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MONDAY (YANGSHUO)

My nephew, Jeremy Walker, and I disembarked from the tourist boat on the outskirts of Yanshuo around 1:30 p.m. (We had boarded south of Guilin for the four-hour cruise downriver—the scenic highlight of my time in China—an experience related in the previous post to this blog: (6) CHINA 2012—BY TRAIN TO GUILIN + LI RIVER (SATURDAY-MONDAY, MARCH 3-5. We made the short walk into the city center, ready to eat and then to find our way to our lodging.

Dumplings Dynasty is a restaurant mentioned in Lonely Planet and it seemed like a decent enough place, so we went on in. We were the only Western customers there, in fact the only customers at all at the mid-afternoon time. A plate of dumplings stuffed with shredded pork, leeks and parsley was served with a side of slivered carrots and green peppers and hot tea. Complemented with a 590-ml (about 20 ounces) bottle of Liquan Nature Beer, the tasty meal cost 18Y (less than $3).

Yangshuo: Jeremy Walker trying to arrange transportation to the Giggling Tree

Fortified now, we returned to the streets to find transportation to our lodging, a guesthouse outside Yangshuo. It took a little time, and the help of a young couple who may have been college students and who had some rudimentary English skills, to find a driver to take us to the Giggling Tree. (Surprisingly, neither the driver nor the students seemed to be familiar with Giggling Tree though it lies not far outside town and is certainly a popular spot with foreign travelers.) After some negotiating, we loaded our bags and ourselves into the back of a three-wheeled motorcycle and set off from town.

Loaded and on our way

Giggling Tree is located about 2-1/2 miles west of Yangshuo in a village called Aishanmen not far from the Yulong River. The last half-mile to the guesthouse is on dirt roads that were potholed and puddled enough to make the ride in the back of the mototaxi a bouncing/uncomfortable/exciting/memorable (take your choice) experience. No matter how you get there, though, Giggling Tree is worth the effort.

The property is run by a forty-ish Dutch couple who live there with their precocious son, Pella. Ultimately, I felt that although one might find something here or there that might be better (minor things to be sure), I was certain that the warm and cheerful and accommodating attitude and service provided by everyone from the ex-pat owners to the Chinese kitchen staff was of a level I had rarely if ever experienced.

Jeremy, who had stayed there before, had made reservations for two nights at Giggling Tree. (That would not be enough: the accommodations and staff were so superior that we almost immediately extended our stay for an extra day.) The facility is something like a compound with its several buildings—old farmhouses, a barn and stable, and even an old store—surrounding a cobbled courtyard. Our spacious room with two large beds and ample ensuite bath cost 180Y (just over $14)/night each—more than we would spend anywhere else, but nowhere else measured up to the Giggling Tree.

After checking-in and settling into our room, I took some books and my tablet (Wi-Fi was available) and sat at a courtyard table outside the entrance to our room. No one else was outside except bustling management and staff going to and fro. Towering karsts, for which the area is known, were visible from my table. I ordered a nice cappuccino from the kitchen and considered my day to have been truly memorable.

Basket of calamandarins

I wanted to get some things done, things like catching up on emails and my journal. Instead, I got involved in things I could do nowhere else. The Chinese staff was eager to interact with foreigners, so I engaged some of them in determining just what to call the small fruit I had purchased from an old woman in Yangshuo earlier in the day. The fruit looked like a tiny orange, about one inch in diameter, and it is eaten skin and all. With some help, I determined that this was something called a calamandarin—a product of this citrus-growing region.

Young visitor at my table in the Giggling Tree courtyard

Then things got to be more interesting. A young mother and her toddler (18 months?) dropped by the Giggling Tree to chat with the woman’s grandmother who worked in kitchen. The child was encouraged to wave ‘hello’ to me and eventually came over to my table and seemed to be interested in the array of gizmos strewn about rather haphazardly. He/she was so bundled up that I was not sure of the kid’s sex: what I was sure of, though, is that I’d never seen anything cuter. (I found out later that the youngster was a girl.)

