd been thinking. Still, the people around us were very friendly even though we could only manage to communicate "England" and "China" to each other. Apart from one bold-as-brass 12-year-old girl who decided unilaterally that Faye was to be her new email friend and English teacher.

Guilin sounds beautiful in the guidebook - it's surrounded by spiky limestone rocks and waterways - but as I say, it's currently chucking it down so we can't see anything. We plan a cruise down the river to a chilled out Westerners' enclave called Yangshuo, but may hold off until the weather clears a bit.

Right, time for another cup of tea.

They let us in

...despite me wearing a T-shirt that is almost definitely offensive in the People's Republic of China. Allow me to explain... During Lunar New Year, red is very much the colour to wear here in China - it represents good luck for the coming year. This year is the year of the pig. I like T-shirts that have foreign languages on them, especially when the language is written in an unfamiliar script. I do not have anything red in my 'wardrobe'. So when, at the New Year's fair near our hostel in Hong Kong, I saw a pretty cool red T-shirt with a picture of a pig's head on it and some Chinese writing, I thought - perfect, I'll have that. The pig is dressed in army uniform.
Since we weren't sure we could trust the vendors to translate the Chinese correctly for us, we thought we'd take the T-shirt to our farewell meal with Steven and his family to make sure it didn't say anything that might stop us getting through the border, like, I don't know, Commies are r*bbish. (Who knows what risks I'm taking writing that here in this blog!). Steven and co confirmed what the vendors had said - the message says something like "Every day learn something new / every day make progress". So no worries there. Our hosts did seem concerned however that the Chinese might not be too amused by the portrayal of Chairman Mao as a pig in the picture........

I tried to send it home from Hong Kong - no go, the Post Office was closed for New Year. So I wore it under another T-shirt as I crossed the border. No doubt being a little over-cautious, but I didn't fancy explaining the above to a uniformed and armed border patrolman. Now I look at the picture, I feel stupid for not spotting it myself... So anyway, we crossed into the People's Republic without incident.

Guangzhou is a bit of a big mess of a place to be honest. After the Westerner-friendly, compact and easily navigable Hong Kong Island, it just seemed to be an endless sprawl of buildings of various heights, with no obvious landmarks, and almost no apparent tourist infrastructure. That's not necessarily a bad thing, after all we are trying to get off the beaten track, but it would have been nice to have a decent map to help us get around. Thank god for the recently built metro or we would have spent most of our time being ripped off by taxi drivers.

Street scene in Guangzhou

Still, we were staying on a little island on the river, in a fairly central location, which was a peaceful haven away from all the traffic and the people. Man, there are a lot of people in China. You may have known that, but it still hits you. And this is a quiet time, when lots of the migrant workers are back in the sticks with their families for New Year. We didn't do a great deal in our three days in Guangzhou - mostly just a wander round the streets, trying in vain to find a nice teahouse to sit down in, eating pretty well as usual (our Chinese is still terrible but we are making progress with food vocab), and watching one of the 40-odd channels in our ridiculously comfortable en-suite hostel room, just 12 pounds a night between us. Some of the many epic kung fu monk dramas (how else can I describe them?) had English subtitles, which as you can imagine were pretty amusing.

Finding feet in Hong Kong

We treated Hong Kong, our first stop in Asia, as something of a China starter pack. It's basically Chinese now, but with plenty of assistance for China virgins such as ourselves - most people speak English, all signs have English on them, and so on. Not only that, but thanks to Faye's mum, we had a contact there. And not just any contact, but a senior doctor in a posh private hospital. On our first day in Hong Kong, we were whisked away into the New Territories (just outside the city but still part of what used to be British-owned), shown how to play Mah Jong, fed some tasty dim sum, and taken to a temple. And I had my still-sore ankle massaged, rubbed and generally attacked by a 90-year-old grandma armed with tiger balm and surprisingly powerful hands. A good start all in all...

(Actually we'd got off to a fairly bad start the night we arrived in Hong Kong. The hostel we were supposed to be staying in for three nights was being refurbished, so we were led round the corner to a poky little room in another hostel. This didn't seem too bad, until we realised that we'd have to vacate the room during the day the next day as Sundays were the busiest day for renting out hotel rooms by the hour... The following day, with Steven the doctor's help, we got back into the original hostel, which as far as we could tell only accommodates couples who know each other's names.)

On the second night, Steven took us for a big pre-New Year family meal. Most of what we ate was unusual, but delicious nevertheless. We were also given stewed goose feet, which were... unusual.



Steven and Monica, and their sons and their girlfriends. And tea and Budweiser.


Every day in Hong Kong, we made an effort to get some kind of view. Then we'd generally go back to our room and collapse. We're hoping it's just the change in humidity after Australia that's made us so lethargic so far. This is the view down onto Hong Kong Island from The Peak.


Looking at Hong Kong Island again, this time from across the harbour in Kowloon.


Junk

Or so Faye said anyway...

(I'm afraid making bad jokes out of Asian English may become a bit of a theme. My apologies in advance.)

We really liked Hong Kong. It certainly helped being shown around by locals, and also where we were staying - Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island - was incredibly full of life. The ferry trip across the harbour, which costs about 15p, was probably our favourite pastime. We ate pretty well (no surprise there) and managed to limit our visits to the familiar comforts of McDonalds and a Japanese fast food chain called Yoshinoya which we'd grown to love in Sydney. We even managed to order quite a few meals of dim sum from Chinese-only menus.

I felt caught up in the locals' excitement in the build up to the Lunar New Year, which seemed much like our build up to Christmas. New Year itself meant: visiting a fair very near our hostel where you could buy giant inflatable versions of almost anything, from the inevitable pigs (it's the year of the pig) to meat cleavers to dog turds(?!); trying to catch glimpses of the New Year parade from behind several thousand locals and some irate policemen, which was all a bit of a letdown; and then a superb fireworks display over the harbour in front of the brightly lit up skyscrapers.

So now for the real thing, starting in Guangzhou - a city of 5 million people in the south of China that used to be known as Canton in the West, hence Cantonese. As long as we get across the border - hopefully our all-singing, all-dancing six-month multiple entry visas are not fakes...