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Sunday Guiping to Nanning

We got up fairly early (7:30) and before breakfast walked over to the bus station and bought our bus tickets to Nanning. Breakfast in the hotel was fine and then we checked out and got two more trikes to take us the short ride around the corner to the bus station. The bus was on time and had good luggage space. The ride was a bit nerve-wracking as most of it was on a two-lane highway packed with slow-moving trucks, fast moving buses, and lots of small trikes and motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians to add to the dangerous mix. The weaving motion of the bus in and out of traffic caused several passengers enough discomfort to make them fill several vomit bags during the journey. Maybe something about the Chinese diet makes motion sickness more likely, but it seems much more common than in the west.

The ride took the advertized 3.5 hours and we were in Nanning, obviously a bigger town than either Guiping or Wuzhou, but not quite a Guangzhou or a Shenzhen. After studying the Lonely Planet, we opted to try the Xiangyun Hotel and took a taxi over there. After some not too difficult bargaining we got a Y430 room for Y300 and after taking occupancy went down to the western dining room for a late lunch. We each had a different set meal that was very good, except that the spring chicken on Gerry’s meal did not get properly cooked and had to be sent back once.

After a very leisurely lunch spent reading our first China Dailies in months (one and two weeks old respectively), we went for a half hour walk around the neighborhood where we eventually found the local McDonald’s. Back in the hotel, we hunkered down for the night in spite of the cold (not quite as bad as Guiping) and in spite of the fact that there was no CCTV-4. We did watch Star Sports for a while and saw Lindsay Davenport beat Martina Hingis in some Tokyo tournament.

We also washed clothes in lukewarm water. The hotel had promised us that they had 24-hour hot water, but even though we ran the water for a long time, it still did not get more than warm. In the end, Jan decided to try and solve it by calling housekeeping and after much too-ing and fro-ing and a conversation with the manager, learned that by running the water much much longer, it did gradually get warmer and warmer until it was hot enough for a shower. It seemed a dreadful waste of water, but we were both happy to have a warm shower before climbing into our cold beds for the night.

Monday Day at Home

Spent the morning in the hotel then went out for lunch to the Mayflower restaurant. Were there treated to a cup of coffee by an Taiwanese coffee salesman who imports coffee from Indonesia to most parts of China. We’re still not sure why he did it, but we invited him to join us and learned the little bit about him mentioned. As we were leaving we noticed the Foreign Languages Bookstore nearby and determined to come back. Gerry is looking for good map books and Jan wants to buy an English translation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

From the restaurant we walked down to the river and then along the bank to the bridge, across the bridge until we could legally cross the street and then slowly back the other way. On the way back we noticed people on the water’s edge getting undressed and warming up ready to go swimming. We saw several people actually get into the water and swim away.

Once back across the river, we visited the YongChang(?) Hotel, trying as we always do to buy an English language paper even if only China Daily. We walked through a very large restaurant with a stage that appears to have shows at some part of the day. Then it was back towards our hotel with a stop in McDonald’s for a sausage and egg burger and some warmth and light for reading. We tried to stop at the bookstore but couldn’t find it in the dark.

Tuesday Nanning

Our goal was to go to the museum, but we were slow getting started and then stopped en route for lunch at a large food street restaurant. We had a nice selection of dishes, including a pizza, Chinese vegetables, soup and cucumbers in vinegar and chili.

We walked from there to the museum only to find that it was closed Monday and Tuesday. So instead we walked around town and ended up at the bus station where we bought tickets to Yiling Cave for 9 a.m. the next day. After the bus station we walked to the bookstore, which we found and was open. We bought two books: “The Adventures of Marco Polo” and “Son of Heaven”, a translation of a Chinese novel about the first Qing emperor, Kangxi.

Jan has been re-reading George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and is almost through with it and Gerry has just read John King Fairbank’s history book called “China”. As we get away from foreign tourist China, access to English language television gets less and less available and so we revert more and more to reading.

Wednesday Gerry’s Birthday at Yiling

Got up and looked out of the window, to see, surprise surprise, blue sky and white clouds! Our first day of decent weather since we were first in Guangzhou over two weeks ago. We had a quick breakfast so we could catch the 9 a.m. bus to YIling, which we did. The bus was very new and modern and the ride to Yiling took only half an hour. When we got there we found that there was not just a cave, but also a whole park. After buying our tickets and turning down the offer of a free guide (because we couldn’t understand her nor she us), we walked through the place pretty much from one end to the other and finally at about 10 a.m. found the cave.

Unfortunately, the cave was locked so we decided to sit down and wait for them to come and open it. When they did at 10:45 it was to learn that we had to pay Y25 each in addition to the Y15 we had already paid. Jan was a bit annoyed, but Gerry was fatalistic and in the interests of not spoiling a happy day, Jan swallowed her annoyance and in we went.

The cave was very similar to those we had seen in and around Guilin, and definitely as big and extensive. We went through with the first group and enjoyed it quite a bit. Once out of the cave we wandered over to the cafeteria to claim our free snack which turned out to be a parcel of sticky rice and a cup of some kind of medicinal sweet tea. The sticky rice was very good. Gerry drank both cups of tea.

From there we searched a while and eventually found the path to the pavilions that we could see on the mountain behind the park. The map had shown at least three. By the end of the afternoon we had climbed up and down the mountain visiting four of them on the way. The climb up got us out of breath of course, but even more unusual it got us hot and sweaty. The clouds of the early morning had given way to clear blue skies. Once we got high, the views of the surrounding countryside were magnificent (see Gerry’s photos). Karst hills interspersed with fields and villages. Truly, a rural idyll.

After we got back down and out of the park, after taking time out to watch some other visitors feed the monkeys, we set off and walked through a nearby village to the countryside beyond. First, however, in the village, Gerry saw a couple of men carrying what looked like a newly slaughtered pig, and spent 20 minutes watching the butcher start to work on the carcass.

Our walk took us through some lovely countryside of which Gerry got dozens of nice photos. We made a semi-circle and came back to the main road to Nanning and hitched a free ride on a sleeper bus that was on its way to the bus station we had left from this morning. At the bus station we tried to buy tickets to De Tian, the waterfall on the Vietnamese border but found that buses left for that direction from another bus station. So instead we walked to the Majestic Hotel to check out their Valentine’s Day offering, but rejected it in favor of our own hotel’s western restaurant where we had a meal for two for Y158 + 10%, including a rose for Jan and a gift for Gerry. Not bad. Then back up to the room to download photos (Gerry), write diary (Jan), and read Middlemarch (Gerry).