The Long Road Home

Here I am having an english breakfast in Yangshuo. This is a bizarre place full of tour groups and souvenir shops in the middle of the Guangxi countryside. There are pony traps and minibuses with frilly roofs and people selling small model ducks and large silk patchwork quilts. The quilts, ducks etc are actually quite nice but what I really finding myself most interested in are the coffee shops and cafes.

Yangshuo

So here I am enjoying (another) one. (Eggs, toast and coffee in front of me) To get here I rode for three days from Wuzhou. First to scruffy little Taiping, then from there to Mengshan. I left Taiping riding alongside the very chirpy local primary school teacher who was scooting along on her scooter to start morning school. Once I got out of the town, people were walking along shoulder poles carrying hods of rice seedlings. Later through the day every day I see people planting them, which it seems you do by throwing them, rather like throwing darts, except the people throwing the seedlings look really bored. Blokes are battling away ploughing or sort of dredging with wooden ploughs behind an ox. In bog up to their knees barefoot with trousers rolled, shouting at the ox. Some guys have little motorised ploughs and they really churn along quite quickly, turning all the time bcause the fields are so small. It was gorgeously sunny and there were dragonflies going everywhere, white butterflies in the bamboos, some brown and black ones with blue bits in the shade of trees. I saw tons of birds, bulbuls like in hong kong, swallows over the water, some kind of shrikes or flycatchers on the telephone wires, warblers in small trees and grasses, and nice little brown finches fiddling with things in the roadside. Altogether a lovely day’s ride, and I arrived in Mengshan in time to appreciate sitting on a balcony at the Yong’An Zhou guest house looking at the Meng River. People bicycling over a very fancy green roofed bridge.

The following day (yesterday) was then a bit of a contrast, still interesting but I had to get into appreciating rain, mist, drizzle, hard rain, and more drizzle, all day. From time to time I could see grey misty views of huge limestone rock towers rising out of the wet fields, with little orange villages at the bottom. I punctured in the middle of nowhere and that took ages to sort out for various boring reasons. A few folk were still ploughing and planting but most were huddled in doorways peering out at the rain or watching TV at the back of their cottages. Or actually, in the case of the men, playing mahjong, billiards and cards under shelterd and plastic awnings.

Near Yangshuo it all got quite noisy and messy with loads of minibuses and little vans with people sitting in rows, and horse traps and tour buses. So I thought I wouldn’t like Yangshuo and I’m a bit old for backpacking these days etc but actually I’m really enjoying it. Ha! I met a delighted old couple on holiday from Yunnan cheerily reviewing which hotel they’d stay, carrying only a small shopping bag of their things. I bought two novels. I played a piano in someone’s bike rental shop. I ate an apple crumble. I met a man from Liverpool who’d been to Sihanoukville and seen the street children picking rubbish and the M’Lop Tapang centre, which is one of the things I’m raising money for. That was lovely. I also heard a lot of music - you can hopefully hear some on a podcast coming soon - if I can transfer the files in the next town. Which is Guilin. Eggs and toast lovely, but I guess I’d better get going to get to Guilin.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 1:28 am and is filed under On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.