Hartley, that’s great writing! 
I enjoyed your stories very much. I also pity you for having taken the tour option. I’ve been to Yangshuo (near Guilin) twice, intentionally bypassing all that tourist crap and going the backpacker route based on Lonely Planet advice. Now I know there are a few jaded souls here who aren’t LP fans, but there’s a lot of good advice in there, and back in '94 and '97, following its advice and skipping Guilin proper, camping in Yangshuo, renting bikes and putting them on a rented boat running most of the way up the Li river towards Guilin, then hopping off and riding back through the hills on the bikes was a fantastic trip.
another off topic - I apologize. It was indeed a pleasure meeting you,hartley, JDsmith and all the others. I dont know why they call it just a happy hour, I was there for two hours or more and all the time was quite happy :bravo: 
Oh, not a real traveller then. Not only do I never eat at foreign fast food outlets when travelling, I avoid visiting countries that have McDonalds. 
[/quote]
Which means you limit travels to about three countries? 
[/quote]
DAY THREE
The usual morning call came at a time that was now becoming worryingly normal, and I panicked for a while that this tour had prematurely accelerated me into the sleeping habits of an old man. I commanded us downstairs to breakfast in spritely fashion, Anita moaning that it was far too early and she needed more sleep.
“Hah, young people today,” I muttered, attempting to admire the buffet selection.
Luckily, it was just the right side of edible, so long as I concentrated on the spring roll /fried egg section of the buffet and ignored the congee/tentacles area which, even at a sane time of day I don’t think I would have been piling my plate with.
First stop of the day – a cave. After half an hour of being led round various sections of said cave, and made to stand in particular spots while the tour guide informed us that this or that looked like a mushroom or a sweet-corn or Richard Stilgoe’s left nostril, I decided I’d had enough.
“That does not look like a bag of French fries,” I whispered to Anita, “this is ridiculous, I’m going back up. All of these things just look like strangely shaped pieces of stone, which is not surprising because we’re in a cave and cave’s are made of stone. It’s just not interesting at all.”
“You have to use your imagination baby,” she said endearingly, seeing that I was almost at the end of my tether.
“I’ve got a great imagination – remember that time at your parents house when I entertained the nephews and nieces with my tricks and stories,” she winced at the memory, “it’s just not for this kind of thing. I need to leave – explain to them that I feel sick, I have to go back to the bus.”
“You see that one over there,” she sighed, pointing to a vaguely familiar looking column of rock, “that one looks like an enormous penis.”
“NO IT D-,” actually it did, “oh yeah, ha ha ha. That’s funny. And look, over there it’s a pair o-,”
“Shhh,” she admonished, “we haven’t got to those yet.”
“Where are we going next?” we were back on the bus, the pornographic rock formations half an hour or so behind us.
“Erm,” she looked vaguely afraid, never a good sign, “it’s another cave.”
“What?”
“Just one more cave, that’s all.”
“But we’ve just been to one – this is a five day tour, couldn’t they, for example, put the two CAVES on DIFFERENT DAYS perhaps?”
“Don’t shout, it’s rude.”
“What’s bloody rude is two caves back to back when I can’t understand a ____ing word they’re saying and in any case everything they show us just looks like rocks – because that’s exactly what they are!” I calmed a little, aware that the issue was probably more to do with lack of sleep and worrying about the onset of senility than caves per se, “except for the penis and balls - they really did look like a penis and balls.”
“Well maybe there’ll be more of them in the next one?” she tried bravely, “do you want me to ask?”
“No… I’ll be alright. Sorry.”
Anita settled back into her seat and tried to concentrate on the incessant babbling of the tour guide. There were those of us in the group who believed she had actually forgotten how not to speak and that what we were being subjected to every day was in fact the result of some hideously degenerative mental disease.
The second cave wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated – there were no sexual organs, but it was the biggest cave in Asia, which was vaguely impressive, there were bats, which excited me somehow, and we got to ride a boat in the underground lake that eventually led us back out into the real world, which was a bit special. I particularly enjoyed trailing my hand in the cool water as we were rowed along. The tour guide would look at me from time to time, give a smile and say “so funny,” which I though was nice. At least she was trying.
