Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Greetings from Guilin!
Well we arrived in Guilin after a nice short flight from Xi'an and made our way to our Hostel. On arriving we were told that we were the first ever guests as it had just opened and we got our two night stay for free along with a welcome beer or coffee, nice one. We were also upgraded to a private room instead of the dorm we booked, even better.
The following morning we woke up to pouring rain outside, felt like we were at home. We went for a nice Chinese meal where we had a "hotpot" which is basically a large pot in the middle of your table with some sort of spicy liquid/sauce that is boiling. You then order your meat and put it in to cook, it was really good. We went for the safe option of "beef" but you could have ordered things like pig intestine, fish head, a live fish, chicken lungs or claws etc.
We decided to move onto Yangshuo the following day which is about an hours bus ride from Guilin. Yangshuo is not a city so its a lot calmer and the scenery is stunning, you are surrounded by masses of hills and the Li River runs straight through the town (this is the photo on the back of a 20 Yaun Bill in China). We checked into our dorm and met our Canadian room mate, who was really nice.
Our first day we went out to a local restaurant for some Chinese food, again the food was excellent but half way through our meal one of the staff started launching plates and cups across the restaurant going crazy......strange, Nobody seemed to bat an eyelid at it. We then headed to the Silver Cave that we had booked through our hostel. Unfortunately we didn't realise it was a Chinese tour, so we had to sit on the bus while the tour guide yapped away in Chinese the whole time. The cave was impressive to see but it had been changed to be slightly touristy, we didn't think it was quite worth the money we paid, but glad we seen it. At night we went to see cormorants fishing, Jonny wanted to see this as it was on the "HSBC advert" haha. There was a Chinese guy standing on a bamboo raft, paddling along with 5 comorant birds swimming alongside him, scopping up as many fish as they could. After about 20 minutes he stopped and picked up the birds, pushed their necks and out popped all the fish they had caught. Was really good to see, even better to watch the fisherman fighting with the birds while they tried to eat the fish out of the bucket again haha.
We went to a Hong Kong Restaurant for tea and had some lemon chicken which was amazing, again another good meal. We were both still not feeling too great, still got a bit of the cold so we headed back to the hostel for an easy night, with a few games of pool.
The following day we decided to take a bamboo raft down the Li River and get some photos of the beautiful scenery, it was nice and relaxing and no sign of rain so it was the perfect day for our sail down the river. Got some brilliant photos, will get them uploaded. Some of the guys from our hostel told us about a burger place that was supposed to have the best burgers you have ever tasted, so that night we headed out to sample. OMG....it actually was the best burgers either of us have tasted!! We went back to the hostel to our usual stop, the rooftop bar which had a really good view of Yangshuo and Jonny played the hostel owner at pool again. Shay got a bit bored so headed down to the dorm......hours later Jonny came back, he had played pool for 5 straight hours haha.
Our time at Yangshuo was up, we needed to head back to Guilin to catch our sleeper train to Hong Kong so we were there in time to see Michael Buble....thats when the fun began.
Our sleeper train was at 9.20pm on the 9th, stupidly we went to Guilin a bit early thinking we could have a coffee somewhere to kill time, better early than late. Well Guilin is not a great place, and nobody speaks any English what so ever and there is no coffee shop in sight, oh and it was torrential rain so we were soaked, not a great start. We went back to the hostel we spent one night in and had a coffee there, killing time and then headed to our train.
When boarding our sleeper we realised the date on our tickets was wrong, it had been printed for the 12th of March instead of the 9th, they were not letting us on. We had 15 minutes to try and get tickets for this sleeper but with nobody speaking a word of English and the fact they didn't except payment by card for new tickets the train had left and we were stuck in Guilin. NOT IMPRESSED.
We headed back to the hostel we stayed once again, it was actually them who booked our train so we explained the situation and they were extremely helpful and apologetic even though it wasn't entirely their fault. In the end they booked us flights for the following morning and only charged us the original train fare and gave us a room for free and also paid for our taxi to the airport, so nice of them.
So after our very long and stressful day we are on our way to Hong Kong :)
J+B
- comments