19 - 24 October 1987

Yangshuo - village at the Li river

In Guilin, famous because of its fantastic limestonehills along the river Li, we get on the bus, after a day and a half in the train, to the village of Yangshuo which is 80 km to the south. The "tourgroup-tourists" go to Guilin where the real hotels are to be found, the place for backpack-tourists is Yangshuo.At some time during their visit the tourgroup-tourists will visit Yangshuo as well: the tourboats from Guilin that go down the river Li everyday for the magnificent views, end up in Yangshuo at about three o'clock. The tourists walk down the main street, that is filled at that time with souvenirstalls and anything else sellable to tourists, to the buses that will bring them back to Guilin. After an hour the main street is quiet again, and Yangshuo once again seems a sleepy Chinese village. Seems, because at the time we arrive Yangshuo already has a reputation as being the place for backpacktravellers in China.

We notice it immediately on our arrival at the muddy long-distance busstation. From everywhere people come to us to take us with them to their hotels. We choose the "Holiday Inn" (surely not one of the famous chain of hotels). The " Holiday Inn" in Yangshuo is my introduction to low-budget accommodation, in these kind of hotels I will (happily) sleep most of the time during this journey and on my later travels as well, but it is a bit of a shock to me at first. We are led to a bare concrete cubicle(3 metres square) which has a door to the half-open walkway. There is a little window looking out on the walkway with a cloth to cover it, two beds with matresses and some blankets, a table in between and a lightbulb at the ceiling. But quite clean and dry and for just $2.50 a night (the two of us!). The showers and toilets are down the walkway and there's just cold water from the shower (only when we leave we notice we could have had a hot shower at another floor) but the view from the (open, no glass) shower-window is magnificent: the view is straight to oone of those beautiful, wood-covered, lime-stonehills, that the area is so famous for. Taking a shower in Yangshuo really is a treat.

Oranges were in season at the market in Yangshuo, it suited us well with all the rain and cold. (Move the arrow over the picture to see an explication of the weighing contraption the woman is holding. Click to see only the explicating drawing, click again for the photo.)

Yangshuo is a very nice place to be anyway. The atmosphere is relaxed and easy-going. There are at the time some restaurants with an eye for the future that cater for backpackers and adapted the cooking and surroundings likewise. The menu's are photocopied in English, popmusic is played and beer and coffe served plenty. Seven year later I was in Yangshuo again, it still was a nice village but it had gone a bit too far, everything centered around the tourist business. The streets were full of hotels, restaurants, bike-rentals, boattrip-companies, cormorant demonstrations (at night fish is caught from bamboorafts with the help of especially trained cormorants) and anything that might be of interest to a tourist. Of course the beautiful scenery remained the same, but we were no longer stared at at the market place for the sole reason of being European by Chinese from further afield.
In 1987 tourism had only just begun, and the only thing that could spoil our stay in Yangshuo a little was the rain that kept on falling. (Check out a A rainy day in Yangshuo for a virtual experience!) We could not take clear pictures of hte limestone rockformations, the tops stayed in humid mists all the time. It wasn't very warm either outside, that's why, after a day or so, both of us caught colds from the ongoing rain plus cold showers in the hotel. Only when we left, by bus towards Wuzhou from where a boat would take us to Canton (Guangzhou), the sun at least began to shine.

View of Yangshuo from a hilltop, at the bottom in the middle you see the long-distance busstation, our hotel was at the other side of the road.