It was only as we got out, and the guide went to talk to Anita, that I learned she wasn’t admiring my Mr Bean-like skills of physical comedy at all, but actually saying something in Chinese which translated as: “Get your hand out of the water you moron, it’s dangerous.”
On dry land we suddenly found ourselves in a warehouse filled with large bags of dried mushrooms. Little cups and plates were thrust into my hand and I was forced to enjoy an unexpected elevenses of mushroom soup, fried mushroom pieces and something which tasted mushroomy, but didn’t look or feel mushroomy and I can only imagine that it was mushroom. Or someone’s leftover breakfast.
We were, of course, expected to buy these mushrooms, but no-one really wanted to. However, the bus driver was obviously in cahoots and didn’t turn up for another hour, by which time half our group had bought mushrooms out of sheer boredom.
Lunch was a much hyped ‘taro festival’ lunch, which everyone had been raving about for the last few hours. This may have been more to do with the inherent monotony of caves than the taro itself, but in any case we were all excited. Taro, if you don’t know, is a purple, starchy tuberous root. Mmmmm, I can imagine your drooling already. The taste is actually quite enjoyable, which is why we were all eagerly sat round the table to see how many different ways it could be presented and what different flavours and textures might be coming our way. As it turned out, there was only one flavour and texture coming our way –the flavour and texture of taro. I now know that it doesn’t matter whether you boil it, poach it in sauce or fry it in batter and sugar it, it all tastes basically the same. So to sum it up, the best part of our third day was taken up by looking at rocks and eating purple potato in various disguises.
Immediately after lunch the bus took us to our hotel and left us there. I think this may have been in recognition of the fact that our morning had not exactly been the epitome of variety and in any case we had been on the go since before God woke up. It was a smart move whatever the reason was, because this was far and away the best hotel we had stayed at. Quite close to the system of caves, but for all intents and purposes in the middle of nowhere, with the mountains all around us and just a few stands and basic shops dotted around. We did go to a local show later that night, and we had a reasonable meal but the main memory I have is of going out onto our balcony at one in the morning, sitting for an hour and watching the flash lightning illuminate the mountains from somewhere far away. And then coming back in, thinking ‘God, I could do with a good old bottle of Tsingtao’ and looking in the directory only to find:
“For room services please call between 5:30 and 6:30pm yesterday.”
DAY FOUR
The hotel may have been nice, but breakfast had taken a turn for the worse. There was not a single piece of food on display that I could envisage ever wanting to eat. Even the orange juice, which I did try, was lukewarm and watered down.
“Just have something,” said Anita, “it will be okay.”
But then she attempted whatever was on her plate, put the chopsticks back down and gave the sludge in front of her a look of disappointment.
“John… have you still got chocopie?”
I did indeed have an emergency supply of chocopie upstairs in my bag, and we trooped back to enjoy it. Now I realize that to many of you, traveling to China and resorting to Chocopie for breakfast is tantamount to blasphemy, but that’s okay. Because I don’t care.
The rest of the morning was taken up with a three-hour bus ride back to Guilin. The highlight of this was stopping off at a roadside toilet, when the bus driver realized that laughing off our protestations of bladder capacity was not going to work anymore, because at least one of us was starting to leak. I’d heard stories about the toilet situation in China – little children wandering round with holes in their trouser-arse to facilitate a speedy dump, cubicles with no doors, lending an almost communal feel to the experience. Up until now, I’d seen no evidence of any of this.
All of that was about to change.
The cubicles in the service station toilet had no doors, and two of them didn’t even have a dividing wall. I wondered if some people actually preferred this arrangement. Perhaps the lack of dividing wall was a selling point, allowing for ease of discussion and perhaps even debate over size, consistency and quantity. Did one look away when it came to wiping, or was it proper to rate technique and give your opinion as to colour? Thankfully, it didn’t matter, because I only needed to pee. For the girls though, it was a whole different ballgame. They eventually came back, after I had been sat on the bus for about half an hour imagining, in the paranoid way I often do, that Anita had got sick of me and led everyone else off to do something fantastically interesting.
“Where were you?”
“In the toilet?”
“For half an hour?!” did she have inclinations that I had somehow managed to overlook in our four years together?
“Yes – there we had to use the cubicle at the end… and we had to use the secret position so nobody could see.”
“What’s the secret position?”
“You can’t know,” she shook her head, “it’s a secret.”
