Serendipity: YangShuo and the Jade Dragon River

We've spent the last couple of days in Yangshuo, a smaller town to the southwest of Guilin. Though it has some wonderful geographic features (barely discernable through the mist), Guilin still has the any-big-Chinese-city feel to it. Yangshuo is smaller, more eclectic and not yet Disneyfied, without the shiny plastic "heritage" feel of Lijiang and other rebuilt scenic spots.

On Tuesday we took a boat cruise down the Li river from Guilin to Yangshuo. Though it was misty, this made it very atmospheric - see the photo blog for images from this trip. There were giant karsts along the way, very mysterious in the fog.

On Wednesday we decided to explore the area around Yangshuo by bike. We duly rented a couple of bikes and bought a map which was more artistic than accurate. Nonetheless we managed to find our way to one of the back-route bike paths out of town, but the track forked in several places, so we had to keep consulting the map. At one such point a passer-by stopped to help us: though she didn't speak English, pointing and nodding helped explain where we were and where we hoped to go. She was heading in the same direction, so told us to follow her. Gradually it evolved into her having appointed herself as our guide for the day - she led us through small villages and winding tracks, pointing out the scenery and telling us the name of each place. Mandarin is a tonal language, and we undoubtedly hopelessly mangled the names when we repeated them.

Though our guide spoke less than ten words of English ("hello", "beautiful", "big", "smallow") she managed to explain that she comes from a place on the Jade Dragon river where they use bamboo rafts. She guided us through fields and past paddies and fishing villages. After a couple of arduous hours (and a couple of tumbles on my part thanks to being distracted by ducks, deep muddy ruts, and a slightly too big bicycle) we wound up at her village. They offered us lunch, but the sight of villagers washing vegetables - and everything else - in the river, along with memories of Dali belly dissuaded us from eating. Instead we just sat in the shade to drink water and catch our breath.

After a rest we debated whether to ride back down the other side of the river or to take the bamboo rafts down. They looked a little flimsy, and the guidebook said that it was best not to go with unlicensed operators, since there had been a boating fatality involving a foreigner a few years earlier. I walked up on the bridge to look upriver and saw a bamboo "houseboat" at least triple the size of the skinny rafts, and thought that that would be okay, so we decided to go ahead with it. Further reassurance came when all sorts of official looking license plates and documents were produced when I paid for the trip.

It turned out that we were going on one of the narrow rafts after all... ten bamboo poles in width, it was lashed together with small gaps between the poles. A couple of deck chairs were wedged in the centre of the raft, our very muddy bicycles were carefully balanced one atop the other behind the deckchairs, and our guide's husband leapt aboard wearing wellies and wielding a big pole for punting.

We did a short turn upriver to admire the beautiful scenery on the other side of the bridge, then headed downriver. It rapidly became clear why there were gaps in the floor of the raft - the river was very shallow, and there were lots of weirs heading downstream, with drops of between one and six feet at each one. Our boatman navigated these adeptly, though the first one - just a few feet - had us rather alarmed. One slowly noses the raft forward over the weir, and it hangs half-suspended until the tipping point is reached, when the front crashes down into the water with much splashing. The gaps in the raft soften the impact and allow water to drain out once the whole raft is down. Very exciting!

The Jade Dragon is very lovely, though on a smaller scale than the Li. We had better weather than for our Li cruise, and had the river almost to ourselves. There was another raft following ours with a couple from Beijing - their boatman was a friend of ours, so the two of them chatted off and on during the two hour trip. At one point our two rafts were passed by the "express service" - a couple of similar but much faster moving rafts zooming by. Other than that there were just fishermen and peasants along the water's edge. A lovely and very relaxing counterpoint to the morning's ride.