East meets West, Giggling Tree courtyard

I gestured to the mother, wanting to know if it would be alright for her child to sit on my lap. It was fine with her. I sat with the child for a half-hour or more. I knew my emails and Internet searches would not be especially fascinating to someone still shy of their second birthday, so I looked to see what games might be loaded on the tablet. The toddler seemed to like the action and sounds of Angry Birds. I showed how my camera worked, taking pictures and instantly showing them on the camera’s display screen. The mother and great-grandmother came over to my table and hovered there, just as interested in my camera and tablet as was the toddler. I took and showed pictures of all of them, individually and together. The child never uttered a sound and never once indicated a desire to get off my lap and end our encounter. A picture of the two of us, taken by the mother with my camera, captures one of my favorite memories of the entire trip.

It was nearly dark when the child’s father showed up and the young family left for home. So the final score for my afternoon’s planned productivity was: My Projects—zero // Cultural Interaction—10. I’ll take that result anytime!

Jer and I ate dinner in the small lounge which, with its wood-burning fireplace roaring in the corner, was particularly inviting this cool evening. Giggling Tree’s extensive menu is Western for the most part and the food—Jer chose the wienerschnitzel and I opted for spaghetti—was very good. (We would explore the tempting desserts on subsequent nights.)

We lingered in the lounge after dinner, I longer than Jer, before retiring to our room and calling it a day.

TUESDAY (YANGSHUO)

I awoke at 9 to the sound of rain. Jer by that time was within grasp of snagging 12 hours of sleep. The rain was not heavy, but it was heavy enough to discourage any immediate idea of hiking or bike riding.

Breakfast in the Giggling Tree’s lounge

I decided before even getting out of bed that—on this day—I would eat and drink whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, without regard to expense. I started with a 10-ounce glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and four triangles of French toast served with honey for 22Y (about $3.50) which I enjoyed in the fire-warmed lounge.

Two activities we had planned for the day—a bamboo raft ride on the Yulong and a performance of the acclaimed Impression multimedia show in Yangshuo—were not possible due to high waters on the rivers following recent rains.  After breakfast I did some journaling while Jer, despite the weather, took off walking.

With no raft ride and no Impression show, we would have to be content with a visit to Yangshuo itself. So, after Jer’s return from his hike, we left the Giggling Tree around 2 o’clock, walking towards Yangshuo on a road that followed the Yulong River. (The Yulong is joined by the Jinbao River, becoming the Tianjia River just upstream from its confluence with the renowned Li River. NOTE: We could have walked further to Puyi town and the mysteriously-named “Camel Flow Love in the Li River,” a site marked on our map and one that was difficult not to investigate. I will always wonder…) The rain had dissipated by early afternoon and our walk was quite pleasant.

Following a refreshment break, we took a three-wheeled mototaxi several miles to the heart of Yangshuo and the lively shops around West Street. We did some shopping, purchasing some patches and a scarf and some matches. (It was possible to buy small boxes of matches with images of your favorite Nazi—Goebbels, Ribbentropp, Goering, and more: collect all 12! The Fuhrer, alas, was not among the matchboxes I saw.) There was not the cutthroat haggling here that there was in, say, Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter, but one should never accept the marked price as the final price without making an effort at finding some lower common ground.

Yangshuo: Minnie Mao restaurant

We found Mr. Weasel’s favorite restaurant in Yangshuo, Minnie Mao’s, a place he visited on a trip several years back. (Mr. Weasel is a friend of some 60 years who lives in Kansas and loves China and all things Chinese.) He wrote that I should seek out his favorite waitress, a woman described by him as having “…short stature and [with] brown hair and brown eyes—probably  mid-30′s.” Well, there was no shortage of women fitting that description. Still, even though I called out “Weasel” several times inside Minnie Mao’s, I saw no heads snap upwards in recognition of his nom de guerre and so this aspect of our trip into town had been in vain.

Discouraged but not despondent, we hired a mototaxi to take us back to the Giggling Tree. We arrived at 6:30 in gathering darkness and near-record cold. Rather than eat in the lounge, we had a hamburger and Coke in the otherwise empty restaurant, an attractive open dining area with small candles flickering in glass bowls on every table. I had decided earlier today, remember, that if I wanted something I would order it. What better to complement the meal than Dutch apple pie a la mode in this Dutch-run guesthouse?

We finished eating and moved over to the lounge to enjoy the fire in the corner. Other travelers were in there this evening, some playing mah–jongg with one of the Chinese staff. I ordered an Irish coffee and settled into a small couch to read a few pages from Pearl S. Buck’s Dragon Seed, a novel set in rural China at the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War (circa 1937).

