Nick’s Adventure Travel
 
 
Well it wasn’t last weekend, but the weekend before that I went to this enchanted place, but here is a quick briefing on how it went down: Friday 29-June-2007: I took the day off of work for the main purpose of visiting a factory in Guangdu and the secondary purpose of essentially getting on more day in China. I wanted to make the most of this trip since it was my second of two entries into mainland China that was permitted by my visa. This time I was just about 100% solo... I even left the PLA hat behind to see what it was like to be perceived as a ‘normal tourist.’ It also happened that 1-July-2007 was the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s hand over from Great Britain to China.... so we had Monday off. The gracious brothers who awarded me a generous scholarship and went out of their way to help me feel right at home in Hong Kong also made available to me the opportunity to have a look at their factory about one hour from the Hong Kong/China border. By about noon this Friday I had seen (how I would imagine) most of the worlds modern day electronic devices are made, or at least the manufacturing/sourcing processes behind it. It was really pretty amazing to see who/how/where/what goes in to my digital alarm clock, or anything like that. Being an engineer at heart I found this almost as cool as a teeny-bopper finds Justin Timberlake. After all of this excitement and the great lunch to which I was treated, I was brought to the train station where I caught a train to Guangzhou, where I wandered around for a few hours before I caught an overnight bus to Guilin. I forgot my language map (that Rod got me for Christmas) this time... so my knowledge of the languages consisted of the numbers from 1 to 99, “hello”, “thank you”, “good bye”, “how much”, “that’s too much”, “Don’t want it” and most importantly “BEER.” With only that, and some help from a few kind-hearted folks, I was able to take the entire trip without any significant issues. Saturday 30-June-2007: I awoke on the bus to a confusing commotion, which happened a few times on the bus ride, so I began to disregard it as usual. Thankfully some friendly Canadians told me that we were there, so I disembarked and cut through the touts to another bus that was supposedly going to Yangshuo. I felt like I had gotten off a bit too easy when I found out that I was on the right bus and we began rolling, but I figured we all get freebies sometimes right? Well this wasn’t one of those times. We would drive for a bit, then stop, then drive, then stop... after about twenty minutes we had gone about 100 meters and I could tell that there wasn’t anything wrong with the bus itself. Then, right in the middle of the street, the driver kicked us all off the bus explaining himself ravenously (in Chinese of course), so I had no idea what was happening... but there was a trustworthy-looking couple that urged me to hop off, so I did. It was reassuring that everyone that was kicked off the bus remained in the same place, but not so much that we all waited over half an hour. I set a ten minute deadline with myself to leave and abandon the 10 yuan (~$1.25) bus and go get another one. Thankfully it did come back and I was on my way to loverly Yangshuo. When I got to Yangshuo I was attacked by a single tout who was good.... he was very good. He offered me a motorbike ride into town to take a look at his hostel, showed me the room, and then tried to keep me from leaving by blocking the door. Knowing that he wasn’t going to do anything too foolish I walked right through him, out into the hallway, downstairs and out into the street the whole time proclaiming that I never stay at the first place that I look at... so he bought me breakfast. I’m not sure how I didn’t see it coming... maybe I thought I would have a chance to pay for breakfast, but now I was obligated after his gracious gift of a bowl full of noodles and a pichu (beer, at 8 or 9 am... what a guy). So I ended up taking the room after talking him down in price about 50%, and it wasn’t too bad of a room. Queen bed, my own bathroom & shower, and a view of the side of a mountain (a close up view). Well after finding out that the computer for the ‘free internet’ was broken and that a group of tourists had all just come and swept away all of the ‘free bikes,’ I rented a bike of my own and vowed to tell anyone ever traveling to Yangshuo to be on the lookout for a really friendly tout with great english skills named ROBERT! (Seriously, he seems nice but he is looking out for #1). With this bike I attracted several more touts who wanted to take me on guided bike trips to local villages... well after five or six hours and 20 - 25 kilometers (12 - 16 miles) I had seen plenty of local culture and taken plenty of pictures (Yangshuo). The weather was great most of the time with the exception of a few instances in the