The Long Road Home

I’m now in the city of Guilin. I’m in a internet cafe in the city centre near the Bank of China main city branch. It’s underground (ie under the ground) and looked quite seedy from the outside. And also from the inside, actually, once i was down the dark stairs - pool tables, video games, grubby plywood tables, green plastic vine leaves along the strip lights - but it’s OK. I’ve paid 5 RMB for 2 hrs on a sofa in the plush area. It’s raining outside. I’m having a day off. I rented an umbrella and strolled around the city centre looking at shops and wet pagodas in wet parks. I drank a glass of boiled coca cola with freshly chopped ginger.

Yesterday I rode here from Yangshuo over the mountains. I didn’t really plan to do that, but my map has no contours, so you don’t know what’s coming until you’re already doing it. Actually it was absolutely fabulous. I set off to Fuli, a small town west of Yangshuo. I went through a tunnel. Lorries make a frighteningly huge noise when you are in a tunnel with them, but I was following an old guy on a Flying Pigeon and he didn’t waver, so I just kept going behind him.

The sun was out again and the dragonflies were back. There were swallows over the paddy fields, and I saw a crested mynah. (You see I have got my bird book with me. Actually, you get crested mynahs in Hong Kong, and they’re easy as they have white dots on their wings when flying.) I came to the village of Xingping and bought a sweet potato fritter and a sesame pancake from a stall where old men were sitting round a brazier under an awning in their green and blue jackets and caps.

It was lunch time, and people were putting toddlers onto little chairs and feeding them out of bowls with chopsticks. Why do people do that outside, right in the middle of the yard? The plump children don’t look at the food; they just stare at what’s going on in the road as the food is put in their mouths.

After Xingping I turned towards a tiny place called Baoshujia, and the road suddenly stopped being tarmac and became a track. A mix of dirt, gravel, sand, potholes and water, depending exactly which bit. The motorbikes were lurching along and tractors bashing into potholes. It was dirty and very busy. Lots of little villages close togehter with tiny schools and people on motorbikes, or bikes, in tractors, or three-wheeler vans, or trucks, or the occasional car, or many just on foot with their cows or their ploughs or their hoes or their baskets of stuff. I follow the track along a tributary of the Li River, climbing gradually. I saw a kingfisher. As I climbed the people and traffic got less. I climbed right up to a small lake high in the hills, and then climbed even higher around and above it. It was hot and really hard going. Now there were just stony hillsides on either side, and grey scree, and brambles. The odd motorbike went by, but otherwise it was quiet. There was a very strange bird singing which would start off with a high-pitched noise like some radio instrument being tuned in. Everytime it came, I would look round wondering how come there’s some electronics kit on a mountain in Guangxi, but then the noise would become birdsong. Sounds weird but that’s what it was like. (Anyone know what it might be??) Other than that, it was quiet.

From the top of the pass the view was absolutely fantastic - row after row of far away pointed mountains in pale shades of blue.

I descended down the rough gravel hairpins, with white dog roses hanging from the rocks and brambles. I drank a litre of water at a small village,where two old people were amazed that a dusty foreign woman had appeared having cycled over the mountain road. The old wall clock in their dark shop chimed rather nicely. It was 2.30, so I carried on.

The road came back to the Li River, and I rode along its east bank. Water buffalo were swimming, amazingly (to me). I didn’t realise they could swim. On a telephone wire, I saw a bright blue bird which I think was a bee-eater (bird book again, and this time I got my binoculars out in time). Actually it was eating a lizard, not a bee, so maybe my identification is wrong. I’ve never seen one before. It was holding the lizard in its beak and bashing the poor thing against the wire to kill it, and then it finally swallowed the whole thing, legs tail all.

Further down the road there was village with a huge ancestral hall, all dilapidated. Two men were mending bikes in the front part. It was the Bai clan hall. I asked if there was anyone called Bai anymore round here. They looked at me as if I was stupid, and said “everyone”. It turned out they were Hui Muslims who had moved here from Henan Province many generations ago. A man selling strawberries further along told me there were several Muslim villages here, and they still prayed somewhere - couldn’t find out where.

A bit later I went through Daxu, a village in which a long cobbled street of Ming and Qing houses has somehow survived. There were wooden houses, with deep eaves, and there were old ladies sitting in the doorways. SOmeone gave me some cold fruit tea. Old men were carrying sticks on their backs through the arches.

It was all very nice but I was getting really tired now. I bashed on into Guilin, and finally reached the city. I was also really hungry. Then I had my first small accident. It was not his fault at all but it was becuase of a man making pancakes. I saw him making these lovely looking pancakes at the roadside on a brazier. I was in a huge stream of bikes and mopeds but I suddenly decided I wanted a pancake. I swerved off the road, but steered wrong, and hit a stone bollard. The bollard tipped over, and sort of uprooted its paving stone, and I fell off the bike in front of a mobile phone shop with a group of trendy people outside it. A girl with orange hair helped me get up. No damage done fortunately. I felt quite stupid. I had a pancake. Better be a bit more careful when I’m hungry and tired.

I’m sorry I still can’t upload the podcasts or photos yet. The machines here are all Windows 2003 and despite a nice young guy helping me, it just won’t work. Tomorrow I’m going from here west towards Guizhou province. If it’s not raining…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 10:53 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.