The lounge closed at midnight, the game broke up, and one of its participants came over to my table and initiated a conversation. We ended up talking about his work with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, DigitalGlobe’s contribution to HHI’s work through its satellite imagery capabilities (e.g., spotting warlords’ movements in Sudan), and George Clooney’s interest and support of the project. Interesting…

It was late when I left the lounge, crossed the courtyard, and went to bed.

WEDNESDAY (YANGSHUO)

I woke and crossed over to the lounge for a continental breakfast and to eat a delicate, coconut, muffin-like pastry I had purchased yesterday on West Street in Yangshuo. Outside, the owners’ irrepressible towheaded son, Pella, was playing as he sang “Do You Want To Dance?” I suspect that the lad, perhaps 12 years of age, will be able to break girls’ hearts in Dutch, English and Chinese.

I decided to take out one of Giggling Tree’s bikes for a 12-mile ride to Yulong Bridge, a trip that was highly recommended in guidebooks and by the guesthouse staff. Jer
had decided to take the day off to rest and plan, so I would go on the trip by myself.
The Giggling Tree provides its guests who set out on bikes with a set of laminated 4×6 cards giving specific directions for navigating the streets, small towns, and paths through the surrounding farmland. The directions were clear and were even supplemented with photos. I had no problems other than a need to make frequent stops to photograph the many memorable sights that I came upon.

We had made reservations for the Impression show in Yangshuo for tonight (the show had been canceled last night because of high waters on the Li River). Impression Sanjie Liu is a nightly (weather permitting) show with hundreds of performers that was conceived by moviemaker Zhang Yimou, the man who directed the 2008 Olympics’ over-the-top opening ceremony. A taxi would be at our lodging to pick us up at 6:40, but leaving the Giggling Tree at 1 o’clock left more than enough time for the bike ride.

Along the bike ride to Yulong Bridge

I engaged and was engaged by many folks along the way. Two young girls mugged enchantingly for my camera on their way home from school. I rode through a village where flotillas of tourists—nearly all Chinese—were launched on the Yulong River aboard 12-foot long ‘bamboo’ (actually, PVC for the most part) rafts fitted with two wooden chairs each plus room for a man to stand and pole the craft up- and down-river.

Along the bike ride to Yulong Bridge

Two charming 20-ish students from Hong Kong, part of a tour that had been bused to the river to shop and eat and raft, approached me. One of them asked if I’d like her to take my picture with my camera. Sure, why not? Then they wanted to have a picture with me, first with my camera, then with their’s. How about if I took a picture of the two of them with their camera? OK. We talked a little about Hong Kong as I had been there just two years before. The girl who initially approached me spoke quite good English, unsurprising since English is an official language of Hong Kong.

I rode through several small towns and farms and orchards and stopped at an ancient cemetery with rock tombs that climbed from the path I was following and up the lower portion of a nearly vertical karst. I stopped at the edge of the cemetery and sat on a rock to eat my lunch and write a bit. A sage-like scent suffused the air. In front of me and the east-facing tombs of rural folk long-since buried, there was an unparalleled diorama of karsts—lush green except for exposed rock that was too steep for vegetation to take purchase—rising from the flat, narrow river valley. Farmers worked the land as I watched and a few magpies flitted about. A man could look a long time to find a better spot to be interred, but I wasn’t quite ready to take the step.

Along the bike ride to Yulong Bridge

I continued riding across agricultural land—citrus orchards, fields with water buffalo and farmers, and even some patches where cotton was being grown—on a bike route that was sometimes no wider than 12 inches. There were artificial ponds where carp were raised. People were in fields, hunched over and planting so precisely that I thought they might be technicians or scientists rather than farmers. Manual laborers, men and women, worked at construction projects and brick making businesses. Old men and women sat outside homes in primitive settlements, some tending grandchildren. Many people called out ‘ni hao’ (‘hello’) as I passed.

Wedding picture shoot on Yulong Bridge

I reached my destination of Yulong Bridge at 4 o’clock. An exotic scene of nature and boats greeted anyone crossing over the bridge at Yulong village. There was a young couple having wedding pictures taken by a photographer and his three assistants, a scene that stopped me in my tracks for a half-hour as I, too, snapped shot after shot.