We arrived back, passing through the main part of Guilin, and for the first time I saw that it was actually quite poor and run down. Clearly the Waterfall hotel, where we had previously been quartered was in the better area of town and had very little to do with the day-to-day life that went on here. The guide attempted to distract us from the appalling poverty outside by singing another song, which made us all feel quite poor and want to be outside, no matter how dirty and disgusting it was. We eventually arrived at a seafood restaurant that did nice crab’s claws covered in a kind of cheesy batter. Halfway through the meal, which was the usual Chinese style shared dishes, they brought in sesame cake. Now this is not really cake, more dense bread, and the first sign of any kind of bread I had seen since Taiwan. I immediately ate five pieces, ignoring the bereaved looks shooting around me.
“Baby, you can’t eat all of it, other people want some.”
“Mfwmmffnnn,” I managed, greedily snatching another piece for my plate before spinning the table round at such velocity that, hopefully, the bread would whiz past everyone and come back to me, whereupon I would profess that I had tried my best but no-one wanted any, and scoff the remaining three slices. Predictably the rest of the group were having none of this and fell upon the remnants with all the zeal of the newly converted, leaving me to look forlornly round the table for something else which might remind me of Western food. I finally settled for something that looked and tasted a bit like mashed potato. I had several mouthfuls while trying to convince myself that it was mashed potato, rather than some hideous mashed-potato-of-the-sea type animal, which is what it actually was, and left feeling rather ill.
Our post-prandial activity was seven-star park, which - picking up on yesterday’s theme - was just a park, although they did have a large area devoted to stone calligraphy. I’d never had much of an interest in stone calligraphy before but – oh, that’s right, and I still have no interest in stone calligraphy. A very pleasant man did spend over an hour attempting to fan my small spark of curiosity into a flame of enthusiasm, but given that he was speaking a language I don’t understand (in several senses) and that I was still fighting a battle against disgusting sea creature nausea, he was never going to make much headway. Ah, headway. Eventually he wandered off and we continued on our way, distracting ourselves by cruelly teasing a family of small monkeys that popped out of nowhere. One of us would hold our hand out as if we had a treat, and then pull it back at the last instant. This was all great fun until we realized that the monkeys were only feigning interest in our pseudo-snacks to work out the best way of stealing our cameras, money and various other valuables. After a brief Planet of the Apes style battle, we hurried on our way, and the simian bastards skimpered off into the trees empty handed.
The park wore us out just nicely for a massage close to the waterfall hotel, where we would be returning for our final evening. This massage had cost us 100 RMB for two hours – agreed in advance with the tour guide. That may sound good, but once there we saw signs outside which suggested it could be had for much less. A further hint was that when we handed over the money inside, the masseurs who saw how much it was displayed the kind of dismayed look I’m used to seeing on the faces of my Taiwanese students when they decide to turn up at one of my shows on the strength that I occasionally make them laugh in class. The massage was good though. Well, it was better than one of my shows.
There was time afterwards to nap for an hour or so in our room, which was welcome, then a very beer-centred meal, which was excellent, although I can’t remember what any of the food was. We staggered out to the ‘Guinness World Record Waterfall Show’ where gallons of water cascaded down the outside of the hotel to music. It was all very nice, but after three minutes we decided to leave it to be very nice on its own, while we explored Guilin’s shopping possibilities. I found a great bookstore that had the not-as-bad-as-everyone-says Poseidon remake on DVD for 22RMB, Anita found a supermarket with condensed-milk paste and rambutan and a six-year old boy scurried past us, obviously looking for something, before seeing a large crack in the pavement, hunkering down and shitting in it.
“He has a hole in his trousers!” I exclaimed joyfully.
“I hope so,” answered Anita.
Hartley, can I conclude that you are not enjoying your trip to Guilin? I took a tour there in '97 and abosutely loved it. If fact, I’ve only ever had good experiences with the local tour guides in China and that includes Guilin, Beijing, Guangzhou, and all the stops along the way when I cruised up the Yangtze from Wuhan to Chongqing to Chengdu.
The only bad experience I’ve ever had was with the Hong Kong tour leader (this was the Yangtze tour, starting point was Hong Kong) who didn’t do much, arbitrarily removed a particular stop in our itinerary, and still expected a big tip at the end of the trip. She’s been on this tour countless times and is bored out of her mind – and it showed. She wasn’t actually a tour guide but was the one that interfaced with the local restaurants and tour guides.
