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On Wednesday morning we piled onto a coach with all of our bags to make our way to Yangshuo, via the Li river and Yulong village. We were accompanied by the world's most enthusiastic tour guide, Yang, who talked non-stop in a mixture of English and Chinese for the entirety of the bus journey and was a big fan of audience participation: "My name is Yang - now practice it, Yang! Yang! Yang! Yes, good..." etc. At first I hated him for ruining my on-the-bus nap-time with his ridiculous selection of fun facts about Guilin, but in the end he was just too happy and excitable to be hated (some of the others disagree with me on this).
The first coach journey stopped by a tiny village at the side of the Li river. There were great Karst mountains looming up out of the mist on every side, and the grey skies and slight drizzle only made the scenery more dramatic. We were all divvied out in groups of four onto plastic imitation-bamboo rafts and then we set off slowly drifting around the bends in the river. I can't really think how to describe the mountains - the closest thing I can think of is when you dribble wet sand on top of sand-castles to make weird melted blobs and parapets, but that's not quite right either. It was really beautiful though; striking and impressive and a little bit unbelievable all at the same time. Yulong village, maybe one further hour's drive from this stop, was just as beautiful. This is apparently the place where lots of scenes from The Painted Veil(?) and a couple of other films were shot. We walked up to an allegedly-famous bridge from where we were able to look out across the view, which was completely peaceful and flat until it erupted into a range of strange lumpy mountains on the horizon. Then we paired off to be punted down the river on bamboo rafts (real, this time).
This time it wasn't the surrounding mountains that were the focus, but the lifestyle of the people who had traditionally lived there. We watched the world's grumpiest cormorant fisherman give a demonstration of how he would use the birds to catch fish, but this was definitely not as serene and harmonious as the old HSBC adverts made it look. First the guy, scowling, spat his cigarette out into the river and poled into the centre of a wide ring formed by all the tourist rafts. Then he grabbed a cormorant by the throat and hurled it bodily into the water after a fish thrown from a bucket on his raft; the cormorant caught the fish easily, hopped about trying to choke it down for a few seconds and splashed back to the raft; then the guy shoved his hand down its throat to wrestle the fish back out. He didn't even have the common decency to wear one of the pointy triangle hats the HSBC adverts led me to believe were integral to the cormorant-fishing process, which is just downright rude.
After the demonstration we continued down the river, with Yang jogging along the riverside behind us happily calling out instructions to enjoy ourselves through his megaphone. The rafts drew up at the bank a little further down so we could dismount and go to see the water buffalo stationed there. Yang popped up with a big bag of long grasses for us to feed to the buffalo, and we took turns climbing onto the buffalo to take photos which was all fun and games until I realised the water buffalo were secured not by ropes around their muzzles but by skinny ropes strung through their nostrils, which I imagine isn't desperately pleasant. Post-water buffalo, the next stop on our raft tour of the area was 'The Rapids', which consisted of a one foot drop by the most generous estimate. More villagers were stationed with SLR cameras to capture the fear of this moment and sell it to you by any means necessary. Mine and Pete's boat-man went with the tactic of parking us by the photo-selling station and just leaing us there indefinitely whilst he disappeared to smoke with his friends - a waste of time as we'd already told him several times that we had no money with us, in order to stop him forcing us into having our photos taken in mock-traditional outfits/holding cormorants/posing with rural props like... buckets. There was time for two more events as we were poled slowly back up the river to our start point: first, we all passed a couple having their wedding photos taken on a raft in the middle of the river and Nold, mistaking the set-up for a commercial photoshoot, loudly commented on the groom's physical unsuitability for a career in modelling. Secondly, Naomi's boat-man talked her into picking up the water pistol under her seat and viciously attacking all those on nearby rafts with it, which did not go down well with Nold and Pete, her primary victims. As soon as our three rafts pulled in at the jetty, they forced her to hand over her camera, then picked her up and dumped her into the river. (Her boat-man thought this was hilarious.) Somehow the sight of Naomi screaming and flailing about in the river convinced the rest of us that jumping in ourselves would be a good idea, so we did. The natural progression from jumping off the jetty was obviously jumping off the bridge we'd stood on earlier, so we doggy-paddled after some locals to ask if it was safe and tried diving to the bottom of the river under the bridge to check the depth ourselves. All seemed fine, so we hauled ourselves out of the river and dripped our way past lots of laughing locals and up onto the bridge. Originally Beth, Naomi and I were meant to jump off all together, but I chickened out as soon as I realised how high the bridge was, so Beth ended up going first, alone. Naomi went next, then me, and then the boys. I was absolutely terrified and had to scream as if I'd been stabbed just to psyche myself up enough to jump; the fall seemed to last for ages, you hit the water with a massive smash and pulling yourself back up to the surface seemed to take forever. A group of travellers eating lunch on the other side of the river spotted us though, and cheered and shouted each of us as we jumped, which was cool. Finding a plaster that was not my own stuck to my stomach when I showered later was less cool.
- comments
jim So, life in China is not as described in the HSBC ads: damn you and your false portrayals, ad industry running dogs. Still - sounds as if you had plenty to occupy and interest you. And I like the phrase 'a plaster that was not my own'. Glad to hear you have the sense to realise that jumping off bridges is something to be frightened of because it's DANGEROUS!