Lots and Lots of Rocks – Guilin and Yangshuo, China

By: Phillip Donnelly

Lots and Lots of Rocks
Guilin and Yangshuo, China

There are few things in life more depressing than finding yourself in a Chinese bus station early in the morning. The sound of hawking phlegm; the hoards of barking Chinese tourists chaotically milling to and fro, as if war had just been declared and they only had 10 minutes to flee for their lives before the Japanese arrived; the indecipherable Chinese characters on notice boards that you can’t help looking at in the vain hope of finding where the ticket office is hidden, or suddenly and miraculously developing the ability to read them; the unhelpful staff who can’t or won’t understand your pigeon Chinese (”qing-mai piao-na li”/ please-buy ticket-where”); the innumerable dodgy characters who seem to have made a profession of hanging around bus stations eyeing up peoples’ bags, like vultures waiting for a moment of weakness; filthy begging bowls being stuffed in your puss; scheming taxi drivers determined to get that fare of a lifetime by attempting to charge you ten times what they’d charge a Chinese. It’s all made worse by the hunger pangs in your stomach because you just can’t face another bowl of stir-fried vegetables covered in slime. You chain smoke cigarettes for something to do, and to keep yourself alert.

This is one of the down sides of traveling. Some claim the best part of any trip is the journey, but if bus stations were the best part of any trip, I’d never leave home!

Eventually we found ourselves in Yangshuo, which my guide book describes as legendary. The reason for its mythic status are its karsk rock formations. In other words, it contains those odd jutting sugar loaf type mountains you always associate with China. The entire region was once underwater, and the landscape does look oddly subterranean, except for the lack of fish, of course. In fact, from watching Chinese documentaries, you might be fooled into believing that the whole of China is covered with these formations, which of course, it isn’t. However, they are here, and in abundance – thousands and thousands of them.

They looked strangely familiar to me, and it took me a long while to figure out why. Then I suddenly realized that the memories it stirred in me were dim childhood recollections of the TV series ‘Monkey’. You know, the monkey king who was, as the theme song proclaimed:
“Born on an egg on a mountain top
Funkiest monkey there ever was
He knew all the magic under the sun
He decided to defy the Gods
And have some fun
Monkey magic
Monkey magic”

As a kid, I couldn’t get enough of this simian and his magic cloud, which he used to fly from place to place and could summon it by merely blowing through his fingers. Throughout this holiday, I was often to wish I possessed the same cloud. He and his companions, Fishy and Pigsy, not to forget the sage wisdom of Tributaka, the monk entrusted to carry the holy Buddhist scriptures from India to China, were unmissable Thursday afternoon viewing for me. Tributaka’s philosophy of non-violence and the attainment of enlightenment through the elimination of desire left a deep impression of my pre-pubescent mind, and even though the Buddhist message was watered down for kids, it certainly put Scooby Doo to shame.

The programme and its scenery kept me glued to the box, rather than out playing football, or whatever it is kids are meant to do. Every episode might have been filmed here in Yangshuo, and I kept an eye out for King Monkey, but he never showed up. Perhaps Mao had him purged, or he found himself unable to adapt to free market economic reforms. Come to think of it, the show must have been made in Hong Kong or Taiwan, as the communists were busy destroying monasteries at the time, and shows about sacred quests would most certainly have been infra dig at the time. So, I guess Monkey wasn’t here at all, but I kept an eye out for him and his magic cloud nonetheless, especially just before long bus trips.

We were lucky that the mist and cloud cleared for one and we could see the hills in all their undulating glory. We took a short river trip on a small boat and tried to take it all in. CCTV9, the government run English language TV station in China, which I found my self watching a lot through lack of an alternative, often harks on about this place, and shows pretty young westerners being hyponotised by its scenic spiritual beauty, and then deciding to spend the rest of their lives here. Personally, I think three days is enough. Geological features, I’ve always found, lose their appeal quite quickly, and already they were just becoming tall lumps of green rock, sticking up like giant spots, and there was no sign of Monkey anywhere.

Nevertheless, the mountains are certainly beautiful, especially if you get to see them on foot or on a bike. My ever troublesome left foot, Sandra’s stomach pains, and the ever present threat of rain, meant that serious hiking was out of the question. However, we did manage to haul our creaking frames onto a pair of mountain bikes for a few hours. In order to avoid the hassle of having to read a map and trying to choose a good route, we took a local guide with us. It was only 5 dollars for a half day, but I’m sure I could have bargained him down to one third that figure, if only I didn’t hate bargaining so much. I’ve always disliked guides, but it was too ‘fang bien’ (convenient) to resist.

What annoys me about guides is that they always want to milk you for every yuan you’re worth, so despite my patent and grumpy lack of interest, there was a lot of the usual guide stuff, like trying to flog us unwanted tours and providing unwanted information, such as:
“This – rice field”
“This – buffalo”
“This – farmer”
“This – new department store – I have friend there – you want good Chinese silk? – I get you cheap price – big discount – you want?”

Nevertheless, every so often my steely contemptuous looks would make him shut up long enough to take in some of the scenery, which was, as they say, breathtaking. There are about 20,000 of the of these karsk hill things, and they can leave you dizzy, or perhaps that was the lack of oxygen going to my brain, as it had been about five years since I was last on a bike. You had to keep your eyes on the dirt road too, or you could find yourself sliding into a muddy ditch, or crashing into a rock and going head-over-heels off your bike and head butting a mournful water buffalo. What a way to go – trampled to death by an angry buffalo for disturbing his dinner.