In Guilin, Beijing and Guangzhou, I was in a group of 8 or less and we rode around in little vans (麵包車). The tour guides were all very funny and had interesting anecdotes. The Guilin tour guide had some very interesting stories about the local tribes there, who have their own local laws and customs. Guangxi is an autonomous province, after all. There were stories about salacious marriage practices, nude hot springs, eating habits, etc. Knowing the language goes a long way as I was able to converse with the tour guide. I don’t think the ABC couple from Boston with barely passable Mandarin got as much out of the tour guides as I did though. All in all, Guilin was very enjoyable, including the caves.
Here’s one embarrasing anecdote about my trip to Guilin. After dinner, four of us from the tour decided to walk around the vicinity of the hotel. When we were heading back, we passed by a fruit stand. We stop to inquire about the prices. The guy at the fruit stand took out a hand-held weight scale, did a bunch of hokus pokus calculations, and haggled with us for a bit. I think we got confused with all of this because by the time we got back to our hotel rooms, we realized we had just paid US$10 for 4 bananas and 2 peaches!! The guy must have thought, “Stupid tourist…”. He’d be right! 
DAY FIVE
“It’s quarter past eight!” I bounced out of bed, “come on – we’ll have missed everything!”
“Late start la,” she mumbled from underneath the covers, “nine o’clock.”
“What about breakfast?”
Her head appeared from somewhere, “if you want the breakfast, go and eat it.”
I reflected on my previous early dining experiences and had to agree that getting an extra half hour in bed was far more attractive.
“You’re right,” I collapsed back into bed, “ I don’t even feel like a chocopie.”
And so began the final day of our package trip.
There had to be some kind of misunderstanding here.
“I can’t go up in that,” I tried to smile, but it just wouldn’t come.
“You have to,” this was the firmest I had ever seen Anita, she was even waggling a finger, “it’s the only way up the mountain.”
I took another look at the chairlift and tried to imagine it with me in.
“No… no, it’s just impossible,” by now the rest of the tour group had stopped getting onto the chairlift themselves to see what was going on. From the look on their faces, they suspected I knew something about this that they had missed. Perhaps back in the UK ‘The Great Guilin Chairlift Catastrophe’ had been front-page news.
“It’s okay,” Anita told them in Chinese, “it’s okay, he’s like this sometimes.”
“Don’t you remember?” I decided to remind her of my psychological problem – well, this psychological problem, “my twenty-first birthday? In Denver? In a cherry-picker with Tom Kruse? Collapsed onto a roof? Haven’t been able to go on roller-coasters, chairlifts or double-decker buses since?”
She stared at me blankly.
“Oh come on,” surely she knew about this, “this was one of the major experiences of my life, I talk about it all the time. Half of my comedy material is based on that. Half of that manuscript you read through last month was about it, half of my life still revolves around that one experience.”
She continued her blank stare.
“You didn’t read that manuscript at all, did you?”
“It is okay,” the tour guide approached us, speaking in English for the first time in five days, “I will stay in the bus with Hartley. You will only be gone two and a half hours. I will have the time to tell him the tours he didn’t understand.”
“It gets really steep up there, do you see?
“Yes, I see,” she soothed, allowing me to grip her hand tightly, “just listen to the music.”
The music was a blend of classical and elevator that was designed to make me forget about the fact that I was dangling a hundred feet above the earth from a piece of wire, which was on the verge of ascending almost vertically up the steepest part of the mountain. It wasn’t working.
“Do you think we might fall?”
“No, not at all.”
“Why not – look, it’s just wire. That’s all, wire, and we’re too heavy. I should never have eaten all those chocopies. Or that sesame cake.”
“If you don’t be quiet, I will push you off.”
“Urk.”
I don’t know how we got to the top, but we did, at which point Anita revealed that we could either take the chairlift back down or pay extra and zoom down individually in a silver bobsled contraption along what amounted to an incredibly long metal slide.
“Then you won’t have to go back on the chairlift!” she smiled, obviously pleased that she had solved my problem.