View from Yulong Bridge

In Yulong village

Though it was getting to be late afternoon, time was not a issue. I knew, though, that I had to maintain a certain pace in order to get back to the Giggling Tree, shower, grab a bite to eat, and meet our taxi at 6:40. I did maintain my pace for the most part, stopping once in awhile to take pictures, and still had no problem following the directions on my packet of information cards…

…until, that is, I did run into problems. At a certain point on the route to and from Yulong Bridge, the packet of directions states that the rider can choose to turn right and return from a point where they had already been—re-tracing a short section of the first part of the route—or turn left and take a little bit different way back. You can guess with metaphysical certainty that I would always make the left-hand turn and take a little bit different way back if given the choice. I knew that I would really need to keep going now to make it back on time, but all was well and I had my GPS homing in on the Giggling Tree.

The directions said to follow a small path along the river till it ends at a ferry where you can cross on a bamboo raft and be less than a quarter-mile from the Giggling Tree. The directions had been so good to that point that I continued on even though my GPS indicated that I was now 3+ miles from my destination, further away than I had been a half-hour ago. When I continued on I was certainly not on a “small path that ends at a ferry.” In fact, I found myself on a busy road where I soon encountered a toll booth. I was becoming alarmed at this point.

By that time it was 6 o’clock, I had ridden 13.7 miles, I was still 2.5 miles from the Giggling Tree, and I was running out of hope that—forget taking a shower and eating—I would even be able to get back in time to meet the taxi at 6:40. I figured Jer would be stewing by now, lamenting having taken me along on this trip, possibly worrying about my well being. I went through the toll booth and started looking for a three-wheeled mototaxi that could take me and my bike back where I’d started. I finally waved down a woman and her young son.

The woman knew even fewer words of English than I knew of Chinese. I showed her a pamphlet from the Giggling Tree, trying to indicate that I needed to get there and could she drive me? That didn’t seem to work, so I pointed to the phone number on the brochure and gestured for her to call it on her cell phone. (Everyone but everyone in China has a cell phone.)  She called the number, handed me the phone, I told the staffer my situation, and I handed the phone back to the mototaxi driver.

One of Giggling Tree’s delightful (and ever so helpful) staffers

The staffer and driver had a long conversation with much motioning on our end of the call. When the phone was handed back to me, the staffer said she would explain to the lady driver where I should wait and that the driver would point it out to me. The staffer would call for a van to pick me up and bring me and my bike back to the guesthouse. She would make sure that Jeremy knew my status and that the taxi would not leave until I got back. The staffer even asked whether I would  like for the Giggling Tree’s kitchen to prepare a to-go meal so I would have something to eat on the ride into town for the show!

I crossed the busy highway to wait in the parking lot of a restaurant/hotel. A van arrived within 15 minutes, picked me and the bike up, and had me back at the Giggling Tree at 6:55. The staffer back at the guesthouse was in contact with the van driver a couple of times while we were on our way back. She met us as soon as we pulled up in order to unload the bike and to transfer me to the taxi where Jer was waiting.

Scene from the “Impression” performance (no need to enlarge–she’s fully clothed)

We made it into Yangshuo for the Impression show in plenty of time to pick up our tickets and find our seats in the outdoors venue set bankside on the Li River, floodlit karsts in the background. The musical folk story was one of boy-marries-girl, the watery ‘stage’ facilitating the use of many watercraft in the telling of the tale. This was a worthwhile activity in a spectacular venue. Impressive.

The show was over and we were delivered back to the Giggling Tree by our same taxi driver a little after 9 o’clock. I gathered up my still-damp clothing that had been laundered and hung up to dry, took a shower, and joined Jer in the lounge where we had (again) Dutch apple pie a la mode.

I had a chance to talk travel and politics and education with a cute German Madchen of 18 or so. She had been traveling solo for the past year, to such places as Australia and India and Uganda. Alas, she had to return to Germany and enter ‘uni’ (university) in the summer or fall. (University is free in much of Germany, she told me, while there is some minimal charge in certain regions.) Before she returned home to begin the college grind, though, she would take the Trans-Siberian Railway from Beijing to Moscow. Oh, my.

It was too late again when I returned to my room for the night. My alarm was set for 6:30 a.m., only six hours away.

THURSDAY (YANGSHUO AND XINGPING)

The two of us were up early on what was, lamentably, our last day at the Giggling Tree. Before leaving, though, we had breakfast in the lounge, packed up our things, and got a taxi into Yangshuo. We accessed an ATM downtown, then caught a bus (for 7Y, or just more than $1) to Xingping.