The town of Yangshuo is, in itself, an anomaly. I’m writing this in a café in the town’s centre, on Xie Jie, or West Street. It’s a pedestrian zone lined by innumerable cafes, with names like, Minnie Mao, Drifters, Wild West, and my personal favourite, Co-Co, which used to be called Coca Cola, until the long arm of the omnipotent corporation threatened them with a libel suit. They offer not only English menus, but also reasonably authentic western food, a welcome rest bite from fried vegetables covered in white slime. I’ve just had a Chinese curry, which is unique in my 12 months in China in that it actually tasted like the Chinese curry I used to have in Ireland.

The street also supports a repetitive array of souvenir stalls, in one of which I picked up a copy of Chairman Mao’s ‘Little Red Book.’ In one of his sermons, he warns about the dangers of adapting, even slightly, the centrally planned economy, arguing that even a tiny loosening of the communist controlled system would snowball out of control, and allow the capitalist roaders and rightists to create an economic system based on greed and this would destroy the socialist nature of the state within twenty years. I wonder what he’s make of today’s China, near to naked capitalism, red in tooth and claw.

Yangshuo has more than its fair share of touts, and none of them are touting communism, let me tell you. As these karsk rock formations are unfarmable, land here is quite poor, there’s nothing for the locals to live off except tourists, and as this was low season, there were a hell of a lot of locals trying to feed off a very limited number of tourists.

Bloated ‘Foreign Devils’ are especially appealing to the Vampire Touts of Yangshuo, and I only wish ‘Monkey’ was here to protect me from them. The never ending requests to clean my boots are beginning to fray my admittedly limited temper, and the postcard touts, who seem to be genetically incapable of understanding the word “NO!!!”, might just send me into a homicidal rage, worthy of my ‘Monkey’ idol.

The hotel touts are the worst. They are tenacious little devils, and they follow the weary and bewildered travellers from the bus station, and drag them to their hotels and guesthouses, wearing your resistance down like dripping water will wear down a rock.

I shouldn’t complain too much though, as for only 6 dollars a night, we’ve got a really nice room, and the fact that you can’t take a shit without blocking the toilet is only a minor inconvenience. The landlady also agreed, after some negotiation, to let us have the remote control so we could turn on the heating, and I’m hoping she’ll forgive me for the piece of wood that fell off the bathroom door in my strenuous attempts to yank it open.

At this stage, I would like to give a brief description of Chinese bathrooms. They are best described as ‘functional’, in that they just about perform all the functions they were designed for. However, Chinese efficiency has led to the elimination of certain unnecessary features. Why bother with a toilet seat, for example, when you can just squat over a hole in the floor and drop your stool like a bombardier, and enjoy the innocent fun of listening to it come to a squelchy stop from a height? And to take things one step further, why bother separating the toilet from the shower when you can combine the two by simply placing a drain in the floor? In fact, if you really wanted to save time, you could conceivably shit, shave, brush your teeth and shower all at the same time! To think of all the time I’ve wasted in my life by not doing these things simultaneously. I could have saved at least 30 minutes a day. Some quick calculations show me that I’ve wasted about 1500 hours in my life to inefficiency. If only I had spent that time learning Chinese, I could thank them for their insight.

One afternoon, we went to see “Guilin’s Magical Caves – a Natural Wonderland and Heavenly Sight Transposed on Earth.” People come from all over China to see them, and as I hadn’t been in a cave since I was a mere sapling, I was looking forward to it. They were impressive, I admit, but hardly my idea of heaven. Indeed, if heaven is a stygian cave, then what must hell be like? As so often with Chinese tourist attractions, they had attempted to improve on nature and in doing so, ruined it. The caves had been lit up in a kalidescopic array of colours to make them look more spooky and surreal, but it also had the effect of making them look like something out of Disneyland. However, I seemed to be alone in this opinion, and the Chinese tourists in the flock of sheep we were being shepherded in ‘oohed’ and ‘ahed’ right on cue. There were an awful lot of named rocks, like the ‘1000 Buddha’s Rock,’ the ‘Chicken Rock,’ or the ‘Golden Key Rock’. In the ‘Rocks that Look Like Something Else’ competition, there was some prize specimens here.

It was just after the ‘Golden Key Rock,’ that Sandra started rummaging in my bag, gasping something about a plastic bag. Even though we were at the back of the flock, I didn’t think it was a good idea to try to steal the ‘Golden Key’. For one thing, it was technically theft, and for another, the rock was about a metre long, and wouldn’t fit in the plastic bag. However, she wanted the bag for a different purpose. Just after getting the plastic bag out of my backpack, she projected some multicoloured vomit into it, and if there hadn’t been a bag, she would have had to add some more colours of her own on a nearby green stalactite, which might have become a tourist attraction in its own right to future flocks of tour groups – ‘the Lumpy Psychedelic Stalactite of 2005,’ perhaps. We hung back from the rest of our group for the remainder of the tour, and thankfully the tour guides megaphone dampened the occasional retching cries of Sandra and her bag of fried vegetable delights.

Fortunately, Sandra made a full recovery, and that night we went to see another attraction beloved of Chinese tour groups in Guilin, the ‘Light Show.’ It has a cast of hundreds and takes place on a man made lake. The actors use pontoons to move around the lake, but it looks like they’re floating on water. The choreography, lighting and timing are truly amazing, and I made a mental note not to miss the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. When it comes to choreographed spectacles, the Chinese are unbeatable.