The Hordes of Yangshuo

Casual bamboo rafting on the river

 

The hills are so famous that they are on the 20rmb note.  Looking closely at a 20rmb note, I failed to see the armies of uniformed tour groups and the clusters of hotels and the endless checkpoints of touts and vendors surrounding the hills. They are there. I know they are.  We walked amongst them every day we were in Yangshuo.

At night, with the hills surrounding the town artfully illuminated by carefully placed spotlights, the walking streets of unsleepy Yangshuo were rippling with tourists.

 

I’m pretty sure I was here, because I have photographic evidence.

 

Want to pose with peacocks in leg manacles and chains? Sure!

Want to hear an elderly instrument vendor scratching out the first few bars of Amazing Grace and Frere Jacques on his erhu? Can do!

Want to be filmed by a dozen Chinese tourists who think it’s really interesting to see a foreigner in town? Oh yeah!

Don’t want to have to wait until evening or have to actually go out onto the river to get a picture of a fisherman or his cormorants? It’s okay, for a fee you can do it in town at noon.

Yangshuo is in theory a pretty little town.

It has a lazy riverfront promenade that looks out onto the undeveloped opposite shore. There is a lone horse that tends to graze regularly there.  Lots of Karst hills in the distance. There’s a street market selling pretty things.  You can get silks, ginger candies, fruit, generic ethnic carvings,  more specific local ethnic carvings, a tshirt with your poorly drawn portrait on it, hippie flowery tops for women, absurdly cheap Tibetan silver (or rather, perhaps, ‘silver’), and cheap cotton mobile phone cases shaped like owls and fish.

 

The cormorant non-fisherman poses

 

There is a prominently placed Mc Donalds, illuminated at night by the spotlights meant for the arched bridge over the canal.

There is a large KFC at the entrance to West Street, the main tourist walking street.

There are quite a few KTV karaoke bars flashing their coloured lights further along the street.

At night, you can barely move for all the people.

Women teeter in absurdly high spiked booties; men take pictures of them posing with the cormorants and manacled peacocks and assorted street statues.  Tour groups follow their baseball capped leaders with amplified headsets giving everyone within earshot an insight into their itinerary.

 

Xing Ping, home of bamboo river cruises

 

There are tourism agencies every 20 meters or so, selling visits to water caves (But not the fake ones like the others! Ours is the real one!), butterfly caves, ‘ethnic minority’ entertainment evenings, rice paddy day trips, white water rafting trips, bamboo raft river cruises.

Between the agencies, individuals with laminated cards go from person to person, selling their bamboo raft cruises.  Restaurants with multilingual menus on pedestals out front are filled with backpackers and weekend tourists from big cities around China.  You can get banana pancakes. At least three places claim to have the Best Coffee, though none of them actually do.  There is an awful lot of wood-fired pizza available.

 

Pretty fields for cycling alongside

 

We didn’t stay in town. I would have been banging my head against the cobblestones had we chosen to go that route.  We chose a place about twenty minutes outside of Yangshuo, a place that had little personal balconies overlooking the countryside. Ours faced out onto a rice field and every morning we got to watch a farmer plough his field with his ox, shouting out the Chinese equivalent of Gee! Haw!  In the distance were the Karst mountains, rising up abruptly, green. Cicadas rattled. Birds sangs.

Gloom mongers posting on Trip Advisor had moaned about how isolated our hotel was, how difficult it was to get to and from the town (where all the excitement was!).  On our first day, we rented bicycles and cycled to town in half an hour. On other days, we used the hotel’s two free transfers to take us in to town and caught tuk-tuks and unmetered taxis back. Both quoted fares that were less than half what the posters had noted. Perhaps they were renting limousines. One never knows.

Outside of the town, it is lovely there. The people are lovely and the land is lovely. I’d simply bypass the town next time.

 

The hills are alive

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4 responses to “The Hordes of Yangshuo”

  1. Marie Avatar

    KFC and McDonalds?! Holy crap, it has changed. My good mate’s husband is from the area and she told me that they’d redone all the shopfronts a few years back to make it modern. Man, we thought it was touristy when we were there, but they were only just laying the concrete roads. The next time you have a chance to flick through a bunch of old NGs, there is one that’s about 15 or 20 years old and has some pics of Yangshuo in it. It would make an interesting contrast to your experience. I sort of want to see Yangshuo now in a morbid fascination kind of way. Thank you for writing this and putting up some pics. I’ll pass the link on to my friend. Can’t wait to see where else you go in that region!

  2. MaryAnne Avatar
    MaryAnne

    Yeah, it has definitely changed. In town- and in XingPing too- the vibe was the usual predatory tourism one that I’ve come to dread over the years. We went on a huge bike ride on our own at one point and got totally lost (see http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=425253&id=854135132&l=d03008d4aa) and found that everyone we met outside of the tourist parameters was sweet and sane and helpful and humble and non invasive. It was a relief to know all wasn’t lost. The town itself made me feel quite sad for some reason.

  3. ChinaMatt Avatar

    I guess I was there at the right time of year (just a couple weeks before Spring Festival). Wasn’t really crowded or noisy. It was rather wet though. We stayed in a nice hotel overlooking the river and had a Red Army tour. I remember having dinner in Chinatown and wondering how a town in China had its own Chinatown.

    1. MaryAnne Avatar
      MaryAnne

      We were there for the May Day/Shanghai Expo super duper long golden weekend shebang. Hence. the hordes. Rainy and wet would have been great- my arms are peeling from the sunburn I got on a deceptively overcast day when we went on a huge backroad bike ride! Where we stayed (the Dragon River Retreat, outside of town) was really lovely and low key, which totally saved my sanity- Yangshuo town was packed beyond belief!!! Was Chinatown near the fabled West Street? I remember a few back streets near there were more Chinese and less western backpackery.

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