early afternoon when the clouds parted, turning me red as a beat, and one time when it down poured for about ten minutes. I avoided getting drenched because a knowledgeable motorcyclist began waving wildly at me as he passed yelling something that may or may not have been “rain!” But it got me to look in the direction he was pointing and I knew what he was talking about, so I pulled into a very local family-owned ‘convenience store’, bought and drank a few bottles of water, had a popsicle with the kids and by the time I was done the rain had stopped and I was on my way. It took me a while to realize that the tourist maps weren’t really made for navigation purposes (they surly weren’t drawn to scale and I couldn’t shoot a bearing too well), so I got lost and managed to find my way back by asking the locals “Yangshuo?” and pointing down a particular branch in the road. I am pretty sure they were laughing because they thought I was a moron... but I found my way back so I really don’t care! When I finally did get back around 3 or 4pm (and suffering a rouge bees sting) I took a nice tepid shower (despite the ‘ample free hot water’), read for a few minutes and woke up at 10pm. I thought of going back to sleep, but the promise of wonderful food and people-watching got me out of bed and down the street within a few minutes (my @$$ was too sore to sit comfortably on). I dined on one of the local specialties, beer fish, which was surprisingly good ($5 for a whole fish on a platter of veggies). I finished it up with some banana pancakes, just in case I didn’t have a chance for breakfast (man, biking all day in the blistering heat sure can make a guy hungry). After gorging myself I waddled back to the hostel and passed out. Sunday 1-July-2007 (Happy Independence Day HK!): I had set up a riverboat trip on the Li river with Robert (that dastardly devil) the day before and woke up EARLY to catch the one hour bus to the river. On the way to the bus I met a Swedish couple that I suspected were also under Robert’s evil spell, and later confirmed this to be true. However, once on the river I didn’t think too much about being scammed by Robert and focused mostly on the amazing scenery while riding on the roof of the small covered water-faring vessel. I should have known that the boats would bring us up to a small island of rocks where more touts awaited us trying to sell us food, drink and..... you’ll never guess... rocks. On the way back from the river to the bus we (the suckers that had been duped by Robert) were surprised to find that Robert had arranged lunch at a local place for us... now that was a surprise. When I got back into Yangshuo I had about six hours to kill before my overnight bus back to Shenzhen (which borders Hong Kong)... so I went rock climbing. I was traveling solo, so it was pretty quick to get a ride to one of the many sprouts of earth that was well-suited for climbing and run up and down it a few times. There was one instructor, accompanied by his protoge’ and his girlfriend, who belayed and guided my ascent up four different paths of increasing difficulty. It was great fun and my forearms were sore for nearly a week afterwards. Back in town I hung around at ‘Spider Man Climbing’ with Tina and a few of her friends for a couple of beers (that only I was drinking) and then grabbed a quick dinner before hopping on the overnight bus back to Shenzhen. Monday 2-July-2007: A surprisingly good sleep later and I awoke to be dropped off in the middle of the city (as opposed to the border) around rush hour (it was a Hong Kong public holiday, not a mainland holiday). I (again) somehow managed to struggle through the language barrier and find yet another bus to take me to the border crossing where, as anyone who has been there knows, there is a huge mall filled half with storefronts and half with shady warehouse-like holes, all filled with counterfeit contraband from fake Louis Vuitton purses to Rolexes and of course the infamous pirated DVD’s (of which I purchased none of course). None-the-less, I spent the morning wandering around the mall amusing myself with all of the fake goods and wheeling and dealing with shopkeepers from whom I had no intention of buying. This isn’t really a good practice, so I like to think that they just didn’t come down in price enough. Once I had amused myself enough, and talked with one of my tailors, I skipped gleefully across the border into Hong Kong’s rising sun... Epilogue: I am still going strong at Colliers and will be until mid August, at which point I will be returning to MN (at least for a little while). I’ve got to say that I am really looking forward to seeing the family & friends and to see how the reverse culture shock manifests itself. Yangshuo pictures: Yangshuo ../../HK07/Yangshuo.html../../HK07/Yangshuo.htmlshapeimage_2_link_0shapeimage_2_link_1
 
A weekend in Yangshuo
Tuesday, July 10, 2007