Yangshuo, You should go

It’s Golden Week in China. It’s a week that everyone is supposed to have off. Well, not a whole week. They give you Monday through Friday off, but then you are supposed to work on Saturday and Sunday to make up for it. But I don’t do that because…well…I’m a bullheaded American who just refuses. Well, to celebrate China Day and the other days in Golden Week we went up to Yangshuo, which is in Guangxi province. Mark doesn’t actually get the whole week off because Macao has so many holidays to celebrate, it just can’t do everything China does, Portugal does, and Hong Kong and celebrate a few of it’s own days so he took off only 1 extra day. We left directly after work on Friday and took the overnight bus up to Guangxi. It’s kinda like a train sleeper car, only not. There are beds against the windows and another row down the center. Only calling them beds would be stretching it a little. I’d say they are 5 and a half feet long – I could technically fit, Mark can’t. You head is resting on the cubbyhole where the next person’s feet are tucked into. They are only as wide as my shoulders – not Mark’s. It is completely possible that you will fall out of your bunk on the windy roads. The temperature is constantly changing. The bus stops every 1.5 to 2 hours and they turn on all the lights, which is necessary as there are usually some people sleeping in the aisles on oversold buses. There is no bathroom. All that said, it’s still better than sitting up for the 8 to 10 hour journey. Oh, and it is cheap. $25 bucks a ticket, compared to the $200 airfare that doesn’t actually get you their any faster. Unfortunately we must have missed our stop, because we ended up in Guelin at 4 a.m. at a crummy bus station and had to wait 2 hours for the first bus back to Yangshuo.
Spent Saturday walking around the city, finding our hostel and trying to get our bearings. We never really did and constantly spent the next 3 days walking in the wrong direction. The old city is cute, touristy and was absolutely packed because every person in China has the week off. I like the American system of staggering our vacations, rather than closing the entire business down for a week. We had awesome Chinese and vegetarian food, decent veggie burgers and some really crappy pizza over our trip. Bought some souvenirs. Saw the night time river show in the rain. And chatted with other foreigners about their lives in China.
The highlight of the trip however was the smile on Mark’s face when we went bike riding. The second day we only went for a 3 hour bike ride, but it was fun. And we saw some incredible scenery. I took lots of pictures, but since the disc was still at the hotel you will never see them. The third day the plan was..does it matter? We had a plan. The gods laughed. We spent the entire day hiking or biking and getting lost. But we were okay with that. We saw more incredible scenery. I was able to stop and take lots of pictures…ones that actually exist. I had a very good time. Mark was in heaven.
The next day it rained all day and there is really nothing to do. So we stayed at the hostel and read and uploaded pictures and wished we had facebook. Then it was time to do another overnight bus ride back down to the Pearl River delta. It was even less fun than the ride up, took longer and my knees and calves were killing me from all the riding. Nonetheless, the whole trip was an adventure, and adventure we are glad we took.

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