November 6, 2011: “After our flight to Guangxi Province in southwestern China, we arrived to a drizzly Guilin and had a late dinner. My roommate for the trip, geology professor Alan Goldin (an avid cyclist from Missouri who rides 15k miles a year) and I ran out for a walk around the Guilin Night Markets, after finding an ATM right around the corner. We rounded another corner and came upon a closed street with tents lining both sides, people everywhere. Although I hadn’t pegged Alan for a ‘shopper’, within the first 25 meters or so he had successfully bartered with 3 different vendors, and I got my first direct experience with just how inexpensive locally-made items are here in China. And I do mean inexpensive; Alan’s first purchase was a handmade fabric shoulder-style bag for 10 yuan. That’s about $1.60… [continued below gallery]
We continued through the market, where people were eating and shopping, with much of the foodstuffs laid out on counters along the walkway. As in many of the countries we’d visited, every 5 meters or so were items that I cannot even fathom the source of, including one of apparent mammalian origin, a ‘terminal’ organ of which might have once been featured as an appetizer on that awful show from years ago, ‘Fear Factor’. All I can say is: Yuck, with a capital “Y”.
After walking around for awhile it occurred to me that the road surface, sidewalks, and even curbs were all made out of limestone, polished in many places. As Alan continued back to the hotel, I walked and wondered how this beautiful town in this once poverty-stricken country could possibly have the resources to line every street and sidewalk with cut stone.
Our hotel was located adjacent to Rong Hu, a park with a smallish lake, interconnected to the moats that meander through the town. I walked to the west end, and was surprised to find a lock, elevating small tourist boats approximately 5 meters to the level of the lake and canal system. The trees were lit with colorful lights everywhere, though I realized it might be time to turn in when the lights went out at about 11:30pm. I walked back to the hotel, and I noticed an older man walking with a young girl, perhaps 12 to 14 years old, and—assuming he was her father—wondered if it was normal for kids in China to be out so late. Stopping to take another image of a lakeside sitting area, I became aware that she had walked up behind me, and was sitting, alone, on the benches a few meters from me. As I turned to leave, I tried to peripherally glance around to see where the older man had gone, but saw no sign of him. Being acutely aware of the fact that I was a foreigner in a land where I didn’t really know how things worked, I walked down the now-darkened lane along the lake, puzzled by the 90-second experience. As I neared the end of the lane, an electric scooter whizzed silently by, the man on the front, the girl riding on the back; they turned a corner and disappeared.
Weird. But, I had to acknowledge the possibility that I was indeed the weird one, the foreigner walking around a city alone at nearly midnight, not really knowing what to expect, nor able to understand what I was seeing…
…Here I am in Guilin, China with a dedicated wireless connection in my 5-star hotel room, ready to post Malaysia and start getting Vietnam up, and… Both blogger and Facebook are firewalled! Not even sure this email will make it into the blog. But, this is one amazing place on earth, I must admit…
…[rant] OK, I’ll just come out and say it: as most of the world was able to vicariously witness during the Beijing Olympics, China’s air quality is quite simply horrendous, surely a result of the abundant coal-fired power plants that have sprung up over the last several decades. China’s 1.8+ billion people has a rapidly growing population of middle-income wage-earners, and as development rapidly spreads, the government approaches some of the energy requirements utilizing less-sustainable solutions than the rest of the world might otherwise prefer. That being said, the U.S. pours more carbon into the atmosphere, per capita, than any other nation on the planet. China’s population, however, is poised to potentially dwarf the rest of the world in both energy and resource consumption if the government doesn’t take environmental issues into account, which it appears to be doing as of late. [/rant]…
Upon arrival in Yangshuo, the normal ferry port could not be used due to the low river level, ‘conveniently’ requiring a walk of 500 meters down a pathway jammed on all sides by vendors selling the same stuff we’d seen in both Guilin and Longsheng. The 23 of us–along with what seemed like several thousand Chinese tourists–all meandered down the same 5-meter wide walkway, with some of our group being Lifelong Learners (the group of older people on the ship), some of whom weren’t particularly fast nor agile in the chaos. Once we got to the street, unfortunately one of the Lifelong Learners got sideswiped by a motor scooter, though thankfully she didn’t appear too terribly hurt. A shouting match ensued between our guide and the scooter-driver, who appeared to be suggesting that it wasn’t his fault. Alan and several others spent the next several hours taking her to two hospitals for a shoulder x-ray to ensure she was OK (the scooter-driver had been detained and apparently is legally responsible for her medical bills, clearly the source of his rather vociferous objections).
The rest of us walked through the quaint little town to Ai Yuan Hotel on West Street, yet another self-professed ‘biggest market in the world’. We found our luggage in the lobby, with a net tossed over it to prevent any of it from walking off. I quickly dropped my bag in the room and then walked West Street, a wonderful mix of restaurants, vendors and shops, all dramatically set beneath steep-sided limestone peaks in all directions. As beautiful as Guilin was, this mere ‘town’ of 60,000 was simply spectacular, in all respects. As I came upon a McDonald’s with perhaps one of the most incredible locations in the entire world, I snapped a picture of ten or so people about 50 meters away on a footbridge, all pointing their cameras the same direction.
About the time the shutter clicked my stupidity dawned on me, and, flip-flops a-flappin’, 20 seconds later found me standing on the footbridge, pointing my camera westward into the warm sunset, the orange disk of the sun having just descended onto the horizon, perfectly situated between two spires above, a reflecting pond below. What might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the sun set in such a wondrous place as this could have been thwarted by any number of different turns along my path down West Street. Curiously, McDonald’s proved the ‘visual catalyst’ to my getting to the one place in the vicinity where it could be viewed. All of 90 seconds and 16 images later, the sun was gone, the impromptu other-worldly show over, the monotone nature of the atmosphere resuming. I realized only later while reviewing the pictures that the building standing above the reflecting pond had a sign on it, which read: ‘Paradesa’.
As much as I’d typically try to seize such opportune pieces of text as closure of blog posts, I can’t due to the positively spectacular show we witnessed later that night, set beneath a landscape more remarkable even than the Colorado music venue, Red Rocks Amphitheater. If you recall the Beijing Olympics’ incredible opening and closing shows, the director of those spectacles has been running a show called ‘Impression Sanjie Liu’ since 2004, with the backdrop the karst pinnacles along the Li River. 600 people are involved in this earthscape/visual show presented once or twice daily, and the limestone peaks 1+ km behind are completely devoid of ambient light, then alternately lit up with lights, while six hundred people perform in a huge reflecting pond of the Li River in the foreground. Canoes and moving, floating walkways are used, with various visual effects like long lengths of fabric, LED-lit costumes, music, singing, and stories told in Chinese. All I can say is WOW, and I was kicking myself for not dragging a tripod with me for this visual and aural feast.”
If you’d like to visit my original Blogspot post for this country, please start here: 11/3/11: Hong Kong Dragon’s Back Hike