Chapter 5. This time the tour was more than three hours.

My Big Fat Guangxi Honeymoon

Chapter 5.  This time the tour was more than three hours.

 

My darling ran out to buy breakfast Tuesday morning while I got the laptops up and running.  I thought she took a little too long.  Later, she confessed that she was cheating on me during breakfast.  Before buying some very nice pork baozi for me, she was secretly stopping at a noodle shop to have a bowl of special, famous, auspicious Guangxi rice noodles (not sure if these involved horse meat or not).

After an early lunch, we had a quick shopping trip in town.  I quickly maneuvered us near the Three Flowers Baijiu factory store and picked up several lovely bottles of high-grade rocket fuel baijiu as well as some proper Chinese-style drinking cups. 

 

 

If I ever drank 1/10 as much baijiu as I collect, my liver would explode. 

Then we took a bus up the Li River.  The ships boats rafts were the same basic design as the one we rode in the Dragon River two days earlier, but with 2 small changes.  The bamboo was replaced by PVC pipes (I’m not sure how they get bamboo to curve that way and really wonder how to curve heavy PVC like that), and in addition to the high-tech propulsion pole, there was a small motor.

 

 

Unlike the Dragon River, the Li River also had some larger boats, including some very large ones that somehow avoided running aground in the shallows.  (I later heard that there are river ferries between Yangshuo and Guilin.   This is something I’ll want to check out in the future.)

 

 

There was also a welcome lack of dams, and the slightly larger size of our new raft made it safe to stand up and move around some to get better angles for photos and videos.

The Dragon River scenery was excellent, but the Li River scenery was even better.  Every 4th or 5th mountain had some sort of story associated with it or else was supposed to bear an uncanny resemblance to something like a dragon, a lion, girls picking tea, dogs playing poker, etc.  A few of them sort of made sense.  Others apparently required some sort of perception enhancement chemicals to fully appreciate. 

 

(Our captain was kind enough to provide the pack of cigarettes since neither of us smoke.) 

Another feature the Li River had was tourist shops in tents alongside the river. The water level was low, but having these shops in tents made it possible for the shops to be moved so they would always be set close to the shore as the water rose and fell.  Some had the usual traditional costumes one could rent and have photos taken in.  Others had food (frequently special, famous, auspicious Guangxi rice noodles).  Others sold tacky souvenirs cultural relics.  A few had cormorants (fishing birds) and other animals one could pose with.

 

 

Naturally, our raft captain had one to take us to one of these places.  For some reason, they seemed to know him quite well there – I’m sure that was just a coincidence.   The arrangement of tents at our stop was a little strange.  The shops were on a wide stretch of sand and rocks.  There was a fence splitting the shop area in half.  Both sides had a full set of tents offering the usual range of riverside services.  Evidently, each side wanted to prevent “their” tourists from spending money on the other side.

 

 

The problem was that this bit of sand was the perfect spot for photos of the famous 9 Horses Mountain, and the fence was rather inconveniently located.  Next time I’m bringing wirecutters. 

 

 

My darling ordered yet another bowl of special, famous, auspicious Guangxi rice noodles.  She wanted me to order one too, but I just stole a couple bites of hers.  For some reason, it’s ok if I order something and she poaches a few bites, but somehow, I accidentally crossed some mysterious cultural taboo by not ordering my own bowl of noodles in this fine dining establishment tent, since this would evidently make us look too much like cheapskates appear too fiscally conservative in the very important opinion of people who sell noodles from a tent on a sandbar on the river.   I’m sure for many generations to come, they’ll be singing folk songs and reciting epic poems along the shore of the Li River about the man who resisted buying his own bowl of the irresistible rice noodles. Maybe they’ll decide one of the nearby mountains looks like this incident. 

 

 

The final highlight of our Li River raft tour was the set of mountains and hills portrayed on the back of the 20 RMB note.  That’s also where we got dumped off the raft.

 

 

We were trying to find the exact spot where the original image came from and had to fight our way past a pile of motorcycle taxis that wanted to charge way too much to take us to the bus that would take us back to town.  After much effort, we finally determined the truth.  Although the image is beautiful, it’s a composite painting.  There is NO place that we could find to stand to have the exact angle shown.  Moving to bring one pair of items into alignment throws others out of alignment.  We spent a good hour before realizing the utter impossibility of the project.   

The buses were nearby in Xing Ping village.  We avoided the motorcycle taxis and wandered around town a little.

 

 

The first place we tried to eat had insanely high prices.  We went a little further away from the tourist zone and had an excellent dinner for two for less than one of those 20 Yuan notes we were using as props while taking pictures. 

Finally, we found a bus to get back to town just at nightfall.  Naturally, we spent more time (and money) wandering around West Street looking for things we just had to buy.

 

 

As the pile of purchased junk treasures in our hotel room continued to grow larger, so did the intensity of the fight argument disagreement discussion about just how many of the items could be fitted into the available volume of our current luggage.  Little did I know that my lovely wife had her own solution to win the argument.

It turns out that she was plotting my painful demise the next day.   

 

<– Back to Chapter 4.          –> Chapter  6. Her murder plot and my terrifying revenge. –>