It was a cool morning, not cold, and it was drizzling. The ride from Yangshuo north to Xingping took about an hour. We arrived at the small town, located on the Li River between the larger cities of Guilin and Yangshuo, at 10:30. Xingping, which dates to the 5^th century, enjoys a setting along the river and amidst the region’s renowned karst formations, a dreamy landscape made more dreamy as low clouds scudded along and over the rocks.

We walked a short way from the bus station to Backpacker’s Haven Xingping  Hostel (No. 5 Rongtan Road, Xingping) where we booked a private room with ensuite bath. After settling into our room, we crossed the street for a great meal of fried (pork) dumplings.

Li River just outside Xingping

Once fortified, Jer and I took off walking north alongside the Li River, intending to find some enterprising person who would take us back downstream on one of the ‘bamboo’ rafts we’d been seeing for days. The Li was running green now, much improved over the muddy café au lait color it had been when we’d taken the boat past here three days ago.

We continued walking along a good paved road, sometimes along the riverbank, sometimes separated from the Li River by citrus orchards and vegetable plots. A mile or two on, we started looking seriously for anything that might indicate that there could be rafts for hire, but to no avail. We kept walking and looking till we were three miles north of Xingping where we encountered three other pedestrians. They were a 30-year old woman from Bristol, England (Carolyn) and two Chinese students being tutored in English (Peter, 18 years old, and Abby, a 26-year old who looked 16). They were taking a day away from studying/tutoring English and were out for a walk in the countryside. We talked a bit, then talked much more as we walked together as a group of five, returning south towards Xingping, still looking for a raft ride.

Peter, Carolyn and Abby

After walking along for an hour or so, we spotted a riverside café with outdoor seating which was deserted at the time. No matter, we made ourselves at home at one of the tables. Peter and Abby, the young Chinese students, took it upon themselves to find someone to serve us some food.

A middle-aged woman came up from the river immediately below the patio where we were seated. We decided on sharing a meal of fish (prepared as beer fish). The woman went back down to the river and returned with a whiskered fish still swimming in the bottom of a bucket she presented us for our approval.

Our young Chinese friends began hand-selecting items to accompany our meal from the restaurant’s inventory of fresh vegetables, including lotus root. The fish was brought out, cooked whole and not looking all that different from when we saw it swimming at the bottom of the bucket a short while before. Finally, with tea and a large kettle of white rice to go with it, we began to attack the beer fish dish and vegetables with our chopsticks.

Eating the fish was made more difficult by the sense that it was staring at you from its cooked but otherwise undamaged head. I focused on finding chunks of meat from the fish’s midsection, but no part of it was off-limits to my Asian friends. Fins and bones? No problem.

Beer fish entree, fresh from the Li River

When everything of the fish was well picked over, Peter politely asked me if I cared to eat the head. I think he was deferring to my status of being the oldest person at the table. He seemed almost joyous when I said that, no, I’d really eaten enough. The young man dropped his chopsticks, picked up the fish head, and began sucking out anything not firmly attached to the skull—brains and eyes and tiny bits of jowl muscle. Mmmm!

View from hostel’s rooftop.

Our fivesome resumed the walk back to Xingping. Jer and I crossed the Binjiang Bridge into town while Carolyn, Abby and Peter continued walking along the road. We got back to the hostel at 4:30. Staying inside the rest of the day, which had become increasingly cold, seemed like a great idea. I bought a large beer and sat at one of the hostel’s rooftop tables while enjoying the scene and utilizing the available Wi-Fi.

Backpacker’s Haven Hostel features wood-fired pizza in their lounge down on the first floor, something Jer had enjoyed on a previous stay while traveling about China as a student. (I was less enamored of the pizza than he after being served a pie topped with white meat-like morsels that looked alarmingly like slugs.)

Jer and I remained in the lounge, accessed the Internet, and chatted a bit with other travelers and with staffers before calling it a night and returning to our room.

FRIDAY (XINGPING, YANGSHUO AND GUILIN) + TRAIN TO SHANGHAI

Glass of juice fresh-squeezed from blood oranges and redder than Rudolfo’s cap.

I was packed and out of our room before Jer, an unusual occurrence. Downstairs, the ever-gracious Maya at Backpacker’s Haven Hostel front desk prepared a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice for me. I was surprised to be served a drink having a deep red color you’d expect if you’d ordered a glass of tomato juice. But the taste! The deep red color came from locally grown blood oranges and the juice could not have been more delicious. Along with some fruit and the best coffee I had in China, this breakfast got the day off to a good start.

