if only i was making this up

ok so day 4 in Yangshou… Look I know some people aren’t down with the excessive length of my posts but honestly, this one is worth settling in for… some of our posts need a little creative massaging, even if it’s just in choosing what to talk about, to try and make them more interesting… but this one pretty much writes itself. So grab a coffee and prepare to be skeptified (which is a word I just invented, to describe the process of making someone skeptical)… although I swear, it’s all true.

So i’ve realised I need to be more flexible with unexpected detours and changes to our plans, mainly because that’s how Penny rolls and I don’t want to ruin her Chi, but also because it’s more fun that way. With that in mind, for our last morning in Yangshou, we rented the bikes again and decided to ride up one side of the Yulong river, then cross a (supposedly) nice bridge, before riding back on the other side of the river.

The whole trip takes 45 minutes, 2 hours, or 6 hours (on foot) depending on who you ask. We did it in about 4 hours… but we could probably have done it in 2. We learned from our mistakes at Tiger Leaping Gorge and the Li river the day before and vowed to ask every local we saw for directions. We started out from the hostel and rode down to the river where we took the raft ride in the last post. When we got there, a group of bag ladies (plastic bag sellers, not hobos), sensed the chance to make a quick buck without their menfolk, and put us on a raft. The woman who took us across had no clue what she was doing and almost sunk the boat, splashing water on us with every stroke and getting caught in the current. A male bamboo boat guy laughed at her on the way across, and we did too, once we were safely on land.

From there, we got on the bikes, and sped off down the nice flat concrete road… or at least penny did. The chain came off my bike and I sat there peddling like a spaz (P – like a hamster on a wheel, goin’ nowhere) and crying for help until Penny explained why I wasn’t moving. So 5 minutes later, hands covered with grease, we set off down the road. It was quite pleasant and the country side was full of beautiful rivers and Karst mountains.

 

  

We followed the smooth concrete road through a couple of small villages and then suddenly, with no warning, it disappeared. They must have run out of money, or concrete, but it just stopped for no reason and we were on dirt and rocks…. and I mean bumpy, muddy dirt and rocks. We rode through that for a while, convinced we were lost, as the path got narrower, then wider, comfortable for a minute, then agonising for 10 minutes. But eventually we made it to the bridge, which was actually quite nice.

Unfortunately from there we had no idea, so we asked a local and they pointed us off down another road, which we followed for a while, until it turned into an unpaved mud track. We asked some more locals and kept following their directions, as the path hooked out towards the river, getting narrower and narrower.

 

At this point I should probably mention that both yesterday and today, Penny kept getting a little concerned about where we were and the direction we were heading, and I just kept replying that we started at one part of the river, and were walking back to it, so as long as we followed the river, we’d be fine. That was our philosophy today, and we stuck with it.

Anyway we came out of the smaller village/building landscape and found ourselves facing the river, with a few fields in front of us. We were both pretty sure this wasn’t the way, but the locals had all pointed us down here, so I left the bike and jogged about 5 minutes down the path, confirming that it kept going, and followed the river. It did, so we did.

The path was quite comfortable at first, and we didn’t really notice it narrowing even further. We sped along on the bikes, until suddenly we were nowhere near anything, and surrounded by fields and crops. We could still see the river, but the path had narrowed to about 20CMs, with a half meter drop/ditch on either side and we couldn’t ride on it anymore. I tried, but crashed off the road a couple of times and then gave up. Penny gave up with a few choice curses I never thought I’d hear her utter…. and I still laugh when I recall her tone… I’ve never heard her curse that much.

 

So, convinced we were probably on the wrong path, but with no where else to go, we dilligently followed the river for a while longer. Eventually, we heard cars & bikes and saw, far off to the south, the road we were SUPPOSED to be following. We looked ahead of us, to the ever narrowing path, and I called it.

“Lets turn off and make for the road. I’m sure we can get there”.

So we turned for the road and started pushing the bikes through the fields, along the little dirt walls that divide the various crop areas. Now remember, these aren’t like Australian fields… they aren’t flat, or easy to get through… it was a nightmare. We kept turning down dead ends and getting caught on the spiky bushes they use as fences here… the bikes kept weighing us down and getting stuck, and at some points we had to lift them and carry them on our shoulders. (P – and I’d like to point out that even at this stage, we were still trying very hard not trample the actual crops. Maybe if our spirits were totally broken we would have just walked straight across the top…like when we ended up at McDonald’s for breakfast in Kunming. Josh wants me to specify that the McDonald’s incident was at my request…we’d been on a train for 12 hours and I didn’t want any more noodles okay?).

