The Hordes of Yangshuo

The hills are so famous that they are on the 20rmb note.  Looking closely at a 20rmb note, I failed to see the armies of uniformed tour groups and the clusters of hotels and the endless checkpoints of touts and vendors surrounding the hills. They are there. I know they are.  We walked amongst them every day we were in Yangshuo.

At night, with the hills surrounding the town artfully illuminated by carefully placed spotlights, the walking streets of unsleepy Yangshuo were rippling with tourists.

Want to pose with peacocks in leg manacles and chains? Sure!

Want to hear an elderly instrument vendor scratching out the first few bars of Amazing Grace and Frere Jacques on his erhu? Can do!

Want to be filmed by a dozen Chinese tourists who think it’s really interesting to see a foreigner in town? Oh yeah!

Don’t want to have to wait until evening or have to actually go out onto the river to get a picture of a fisherman or his cormorants? It’s okay, for a fee you can do it in town at noon.

Yangshuo is in theory a pretty little town.

It has a lazy riverfront promenade that looks out onto the undeveloped opposite shore. There is a lone horse that tends to graze regularly there.  Lots of Karst hills in the distance. There’s a street market selling pretty things.  You can get silks, ginger candies, fruit, generic ethnic carvings,  more specific local ethnic carvings, a tshirt with your poorly drawn portrait on it, hippie flowery tops for women, absurdly cheap Tibetan silver (or rather, perhaps, ‘silver’), and cheap cotton mobile phone cases shaped like owls and fish.

There is a prominently placed Mc Donalds, illuminated at night by the spotlights meant for the arched bridge over the canal.

There is a large KFC at the entrance to West Street, the main tourist walking street.

There are quite a few KTV karaoke bars flashing their coloured lights further along the street.

At night, you can barely move for all the people.

Women teeter in absurdly high spiked booties; men take pictures of them posing with the cormorants and manacled peacocks and assorted street statues.  Tour groups follow their baseball capped leaders with amplified headsets giving everyone within earshot an insight into their itinerary.

There are tourism agencies every 20 meters or so, selling visits to water caves (But not the fake ones like the others! Ours is the real one!), butterfly caves, ‘ethnic minority’ entertainment evenings, rice paddy day trips, white water rafting trips, bamboo raft river cruises.

Between the agencies, individuals with laminated cards go from person to person, selling their bamboo raft cruises.  Restaurants with multilingual menus on pedestals out front are filled with backpackers and weekend tourists from big cities around China.  You can get banana pancakes. At least three places claim to have the Best Coffee, though none of them actually do.  There is an awful lot of wood-fired pizza available.

We didn’t stay in town. I would have been banging my head against the cobblestones had we chosen to go that route.  We chose a place about twenty minutes outside of Yangshuo, a place that had little personal balconies overlooking the countryside. Ours faced out onto a rice field and every morning we got to watch a farmer plough his field with his ox, shouting out the Chinese equivalent of Gee! Haw!  In the distance were the Karst mountains, rising up abruptly, green. Cicadas rattled. Birds sangs.

Gloom mongers posting on Trip Advisor had moaned about how isolated our hotel was, how difficult it was to get to and from the town (where all the excitement was!).  On our first day, we rented bicycles and cycled to town in half an hour. On other days, we used the hotel’s two free transfers to take us in to town and caught tuk-tuks and unmetered taxis back. Both quoted fares that were less than half what the posters had noted. Perhaps they were renting limousines. One never knows.

Outside of the town, it is lovely there. The people are lovely and the land is lovely. I’d simply bypass the town next time.