Yangshuo

Okay so visiting China for the first time is truly wild, and Taiwan and Hong Kong do nothing to prepare you for it. So much funny shit has occurred in just 3 days. We started in Yangshuo in the Guangxi province - right in the middle of South China, a couple hours train from Hong Kong. Relative to China it's a pretty small town - surrounded by Karst mountains and on the bank of a river.

The landscape here looks fake. Everywhere you look are these mad alien rock formations. You can totally tell why they filmed Avatar on karst ranges. I've never actually seen Avatar because I don't like movies more than a tight 1hr 45 mins so you'll have to confirm that for me. My research tells me soft rock + spicy rain + time = steep crazy rock. If you are more geologically minded than me I think they're made from Limestone that erodes from acidic rain to make these vertical cliffs. It's really wild though because it's not like you're in a mountain range - the land is super flat, and they just spring outta nowhere.

We stayed a little out in the countryside at a super cute trad spot on the Yulong river, and spent a few days cycling around experiencing wild shit. Cycle speed did not reach the heights of our Taiwan trip - this time I was on what they called lady bike, and lady like to go slow. On a tangentially related note, everyone else was on motor scooters, but specifically there were multiple girls driving all pink hello kitty scooters with tiny sidecars that their boyfriends sat smoking and looking bored in. Iconic.

We cycled all over - and absorbed two very distinct energies:

1. Rural China
   • We basically used our bikes to go to all sorts of remotes spots and spent most of our days only seeing farmers, or remote villages.
2. The Strip
   • Yangshuo is a really classic spot for Chinese people to visit on holiday - a taste of sweet sweet nature. That meant the town itself and specific tourist areas felt like the Magaluf of China. Truly like nothing I have ever seen before.

Rural China

So Yangshuo was full of vegetable growing - not rice fields like Taiwan, but endless small cabbage, sweet potato and lettuce patches, all maintained by hand by families - there seemed to be literally endless work to tend to stuff, and everywhere we cycled people were tying tiny seedlings to sticks, or burning little fires to do some kind of cool thing that I would like to find out about.

This setup also meant all the veggies we ate were sooooo mad tasty. The same vibe as when you go to Italy in summer and eat a juicy tomato and wonder what's the point in eating vegetables back home.

Highlights were:

1. Rice noodle breakfast
   • Every day we had Guilin rice noodles for breakfast, with a steamed bun and soy milk on the side. They look mid, but it was one of those spiritual experiences where the tomato, pepper, greens just taste so good that the simple shit hits the best.

2. Roadside mango

   • Everywhere you go people are selling whatever they're farming in little stalls on the road. Still dreaming about the insane mango that had some mystery powders shaken on it - it was very Tajin vibes, spicy and sour. It also costs like 40p.

3. Longan, red date, ginger, goji berry tea

   • It's a really hard life when you can't caffeinate yourself in a world of nice tea. I have resorted to a combo of taking some stupid risks, and a lot of buckwheat tea (nothing to write home about). This tea has changed my life, it kinda feels like if Lemsip was actually tasty and had magical healing properties. It's spicy and gingery and sweet and I am sad that it sounds difficult to make.

Marty Tzupreme

The other thing I NEED to tell you about our rural China experience is the farmers market we ran into on a cycle through Baisha town. The vibe was very much not London bougie farmers market where you pay a tenner for some apple juice, an oat latte and a dream. It was giving market for farmers to buy farmer shit, and also the day that everyone in the area just pops into town to have a silly one. This was very much not on the Yangshuo tourist trail, everyone seemed to think it was really funny that we were there.

The market is like 10 streets wide, and people are selling all sorts. Rabbits and mallards in cages (dumb but I never realised when people eat duck they sometimes look like normal ducks lmao), baby trees to plant, buckets of fish.

The best bit was the main square, which was popping off to another level. There was like 10 extremely raucous card games on stools, and a massive speaker playing a load of Chinese bangers that the girliepops were having a dance to. Quite a surprising number of the blokes wear their old communist army jackets just out and about which is kinda mad.

