I felt like I had just walked out of an ancient Chinese scroll painting. A cool breeze wafted around my skin and lifted my eyes towards the hazy hilly view of Yangshou. As far as I could see, huge lumps of rock stood out of the ground. It was both so bizarre and wonderful that God created such an interesting landscape. The hills are primarily composed of limestone where everything else around them is eroded away. We left Friday morning by bullet train and arrived in the city of Guilin around 2:00 PM. We dropped off our stuff at the Airbnb and explored the city. If you go, I recommend staying in Yangshuo. The city of Guilin is not particularly special. We did see the sun and moon Pagodas though, and that was pretty cool.
Just as a side note, this weekend contained many mistakes on me and Tiago’s part. We didn’t buy our tickets enough in advance, so we couldn’t get the earliest train to Guilin. Once in Guilin we found out that all the tickets to Shenzhen were already booked, so we booked tickets to Guangzhou for Sunday morning. We did not bother to book the tickets from Guangzhou to Shenzhen. Little did we know that we would make further missteps.
Saturday
The next morning, we woke up pretty early to go to Yangdi. There we had hoped to catch a boat to Xingping or at least hike, but the river was overflowing due to rain the previous day too much to cross or ride on. All the rafts were shut down, so we ended up taking a bus to Yangshou.
The entrance to Yanshuo is deceptive. It looks dirty and old, but the actual city is quite touristy, clean, and even trendy. After eating breakfast, we rented electric scooters for 35 RMB. The seven of us got bikes and we payed 50 RMB to get a guide to watch the bikes while we hiked and lead us around.
We drove off until we got into the midst of the karst topography. Surprisingly, there were well paved roads all around the cool areas. Our goal was moon hill. We rode all the way there, and then we parked our scooters and hiked the mountain. Moon hill is quite interesting. It has a natural arch in it. We did the hike to the arch in about half an hour, then we went off the tourist trail and hiked to the top of the arch. We stayed a while.
After that we grabbed some lunch and headed back into town. I ate some bamboo rice which is rice cooked in bamboo. Roman made a new friend.
We took another bus to Xingping. There we viewed the 20 RMB bill view point. It was pretty cool.
After haggling with the boaters for a while, Tiago and I took a boat to Yangshou while the rest of the guys took a bus back. We meet in Yangshou and ate dinner, then we headed to the AirBnb in Guilin.
Sunday
The next morning, we barely made it to the station to go to Guangzhou; however, we made it. So, we got to Guangzhou and made our next mistake. We bought the tickets leaving from the station we arrived at when we wanted tickets from the South station, so we exchanged them. However, when you exchange the tickets, then you can’t exchange them again. We explored Guangzhou. Guangzhou is a nice modern city. It is like the Shanghai of the Cantonese people. We got to see Canton tower and some other super tall skyscrapers.
At 5:20 PM Tiago and I left the group to go catch our train at 6:20 PM. We made some mistakes and did not take the fastest subways. We arrived at the train station panicked and late. We hopped some lines to arrive at the terminal at 6:19 PM. We couldn’t get on board. We couldn’t exchange our ticket either. We only had about 146 RMB on our persons. All the tickets to Shenzhen by train were sold out. We couldn’t even buy from the sketch guys offering van rides to Shenzhen. Shenzhen isn’t too far from Guangzhou, luckily. We couldn’t find any ATMs, but we found the bus station right under the train station. We bought bus tickets for 70 RMB each. We literally had 6 RMB left in our wallets. Only 4 RMB in coins. We waited for the bus to leave at 8:00 PM. It did not leave till 8:20 PM, and it arrived at 10:20 PM at the north Shenzhen station. The subway tickets can only be bought with 1 and .5 RMB coins, so we only had enough to go one stop. Ideally, we would have gone two stops to get even closer to the university, but that was unnecessary. We hopped on the subway with 2 RMB to our persons. We found an atm at the next station and got some more cash. Then we went to dinner and then home to bed.
