Getting Fancy in Guangxi

See, that’s extra funny because in order to rhyme with Guangxi you have to pronounce “fancy” like “faahncy”, which sounds fancy. Stellar.

The province of Guangxi has (deservedly) been the darling of Chinese travel for decades: with its incredible landscapes and amazing old towns, the provincial capital Guilin was the first city to open to tourists after the creation of the People’s Republic. The Chinese refer to Guilin as the most beautiful place below heaven, and children learn about it in primary school. It is, however, eclipsed by its smaller neighbours Yangshuo and Xingping, which are like Guilin on crack… It’s not for nothing that the guidebooks tell you to travel from Guilin to Yangshuo rather than the other way round – it’s good advice to avoid disappointing comparisons!

We rolled into Guilin early on a very cold and drizzly evening and took a walk from the bus stop to our hostel through the enormous walls surrounding the Ming Palace to our hostel.

It being a Friday night, the night markets were in full swing. We wandered for a few hours soaking up the atmosphere and had our first bowl of the famous Guilin rice noodles – as Nick describes them, the Subway of noodles. Handed a bowl of delicate rice noodles, with spices, three types of meat and some vegetables, you then add soy boiled eggs, pickled beans, chili sauce, fermented bean paste and raw spring onions, a deep fried dough stick for dipping, perhaps some tofu skin, and then however much boiling water suits your desired soupiness. The Guilinese tend to eat this for breakfast (for which it is amazing), but we ate it for breakfast, lunch or dinner depending when the mood struck!

While in Guilin, we visited the symbol of the city – the elephant drinking from the river – and climbed to its back (and through its eyes?! a natural tunnel through the ‘head’ of the elephant), as well as the Sun and Moon Pagodas and marvelled at all the pointy karst hills scattered throughout the city.

We also took a day trip to a village called Daxu, founded in 200 AD and for centuries an important market town (the name literally means Big Market). The Lonely Planet had assured us it was a sleepy spot, however a bus route seems to have sprung up since that was written and the main intersection of the town was awash with weekending locals from the big city. Nonetheless, a few steps from the main intersection in any direction provided beautiful glimpses into ancient shop fronts and cobbled alleyways.

From Guilin we caught a bus to Yangshuo (in what is becoming a bit of a theme in bus travel for us, we were the only people on the entire bus) and arrived in an absolute sea of karst peaks, with a crazy neon tourist town nestled between them.

Arriving mid afternoon, we took a punt on a minivan to Xianggong Mountain to watch the sunset. A hair-raising ride through switchbacks and a very steep climb later, we rounded a bend to one of the most gobsmacking views of our short and sunny lives.

The sunset was a bit of a rort (we were facing entirely the wrong direction) but it didn’t detract from the hours we spent ogling the Li River and its outrageous array of mountains. The viewing area looked like it was built to hold the entire population of China (that’s 1.4 billion, by the way, 1 billion and 395 million ish more than New Zealand), but we shared it with about ten other people.

From that bird’s eye view we took the worm’s eye view the next morning, embarking on a 40 km bike ride through the Yulong River Valley. Having totally missed the bike path for the first hour or so (it was completely unmarked and it turned out it was entered through the carpark of a random hotel) we spent a wee while cycling through awful concrete developments and tragic blots on the otherwise staggering landscape before finding our way to the riverside. Watching people punt down the river on bamboo rafts, stopping for lunch and a beer in a small village full of chickens and dodging selfie-takers tottering out of the long grass we crossed the Dragon Bridge by late afternoon and started towards home.

Already pushed for time, we soon realised Nick had a flat tyre – at the furthest possible point from our hostel! However, the village ladies soon had him sorted out.

By this stage we had very sore butts, but the even more incredible views that the still evening brought, and the more bucolic/less touristy vibe on the other side of the river powered us all the way home. Well, that and the lift we got on a bamboo raft from a local boatman when we got trapped on the wrong side of the river!

The next day saw us take a much more leisurely tour of the Li River from Xingping, seeing the cliffs, mountains and bends of the river we’d looked at from Xianggoing Mountain from a motorised raft – including the scene on the back of the 20 Yuan note. We also had to get a Chinese massage to recover from our bike ride!

We were so lucky to see these landscapes when we did – with perfect weather but not bursting with tourists. To little old New Zealanders, it felt like there were people and touts everywhere, but we just had to look at the enormous amounts of infrastructure in place for queuing to know that in the summertime you might not have space to ride your bike along the river at all!!

Tearing ourselves away from beautiful (but hectic) Yangshuo, we took a bus with another couple from our hostel and one other young woman to the town of Dazhai. Well, almost to Dazhai – we came to a halt in a lovely New Zealand-esque river valley and our fellow passengers managed to translate the driver’s message that there had been a rock fall and the road was blocked. We were to gather our things and walk over the rock fall and he would take us the rest of the way on another bus on the other side. And – surreally - that’s exactly what happened!

On our eventual arrival in Dazhai, the five of us set off to our hostel, a 40 minute walk up the rice terraces. A beautiful, meandering and very lost 2.5 hour hike followed, accompanied by a golden retriever who took it upon himself to adopt us, and we finally found our accommodation in Tiantou Village. Thank goodness Nick had downloaded his standard number of apps at the commencement of this trip – we were saved by an obscure offline map app he had installed on the advice of a random Singaporean man we met at a train station McDonald’s. We were later told that if we’d just trusted the dog, he probably would have got us there faster.

The power was out in Tiantou as a result of our old friend the rock fall, but the local specialty is sticky rice, bacon and sweet potato cooked in bamboo over coals so we didn’t go hungry.

We ended up spending extra time in Tiantou, with the weather totally still and variously misty and sunny, the place was seriously peaceful and almost inescapably relaxing (well, except when the 20 Swedish teenagers arrived for a night). And the food was so damn good, the cat so damn cuddly and the dogs so damn cute that we just couldn’t tear ourselves away. Apart from a three-hour hike to the Music From Heaven lookout and the Three Golden Buddha lookout, we spent most of our time eating, playing cards, reading and losing at foosball.

Our next destination, Chengyang, was similarly peaceful, but the trip to get there was so tediously time consuming we ended up spending only a few waking hours there! A tea growing area and home to the Dong minority group, the Chengyang villages are famous for their tea soup (which we didn’t try, sounds a bit yuck), ‘wind and rain bridges’ and drum towers, none of which use nails in their construction. They’ve also been the location for many Jackie Chan movies.

Another day in Guilin followed, where we reunited with our buddies from Tiantou (those who climb rock falls together stay together), ate a lot of goose and tried the famous beer fish (Li River carp cooked in local beer) and some durian. Now we’re travelling on a bullet train, with a Jackie Chan movie playing on repeat overhead, eating pot noodles and snickers bars and feeling pretty stoked with the last couple of weeks!