I can’t stress how far away from anything we were… I mean we were honestly worried it was going to take like 5 hours to get out of the field.. we thought it would be dark before we got out of there.

 

We should have known we were in real trouble when we spotted a couple of farmers off in the distance, laughing their asses off at us. They were the first people we’d seen for about a half hour, and they were the last people we saw (other than those on the road) for the next half hour. I just waved… “nearly at the road”, I told myself, smiling and waving… “yes we’re stupid tourists,” I thought, waving and smiling… “but we’re nearly at the road”.

We burst out of the fields and there it was, 20m away, up a slight embankment. The road home.

A guy sped past on a scooter, noticed me carrying a bike through the field and did a double take that nearly took him off the road. He corrected himself in time to laugh his ass of at me, just as Penny burst from the crops and I noticed why he was laughing.

Between us and the road, as far as I could see, was water… I mean it had plants in it, but it was water, and it was too deep to cross with the bikes. At this point Penny was ready to throw the bike in the pond and swim… she was convinced we were going to die out in the field but I had hope (and also felt it was mostly my fault), so I left her with my bike and went scouting. We were close to the road, but it didn’t seem to matter, because we couldn’t see any way through, and we had no idea how to go back the way we’d come.

 It took me about 20 minutes of back-and-forthing, but eventually I found a way to the road. We had to drag and carry the bikes the whole way, through mud and crops… but eventually we got to the road… the glorious paved road… and headed back to the hostel. All told, I think we were lost in the fields for more than an hour.

Oh I nearly forgot to mention, the bike I had was endowed with a broken bell, so every time I went over even a tiny bump, it rang, which meant the whole way through the fields anyone who could hear the bell, was able to see us and then shortly thereafter, laugh at us.

Anyway we followed the road through another couple of villages until it narrowed and narrowed, and we started freaking out… then it got to a fork, each branch barely wide enough for the bikes. We couldn’t decide, and we knew we couldn’t handle another trek through the fields, so I walked down the route we were leaning towards… where I found some stupid western tourists.

The reason I refer to them as stupid will become apparent in the next paragraph, but they told me they’d just come 2KM from a village down that path, and it was perfectly pleasant and showed some lovely countryside. It was, they assured me, “THE” path.

So we rode down it. And it narrowed, and got rocky, and muddy…. after I nearly launched myself off the path and down a 2M drop into a rice field, we took the bikes off and pushed them along the path. Sorry… along A path… not THE path. Stupid tourists.

Once i realised they were stupid, and were just as lost as us, but unable to admit that, even to themselves, I stopped and asked for more directions. We were turned immediately off “THE” path, and after a few minutes of following a guy on a scooter, we arrived at the road again, which we took all the way back to the hostel.

 

From that point on, it WAS perfectly pleasant, and did show some lovely countryside.

To help you, the reader, I’ll compress this next bit for you. We took a taxi into town, where I inadvertently cost a tout the tourist she was trying to scam, then we took an express bus to Guilin. From there, we walked to a hostel recommended by our lonely planet, which turned out to be under construction and closed. Then we walked to another hostel, which revealed itself (but only after we’d checked in) to be a crap hole staffed by partially retarded mutes.

With some help from the staff (see my previous description), we went down to the bus station and tried to buy a ticket to the rice terraces the next day. After being told by both ticket counters, the information desk and a couple of touts that there was no bus (and we’d have to take a taxi for 88 yuan per person), we found a tourist info booth which told us there was a bus, and they should sell us a ticket… maybe we should go back and insist?

“Dammit,” I thought, “is everyone in this city in on this scam?!?”

So I went back and insisted… they insisted, that there was no bus. So we went back to the tourist info booth, and she told us we had to go to the OTHER bus station. You know, the one that’s not mentioned in the guide book and isn’t on any maps? Yes, that one. It’s not a scam… there’s just a second bus station, and everyone was trying to tell me to take the taxi THERE.. or the number 88 bus.

We gave up, went back to the hostel and had them to call a guy that someone in Yangshou recommended. He said he’d drive us up to the terraces for 250 yuan, which is actually only about 60 yuan more ($10) than the bus.

HEY! don’t quit on me… we’re nearly there.

Anyway the last thing we needed to do was get some cash out. So we tried 5 atm’s in a row and none of them worked. We finally found one that had heaps of people lined up at it, so we knew it must be working. We stood in line for 10 minutes before we worked out it was a mobile phone recharge booth, not a bank, and they were putting money INTO it.

Then we gave up and went to bed.

I don’t want to leave you on the edge of your seats, stressed out… so I’ll just assure you that we found a working ATM and made it to the terraces without further incident.