Chapter 4. Going down and the return of the naked(?) moon goddess.

My Big Fat Guangxi Honeymoon

Chapter 4.  Going down and the return of the naked(?) moon goddess.

 

Monday. There’s nothing quite like being on your honeymoon, rolling out of bed at 7:00 in the bloody morning, and cranking up the laptops for work.   

At least my darling had time to go out and buy some baozi (yummy tasty steamed buns) for breakfast.

After we spent a long morning sweating over hot keyboards, we headed off for lunch.  My wife told me that there would be some “going down” after lunch.  (This being our honeymoon, I thought she meant something else. )  Then we got on the bus to Silver Cave.

I love cave tours.  I’ve been in caves in several states in the US, and enjoyed them all.

 

 

Lunatic Travel Tip:  If you visit Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, make sure to ask the park rangers where the mammoths are.  Since almost no one ever asks this question, most of them will be very happy to talk to you all about how mammoths used to roam the cave during the ice age.   A few park rangers may claim that “mammoth” refers to the size of the cave, not the animal.  They’ll then say here never were any mammoths in the cave, but they are just joking.  Tell them you read all about the mammoth bones on the internet and that you KNOW that they’ve got cloned mammoths hidden away.  Promise you won’t tell anyone else if they take you to the secret caverns and let you pet the baby mammoths. They’ll pretend to know nothing of this.  They may even pretend to get angry and keep insisting that there never were any mammoths at Mammoth Cave.  The trick is to be very persistent and don’t stop asking no matter how many times they deny having any cloned mammoths.  Sooner or later, they’ll give in and take you to pet the baby mammoths. 

Silver Cave in Yangshuo was impressive.

 

 

Besides getting a stalactite in the head, there were some other hazards in the cave.

 

 

My darling wife complained that the pretty colors didn’t show up in many of my pictures.  That’s because the flash on my camera tended to wash out the colored lights that were used to make some of the more blandly colored rock formations look more interesting.

 

 

One feature was that you could get free photos at 2 scenic sites.  What they don’t tell you is that the “free pics” are about the right size to go on a postage stamp and that the size big enough to use without a magnifying glass costs an extra 30 RMB each.   I’ve now got 2 micro-sized cave pics of me and my darling wife in my card case.

 

 

After getting back to town, I decided to find my way down to an island in the river that I could see from our hotel balcony.  I’d seen other people out there, so assumed it probably had a bridge.  Happily, this was one of those rare assumptions that turned out to be 100% correct.  The only disturbing part was going through the edge of an open-air restaurant to get to the bridge.  My lovely wife told me it was labeled as a Dog Restaurant.  She said she wasn’t sure if that was just a name or if it referred to the main course on the menu.     I decided I’d skip eating there so I wouldn’t have to worry about it.

The island is in the Li River (I believe the Dragon River connects to the Li somewhere nearby).  A few of largish Chinese cows were grazing on the island and then swam out into the river when they got tired of me taking photos of them.

 

 

Once I was done annoying cows, we wandered through town a little before having an early dinner.

 

 

One special note about the joys of wandering around town in Yangshuo.  The better river tours require a ride to a different place to get into one of the rivers.  There are some short, cheap tours that start and end in town.  The people selling those will pursue you endlessly trying to get you to agree.  Other people will pursue you endlessly trying to sell you tickets to other local attractions.  Others will chase you down trying to sell books of pictures and packs of postcards.  When they’d come up to me, I’d point them to my wife.  Once she rejected them, they’d come after me again using their great English skills to say “Hello” many, many times while waving postcards, pictures of boat rides, etc. at me.  When that failed, they’d try saying “Hello” several dozen more times. I finally dredged up enough of my limited Chinese to say “I have no money.  My wife is my boss.”  I’m not sure if my dearest darling sweetness was more amused at my method of escaping the street vendors or was more annoyed that I kept redirecting their attentions from me to her. 

There is a very famous Chinese movie that was set in the Yangshuo area.  It’s called Liu San Jie.  It’s a musical about a girl who sings folk songs to annoy the rich landlords while helping the poor peasant farmers.  Of course, the movie ends before the peasants are over-run by bandits after the landlords lose their power and can no longer afford to pay soldiers since the peasants have stopped paying rent and other taxes. 

In any event, you are probably wondering why I’m interrupting my honeymoon blog to babble about a movie.  The reason is that there’s a musical show called Impression, Liu SanJie. If you recall the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, it was Zhang Yimou who put that together.  He was heavily involved in the Impression show.  We went on Monday evening.  All the sections of the show were good.  I really need to call up some satellite photos of the performance area to try to figure out how they literally could rearrange land and water in some areas when the lights were dimmed.

One segment had Chang’e, the Chinese moon goddess, dancing on a crescent moon.  My darling told me that when the show first started some years back, the actress playing Chang’e didn’t wear anything , but that some Chinese people where scandalized, despite the fact that she was about the length of a football field from the front row.  The set for this show seems to be a lake connected to the Li River surrounded by mountains and it’s HUGE.  Now, my wife was told that the actress playing Chang’e wears a body stocking.  Being a person who likes to look at naked girls studies beautiful art closely, I used the 12x zoom on my camera to verify whether this version of the Chinese moon goddess was or wasn’t really undressed.  I was terribly sad to discover that she was indeed wearing a body stocking.    Despite the unfortunate presence of unneeded clothing, she still gave an excellent performance.

 

 

Despite the beauty and impressive dancing skills of the girl portraying Chang’E, the Silver Impression segment was the best in my not very humble opinion.   In utter blackness, girls visible only by the silver lights on their dresses start coming out one after another.  It’s only a few girls at first, but the line keeps getting longer and longer.

 

 

Then the dresses start flicking on and off in complex patterns.  I’m not sure how they coordinated the lights on such a large number of girls’ costumes, but it was flawless.

 

 

Fighting through the crowd to get out was a bit of a challenge, but we managed it.

After the evening show, we went back to the hotel.  For the record, I’d like to formally deny that any acts of public indecency depravity  naughtiness honeymoon activities occurred on our hotel room balcony that evening or at any other time while we were in Yangshuo.  As long as nobody on the sidewalk across the street had a good camera, no one will be able to prove otherwise. 

 

<– Back to Chapter 3.          –> Chapter  5. This time the tour was more than 3 hours.–>