Beautiful Yangshuo

From Kunming I had a day and a night of travel. The night on the train was very nice, and I slept like a log. There is nothing “hard” about Chinese “hard sleepers.” Unfortunately, I could only take the train as far as Nanning, capitol of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. It seemed like a nice city, but there’s nothing to see there, so I walked across the street to the bus station, which was being demolished. Luckily Lonely Planet indicated that there was another bus station a block away, so I walked to it, but it was locked up. So I had to take a taxi to a bus station miles and miles away outside of the city, which was exorbitantly expensive.

At the massive, shiny, new bus station in the middle of nowhere I was able to buy a ticket for a bus to Guilin, four hours away. The bus had huge reclining seats, only three across, which was nice after the run down old busses of Western Sichuan.

Yangshuo fisherman

Guilin is one of China’s most famous attractions, with huge limestone karst peaks everywhere. The landscape inspired many Chinese paintings, and served as the Wookie homeworld in the latest Star Wars movie, along with the similar landscape of Southern Thailand. But fame draws huge numbers of Chinese tourists, and Guilin itself is a big city of a million people. To escape the crowds I immediately bought a ticket to Yangshuo, the legendary backpacker mecca an hour away.

It’s legendary for a reason: it’s really nice. A small, manageable town, with the same limestone peaks everywhere. West Street, the “foreigner street,” is the first place I’ve been to in mainland China that is geared to foreigners, with countless “same same but different” cafes serving good food, and English is widely spoken. And it has more Western tourists than I’ve seen anywhere in China. After months on the road, it’s the perfect place to relax and take a holiday from China.

As much as the place is geared to Westerners, there are many more Chinese tourists, perhaps here to observe the Western backpacker in his native environment.