Guilin - Home of 1,000 Carps

Place: Guilin, China

Language: Mandarin Chinese

Hello: Nĭ hău (knee how)

Thank you: Xièxie (shie shie)

We are just hanging out at the apartment this weekend, waiting for Morgan to call us, so I decided to post a blog about our travels to Guilin and Yangshuo.

[For those of you who don't know what/where Guilin is, just look up page 422 in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die (we're steadily making our way through this book by the way). For those of you who haven't bought this book even though I told you to, it's about an hour plane ride northwest of Hong Kong in the province of Guangxi.]

We left on Thursday night for a short weekender of action-packed adventure. The flight was non-eventful and we landed in Guilin around 8pm. Yet again, we have another story from the airport in Guilin. It seems that we can't start any vacation without some sort of note-worthy airport experience. My pea-sized bladder apparently couldn't survive the hour long plane ride so I rushed out of the plane in search of Le Toilet and came across this sign:

DO WHAT???!?!?! I was laughing so hard I just about didn't make it to the bathroom but luckily I did, without my passenger friend, and everything came out just fine,thanks for asking.

We made it out of the airport without further incident or confusing signs and made our way to the hotel. By the time we got there, it was late and we were both starving so we went to Congee City Restaurant, recommended by the concierge because it had a great variety of food available. So, I had some very tasty beef and vegetables with rice while Marc decided to go off the reservation and eat this:

Guesses anyone? I will give anyone who guesses correctly (and hasn't heard this story yet) $20 USD. Here is a close-up:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is duck jaw. Marc, in his infinite wisdom, decided to voluntarily eat the beak, tongue, ear canal and jaw ligaments of DUCK. Seriously? Out of all the things on that menu and he picks DUCK JAW? Granted, some of the other options weren't very appetizing either:

• Duck tongue (for those who don't want the ear canal I suppose)
• Soft-shell turtle
• That reptile I hate whose name starts with an S
• Donkey meat
• Guilin river snail (a local delicacy, how do you say escargot in Chinese?)
• Pig pizzle (what? There is some pig pizzle in the hizzle?)
• Sparrow (a "special kind of fish" according to the menu)
• Mouse-like fish (so, is it hairy?)
• Frog saute
• Squid on a stick
• Congee (I have no idea what it is, but you could order congee with EVERYTHING)

I'm all for being adventurous, but come on folks, some things just aren't meant to be eaten. Besides, Marc said it was kind of gristly and didn't have a lot of meat on it. Really? Does any animal have muscles around its mouth? Like I said, I stuck to my safe beef and vegetables and got plenty to eat. [I've been chastised for writing about gross Chinese delicacies because I'm deterring potential visitors from coming to Hong Kong, so I'm making more of an effort to elaborate that you can get a side of normal Western food to go along with duck jaw if you so choose.]

The next day, we woke up early to board our Li River cruise boat. Now, Marc and I are not the tour types, we like to set forth on our own adventure not shuffled like cattle from one must-see tourist attraction to another. However, some things we can't do on our own, like boating down the Li River (which is what the book recommended). So, we got on board with 100 other tourists and this kid:

Boy was HE excited to be there, he could hardly stay in his seat. Luckily, once we were moving, we were allowed to move all over the boat, including the top deck where we could take some spectacular pictures.

The scenery in this province of China is full of strange narrow limestone mountains called karsts. I kept forgetting what they were called, so throughout the trip, I kept saying "Take a picture of THAT corpse, it looks like a pencil!" or "Holy carp!" It was funny at the time. Marc ignored me and instead took so many pictures that I made him go through them all and delete 75% of them. Here is one we kept:

Marc's visions of the foggy Chinese-y mountain-scape was coming true and he was like a kid in a candy store. It was (secretly) very cute (shhhh, don't tell him).

On the boat, we met some Americans, the first since we moved to Hong Kong except for 1 of Marc's co-workers. It's amazing how many Brits and Aussies we run into, but Americans really are the minority. It was comforting to hear American accents and we spent some time telling the tour group members where to go in Hong Kong (their next stop on their itinerary).

The other group of tourists on our boat was a loud group of Spaniards who asked me to take their picture. When I said "Sure, no problem" in Spanish, they got even louder "Oh! She speaks Castellano! Let's get her to take a group picture!" One group picture turned into 20 and 5 minutes later, I was part of their group and even invited to dinner! Marc and I had other plans, so we declined but it was just really neat to meet other tourists who spoke our language(s) and who were enjoying China as much as we were.

We disembarked at Yangshuo 5 hours and 6,762.5 pictures later and found ourselves in a quaint farming river-town with more karsts and bicycles galore. Lonely Planet had offered this interesting item: "If you're like most, you'll come to Yangshuo for a couple of days after the Li River cruise but end up staying far longer." Even though it was a sleepy little town, it had so many things to do, we could easily have stayed a week exploring the town and its surrounding areas.

The main area of town next to the river is a big pedestrian walking mall with tons of unique Chinese handicrafts, paintings, clothes, fake Rolexes (of course), traditional musical instruments and jewelry. Also in town were tons of little coffeehouses and restaurants aimed at tourists' palates. You could get Italian, Greek, English pub food, even pizza! And it was good, not the weird concoctions we find sometimes when we go to the Pizza Hut in Hong Kong (prawn pizza anyone?).

We found our way to our hotel and quickly rented bikes, THE mode of transportation. Then, we rode along the river-side to a local market and made a pit-stop for Marc to play an intense game of ping-pong with one of the locals. It went like this:

• Marc sees Chinese men playing an intense game of ping-pong in the park.
• Marc says he wants to play ping-pong.
• I say OK, but they are going to kick your butt.
• Marc says I know.
• Marc plays old man at ping pong.
• Old man beats the pants off Marc at ping pong.

HELLO! They're Chinese, they invented ping-pong, what did you expect?

While Marc was getting schooled, I sat on the curb next to the guy whose head you see in the picture. We got to talking and he asked me how I was enjoying Yangshuo. I told him I really liked it and it was a very pretty town. Then, he asked me to fill out a page in a journal he had with my thoughts on his home town. His journal was just a regular black and white composition book but I could tell it had been used a lot. I flipped through the pages and saw about 100 pages filled with comments from other tourists from all over the world. How neat! I wrote a few paragraphs and he practiced his reading in English while I helped him with some of the harder words. Marc and I both agreed that this graze with the Locals was one of the most interesting moments of our trip.

Later that evening, we went back into town to line up some activities for the next day and called it an early night. Stay tuned for days 3 and 4 of our Yangshuo adventure. In the meantime, here's a video from our Li River cruise, you can see one of our newfound Spanish friends yet another picture at the end of the video. Enjoy!