“I want to take the chairlift,” I muttered, paling at the thought of navigating my way slowly down the mountain in a bobsled, brake half on and someone smashing into the back of me. Possibly Anita smashing into the back of me, which from the look on her face she probably wouldn’t mind.
The top of the mountain, like everything else we’d experienced so far, was given over to as many different ways of relieving tourists of their cash as they could possibly fit. Trying to take a picture of my wife at a particularly scenic spot, I was elbowed aside by someone – I took him to be an admirer – who also wanted to take her picture. Before I could focus my rage in the appropriate way, he was gone, only to come back moments later with a print out of the photo he had just taken.
“Let me guess,” I snapped, “25 RMB?”
“25 RMB!” he smiled, glad that we were able to communicate on some level.
“I already have that photo,” I showed him the display on my camera.
“Ah!” he looked startled, then waggled a finger at me and held out his hand, “25 RMB!”
Anita and I thought that was funny, but not funny enough to pay for. I’ve been funny for much longer than that and made nothing, so I didn’t see why he should be any different.
The chairlift down was not much fun, but halfway down I saw someone streaking suicidally down the silver slide that we’d been told about earlier, and it made me feel slightly better. In fact it made me feel a lot better, because not only did that look far more dangerous than what I was doing, if we should happen to fall, there was at least the glimmer of a hope that we might land on the metal track and just slide all the way down.
The bus returned us to the airport, where we would have a full two hours to explore the multitude of duty free goods. Unfortunately, as with most airports, the range, variety and price of items on offer were, respectively, small, small and too big, so I spent the time alternating between the toilet (I’m scared of flying) and Jon Krakensomethingorother’s book about mormons.
The Air Macau flight left on time, and despite some negative reviews on the internet, the service was just fine, though I would have preferred it if the pilot hadn’t called himself by the single name of ‘Johnson’ as this put in mind someone who you might hire on a weekly basis to mop floors, rather than fly an aeroplane. At the stopover in Macau I indulged myself with a variety pack of chunky kit-kats and a box of ‘Celebrations’, which cost more than they should have.
“Are they for your colleagues?” Anita questioned, the cost furrowing her brow.
“Of course they are,” I answered, trying to think of where I could hide them for the brief time consumption would take, oh sod it “actually…no, they’re for me.”
“Expensive la!”
“Yes…well,” this was going to be tricky, “you know… there’s always the chance we might crash…and if we go down, the last thing I want to be thinking is ‘I wish I’d bought those kit-kats’… do you see?”
At which point she turned and walked away and I, following the argument to its logical conclusion, opened the box and teased out the first of my bulky red friends.
She was probably one of the ‘tour directors’ that in the past joined tourgroups to Europe and got big fat commissions and tips and had the good life … now assigned to run around in China it brings less money … well markets shift and she probably doesn’t like it …
The job of a tourdirector is for a big part trying to guide you into the better shops and make you buy the more expensive things … Swiss watches, parfum in Paris, glass in Venice, cristal in Austria, diamonds in Amsterdam …
Non of these things in China … only dried mushrooms …
BTW, Hartley … good writing, fine humour …
Oh, I suspect Hartley had a great time. Look at all the material he came up with.
[quote=“belgian pie”]The job of a tourdirector is for a big part trying to guide you into the better shops and make you buy the more expensive things … Swiss watches, parfum in Paris, glass in Venice, cristal in Austria, diamonds in Amsterdam …
Non of these things in China … only dried mushrooms …[/quote]
Well, her job was more mundane, which was to take head counts on and off the cruise ship and buses and herd us all to the local guide whenever there was a shore excursion. Her other job was to make sure the restaurant served us food when we got there. It was the job of the local guides to take us to the prearranged shops – tea, pottery, pearls, jade. I’m sorry we missed the dried mushroom store.
Sorry to hijack this thread from Hartley. The Li River cruise was wonderful as well. I really felt like I was in the middle of a Chinese painting.
Oh, I suspect Hartley had a great time. Look at all the material he came up with.[/quote]
Touché.
Hartley,
A marvelous tale 
It reminded me very much of our company holiday to Guilin last year… Same damned caves but we did them on different days. Myself and some of my colleagues managed to lose our guide in the larger of the two and got completely lost. We finally ventured out through the entrance (not the exit) to the bemusement of the, I’m sure armed, security guards… 
Our company had splashed out on a 5 star hotel, so breakfasts were actually something to look forward to. 