We spotted a big crowd of uncles in the corner and on closer inspection they were heckling games on a couple of table tennis tables. The only woman at the spot asked Max to play (they seemed amused by the concept of foreigners rocking up and our lack of pen hold on the bat). We went for a little mooch and then one of the bros dragged us back to play more. It was then that we truly entered our Chinese unc era. Old guy on the table kept nudging me to play and we ended up shooting shit for a while. He had to pick up the ball soooo many times when I overshot it and my mandarin skills were too lacking to say anything about it, oop. Meanwhile like 10 dudes are smoking and watching us play. 11/10 funny experience.

The Strip

The town centre of Yangshuo is genuinely wild. If you live in China I'm sure it's mad tacky and overdone but we loved exploring it because it was just so different to stuff we'd seen. Highlights were:

1. Bar top of the pops

   • So there is a lot of nightlife in Yangshuo, and it all has the same formula. There's a stage with 5 people paid to sing for the entire night, and then tonnes of tables of Chinese people on their silly holiday vibes getting fucked up and waving massive blow up glowing sticks in the air. The vibe of the bands is a sliding scale from old dudes jamming to girls more aimed at stag dos. Whatever the vibe, they always put the hottest ones by the door (sometimes with a cute dog to make it even more enticing). Everyone (singers, crowd, waiters) was chain smoking inside for the entire evening.

2. The Olympic opening ceremony v2

   • Yangshuo is home to this mental performance that they run a sold out performance twice a day that is the scale and vibe of the olympics opening ceremony. It's directed by the dude that did the original one in Beijing (Max would like to add he is also a famous film director). It's insane, there is 700 performers all on a lake at once, singing, throwing fire around and splashing in unison. There was also seemingly no qualms about working with animals or children so there was the odd cow and some cormorants dancing too.

3. I am an accidental celebrity
   • I guess everyone from all over China comes to Yangshuo, especially people from places that foreigners don't tend to venture. I figured the classic vibe you hear about of people getting their pics taken was not a thing anymore, but I was so wrong. Little Chinese girls are obsessed with me, they keep being super shy and asking their dads or teachers to ask me if I'll take a picture with them. The only English they know is so beautiful (or so cool handsome boy for Max). I've been gifted flowers in the street. I wonder what all the families back home think of a pic with a random white girl who hasn't slept much.

Vast, fertile, powerful

Guangxi province completed - we've now taken the train to Sichuan. My new favourite book (the 750 page history of 20th century China) talked a lot about the Sichuan province, and said it was nicknamed Heaven's Granary because of how great it was for farming. On the train here I asked Claude why it was called that and how it compared to Yangshuo, and it said

Yangshuo: elegant delicate, painterly - a landscape that looks like art
Sichuan: vast, fertile, powerful - a landscape that feeds empires

It made me laugh so it had to be included. My book also taught me that Mao moved a load of factories and shit to Sichuan in the 60s because it's so protected by mountains that it's hard for enemies to reach. The train ride was genuinely endless mountains, they simply did not stop, so I figured that was a pretty smart call and you will not catch me terrorising Sichuan. For anyone that sees me in the near future you're going to have to stop me telling you about this book at length, Max has had to listen to a brief history of communist China over multiple evenings.

Our first stop in Sichuan is Chongqing - the cyberpunk city built into the side of the mountains (maybe you have seen the TikTok).

I have been going through it to a new degree writing this blog after eating some dodgy hotpot last night so I hope to recover soon. Sitting on a 5 hour train in full body cold sweat with a lady alternating between sleeping on me and eating dried fish was truly testing my stomach. Shout out to Max who went on a long and arduous journey to fetch me McDonald's after I'd only eaten 2 choc chip cookies all day and couldn't stomach anything else. Can confirm eating chicken nuggets in a big hotel bed does wonders. Pray for me and Sichuan's famously spicy food.