On May 6, our group met to get acquainted. We had three Australian couples, a Canadian couple, a Swiss woman, our Australian tour leader, and we were the only Americans. One of the Australian ladies and the Canadian woman were of Chinese descent and they spoke some Mandarin, which was immensely useful for the entire group. After a delicious Dim Sum breakfast, we headed for mainland China.
Because of the small size of the Intrepid groups, they use an incredible variety of transport and accommodation. On our first day we took taxis to the bus station, a regular bus through the border and the special economic zone of Shenzen, then on to Guangzhou (formerly Canton). There we took taxis again to a different bus station, and then a sleeper bus overnight to Yangshuo.
As we traveled between Hong Kong and Guangzhou, unfortunately it soon became apparent that China has a huge air pollution problem. We found this almost everywhere we went, but was the worst in Guangzhou. We also noticed many people working in the fields, occasionally with a water buffalo, but mostly the people do all the work without benefit of machinery. This is true all over China. Because of the huge number of people they have to feed, every available bit of land that can grow anything is used, and the mountains are heavily terraced, so the fields are often too small to be worked with machines. Approximately 90% of the people are still rural and work on farms.
Most tourists go to Guilin to see the unusual scenery near there and to take a cruise on the picturesque Li River. We stayed in a nearby small town called Yangzhou. Here we had a day of riding bikes through the countryside, taking pictures of the karsts, visiting small villages, and eating lunch in the home of a local farmer and his wife. The food was delicious and in their home we ate at a big round table in the living room, some of us seated on a sofa, and a TV set was on a table nearby. This was a prosperous farmer! Many of the homes in the villages we went through were very old, seemed rather dark when we looked in, and also seemed very sparsely furnished.
Almost everywhere we went, people were trying to sell us things: postcards, water, umbrellas, ponchos, souvenirs, pins, coins, scarves, wood carvings, etc. For a Communist country, it was pretty surprising to see so much Capitalism!
A karst is a limestone projection that looks like a pointy hill with a rounded top, and there are thousands of them in many interesting shapes in this region. The Li River meanders through them, so we took a cruise to see them, stopping at three villages on the way. One of them was over two thousand years old and had only been open to foreigners for less than a year. Walking around the villages we saw rice milling machines, rooms where people gathered to play cards and checkers, people making things like bird cages outside their homes, girls making fans in a "factory", people selling produce in an outdoor market, men playing billiards on tables under overhangs, and many stalls and small stores where all the necessities of daily life were sold. Right in the villages there are pig pens and chicken coops. Often men passed us leading docile water buffalo out to the fields. Many of the people would look at us and smile and say "knee haw" which means "hello", and usually the children and young people would enthusiastically say "hello" to us in English.
We ate lunch in a local food stall in the village where there was barely enough room for all of us and where the food is cooked right next to where you sit. We had many dishes of vegetables fixed in various ways, eggs and tomatoes, chicken and bamboo shoots, fried potatoes with pork, and many other dishes served with rice, cold beer, and all delicious. Usually a lunch like this cost about 10-15 yuan per person - a real bargain considering there were over 8 yuan to each US dollar.
That evening we went out on the boat on the Li River again, this time to watch a local fisherman using five cormorants. These are birds that are the size of large ducks which dive and catch fish. The fisherman ties them to his boat with long lines and puts a collar around their necks so that they can't swallow any fish they catch. Then he puts them in the water and yells out a command to them and they dive while he poles along behind them on his small, flat boat with a basket on the back and a lantern on the front. When one of them catches a fish, he pulls the bird in and strokes its neck, and out pops the fish right into the basket.
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