The only downside for me was that being single at the time and the only weiguoren on the tour I no one to moan at… :silenced:
I did get some good pictures though → Here…
Will you be posting some pictures at some point?
Would love to post pictures but have no idea how.
Hartley, this is just a diary of how your diet was disrupted by your holiday.
Although you’ll be eating lunch now, and not reading this…
Hartley,
Thanks for that… what a wonderful tale. Made me think of the times I have been there.
I first went to Guilin in 1985 and then later in 1986 and finally in 1992. Haven’t been back since, but would like to take my boy there.
In 1985 I traveled to Guilin by bus from Guangzhou. My Chinese listening and reading skills were very rudimentary and I misunderstood much. When I purchased my bus ticket from Guangzhou to Guilin, I asked what time the bus departed GZ and when it would arrive in GL. I understood that the bus departed at 8:00 am and arrived at GL at 5:00 pm. I understood wrongly. The bus was packed with people, luggage, produce and chickens. We sat three to a seat, and even though I was thin back then, I was sitting on the outside of the seat with only half of my butt on the seat.
At about 4:30 in the afternoon, after enduring the tape player that played only one song over and over on a crackly static sound system and listening to the driver beep and honk at every pedestrian along the road since our 8:00 am departure, I noticed that there were still no limestone mountains in the distance for which GL is famous. Then we stopped for dinner at some little joint, at about 5:00 pm. I was confused… thought we were supposed to be in GL by then. A nice older woman from Shanghai on the bus explained to me that we wouldn’t be arriving in GL until 5:00 am the next morning… Ouch… my butt started to hurt more than it had been.
I sat at a table and ordered “chicken” and everyone else from the bus stood around my table to watch me eat. We got back on the bus and started off into the countryside as night began to fall. At about 9:00 pm, out in the middle of nowhere, the buss broke down next to some peasant’s hut. We sat on the side of the dirt road for about an hour while the driver fixed whatever the problem was. When we got back on the bus, everyone closed the windows so that we wouldn’t catch cold. But, nobody stopped smoking. That same song kept playing over and over again, through the static speakers. With the windows closed, I could smell the chickens, even over the cigarette smoke.
We pulled into GL amazingly on time, despite our break-down earlier (maybe the break-down was figured into the schedule?). As dawn was breaking, we got off the bus and I tried to stretch my legs and get some feeling back into the right side of my butt… and tried to look for a hotel or hostel. We tried the gates of a few places, but they were locked and wouldn’t be opening until 7:00 am… nearly two hours away, temporally.
Oh well, after an adventure in getting settled in to a hotel, we had a fantastic time in GL.
Nice post tigerman, I did see a few of those buses, but was safely esconsed in the tour bus, no chickens allowed. It would have ben nice to have a more local experience in the way that you did.
I went on a similar package tour to Guilin 6 years ago. Went to the same caves (do they still have those ungly plastic dinosaurs in there?) and the chairlift up the mountain.
We went to some gawdawful, contrived “cultural park” where they tried to scam money out of the men by holding a demo “wedding ceremony”, where the men were supposed to give a gift of money to these obviously Han women posing as Miao or some other minority. I stayed safely behind my video camera at the time.
(Oh, and please: 150 by 150 pixels max for your avatar… thanks!!)
The local experience was a mixture of pain and pleasure. Fortunately, I was a young 23 years old back packer then and was able to “rough” it.
I doubt that I could take another 21 hours of the following song played nonstop through a poor sound system at full volume:
[quote=“Leo Sayer”]
Oh oh yeah yeah
I love you more than I can say.
I’ll love you twice as much tomorrow
Love you more than I can say.
Oh oh yeah yeah
I miss you ev’ry single day.
Why must my life be filled with sorrow
Love you more than I can say.
Don’t you know I need you so
Oh tell me please
I gotta know.
Do you mean to make me cry
Am I just another guy?
Oh oh yeah yeah
I miss you more than I can say.
Why must my life be filled with sorrow
Love you more than I can say.
Oh don’t you know I need you so
…
Oh oh yeah yeah
I love you more than I can say…[/quote]
Damn, that song was famous all over Asia for an agonizingly long time… I guess its one of those that had lyrics that folks here could easily sing along to… :s