January 26, 2009 was the mark of the new lunar year, or Spring Festival, as it is known in mainland China. This year marks the triumphant return of the year of the Ox, coincidentally my Chinese zodiac sign, thus fate has brought me to China! For the new year i was in Guilin, located in the south west-ish Guangxi province. This is the place where Chinese artists and poets have come for thousands of years to draw inspiration from the natural beauty of the limestone peaks all around this region. We arrived at 4am sautrday, when we thought that we would get in closer to 10am, but were drastically misinformed about the length of our overnight bus journey. It was too early to reasonably call our host, so we hightailed it to McDonalds.
At home i have little but loathing for this establishment, except for the spicy mustard dipping sauce for the McNuggets, i could breath that stuff… but in China the golden arches have become somewhat of a beacon of light and hope. At 4am, having been abruptly awaken with techno music after sleeping in cots on the bumpiest and squeakiest bus ride of my life, i was in desperate need of somewhere to sit in warmth, put my stuff down and go pee. McDonalds is somewhere you can do all of these things, and for the latter, it generally has toilet paper. There were other people with the same mind set, thus when we walked in there were some people sleeping at tables and a crew playing a lively card game and eating cheeseburgers! We waited out for a more godly hour and then called our couchsurfing host, Alex, and took a taxi to his house on the East bank of the Li Jiang (river).
We freshened up a bit at his apartment and then he came out with us to tour Qi Xing Gong Yuan (seven star park) to view the aforementioned limestone peaks peppering the country side.
Very beautiful, though the weather was quite cold and it even hailed a little while we were walking around. We also went into seven star cave, which has an impressive array of stalagmite and stalactite formations all cleverly named and lit with colorful lights. i especially enjoyed “Lion looking back at Sheep”. We walked all through the park, including a mini-zoo, with a small menagerie with flamingos, herons and peacocks, oh my! Guilin has also just received some Giant Pandas, and they have Red Pandas too. The red ones look like a cross between a raccoon and a bear, too cute.
We ate some great food with Alex: local Guilin noodles, Ni Zi Gao (lotus flower cake), and of course some hot bubble tea to help warm us up as we walked around the night market that takes up one half of the main street in the central district.
The next morning we got up early to go to the train station to buy tickets to Nanning (from where we would head on to Viet Nam), then we hopped on a bus in the parking lot to go to a town called Yangshuo, about an hour away. Yangshuo is really amazing looking. The peaks are within walking distance and they just spring out of nowhere. The land all around them is as flat as anything and then there are these giant limestone points in every direction, they’re like nature’s skyscrapers. We took a river raft in the rain for about 30 RMB, though a great way to see the scenery, it was really freezing on the water. For lunch we had the famous local dish, Pi Jiu Yu (beer fish)
and it was delicious, spicy with green onions and a really nice sauce… (just for clarification i am still vegetarian but i have eaten fish about 6 times for sake of convenience when eating at people’s houses and trying new dishes that i might not otherwise get to eat).
Since it was the eve of the new year shops and restaurants were all closing up early so Ashley and i got on the bus back to Guilin to eat some dinner with our host and buy some fireworks! The only thing open past 8 ‘o clock that evening were fireworks stands, so we all bought some, big and small and multi-colored. Even before the sun went down that night people were setting off all over the city. The most popular seemed to be this long winding role of red, really noisy fire crackers. They made a flash of light, similar to a gunshot and so much noise that car alarms were going off all over the place. Once it was dark enough we went out to the courtyard and had a blast: we had these wands that you light and they shoot sparks off, kind of like a magic wand, and we also had these spinning, hoping little sparkly things. The night air was so filled with smoke that it almost looked like daytime… and midnight was amazing, giant fireworks went off all over the city and we could see a good portion of them from Alex’s balcony. We had to catch a train the next morning at 8am so we went to bed to the sound of cracks and pops…even at 6am when we were leaving the apartment people were still lighting up there leftovers!
We took a five hour train to Nanning and tried to buy a ticket to Hanoi, Viet Nam, but came to find that they wouldn’t sell the international ticket on New Year’s day so we had to spend the night in Nanning. Perhaps we were just cranky from the train trip, or faced with the realization that we would have to go another 48 hours without pho we turned on the city, but i hated being in Nanning! All over China i have had my likes and dislikes, but Nanning just plain sucked. It was dirty and crowded and we couldn’t find any bubble tea, or a proper grocery store, but our hotel was cheap, clean and close to the train station so we just chilled for a large portion of the time. Finally, we boarded the overnight train bound for Hanoi at 6:15pm on January 27. It was the nicest train i’ve ever been on and we shared our soft sleeper cabin with a cute, funny Chinese couple, Peter and Nana, who we got along with great! Other than being rudely awakened for the Vietnamese customs crossing it was a really pleasant traveling experience!
No comments:
Post a Comment