We needed to get to Guilin where we would catch an afternoon train to Shanghai, the last stop of our China trip. We had to take a bus back to Yangshuo from Xingping and then catch another one to Guilin 30 miles north (as the crow flies) on Highway 321.

Buses are frequent along such busy routes, departing perhaps every 15-20 minutes during daylight hours. (Reading the schedules inside bus terminals was another matter: I was glad that Jeremy had a good grasp of the language.) The two rides together cost just 27Y (about $4).

My favorite vehicle, frequently seen in this area along the Li River. You can hear them coming from a distance.

Our buses shared the paved road with other buses—large and small, cycles—motorized and not, pedestrians, men and women pulling two-wheeled carts, three-wheeled mototaxis, and my favorite: trucks with some kind of open motor contraption that sounded like a Poppin’ Johnny. Overhead monitors on the bus played a “Herbie” video. As we neared Guilin, literally thousands of cycles glutted the roads.

We got off the bus in Guilin at 11 o’clock, two hours after we’d boarded the first bus in Xingping. A taxi dropped us at the train station, across the street from the Flowers Youth Hostel where we’d stayed five days ago before taking a boat down the Li River. We climbed the stairs to ask that they hold our bags until mid-afternoon. The staff at the front desk recognized us—go figure…two Westerners, one an imposing young red-haired devil, the other a 6’ 5” gent likely 45 years older than the hostel’s typical clientele—and, of course, even though we weren’t registered guests,  they would be happy to watch our bags for a few hours.

Never far removed from eating or thinking of eating, we went back down into the alley leading from the hostel to the thoroughfare separating it from the train station. We went to the same nameless Mom and Pop restaurant we’d eaten at the previous Sunday night in a rainy gloom. Again, there were no other diners seated at any of the establishment’s half-dozen tables. Again, we had a very good meal, this time a dish called fish pork.

Fish pork is not an entrée that would ordinarily call out to me. In fact, it sounded terrible. Jeremy, though, was familiar with fish pork and he assured me that it had nothing to do with fish or a fishy taste. It was delicious! Served with onions, a plate of green vegetables, a bowl of rice, a pot of tea, and a 590ml beer, the cost of the feast was 24Y (less than $4). This would tide us over till we started the long train ride to Shanghai.

We exited the restaurant and alleyway into a busy square full of pedestrians, buses, shops and street vendors. I made some purchases of fresh oranges and bottled beverages and bagged snacks (yes, you can buy Fried Prawn Flavor Lay’s chips and I have the pictures to prove it) to take onto the train.

We collected our bags at the hostel and crossed the road to the Guilin Railway Station. The soft-sleeper ticket to Shanghai (800 miles northeast of Guilin as the crow flies)—20 hours in a four-bed private compartment—cost 539Y (about $85). Train T82  pulled out right on time at 3:05 p.m.

FRIDAY-SATURDAY, TRAIN (GUILIN TO SHANGHAI)

This was the longest of our several long train rides in China. It was a little more than 20 hours from the time we departed Guilin (3:05 p.m. Friday) till we disembarked in Shanghai

Aboard train T82, Guilin to Shanghai

The trip was comfortable, relaxing, and uneventful. We had the four-bed compartment to ourselves and got a good night’s sleep.

At 8 a.m. Saturday, I noted our location as 140 miles southwest of Shanghai. Outside the window, through haze and pollution that reduced visibility to a half-mile, I could see a modern, thriving city, Hangzhou I think, a port city on the Yangtze River Delta. I also saw something I hadn’t seen in two weeks—the sun. The last time I recalled seeing the sun was when we’d been at the Great Wall outside Beijing.

South Shanghai Railway Station

The final two hours of the train ride into Shanghai was virtually entirely through a populous cityscape. We disembarked shortly after 11:15 a.m., stepping out into the modern Shanghai South Railway Station. There was a subway station inside the terminal, of course, and we would find our way into the city and to the hostel where we’d spend the remaining days (less one night spent in the nearby canal city of Suzhou) of our China adventure.

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[Continued on post: (8) CHINA 2012—THE CANAL CITIES OF SUZHOU, WUJIANG AND TONGLI (MONDAY-TUESDAY, MARCH 12-13)]

We were woken by the humming of our two carriage friends, singing along to their favourite pop song, the girl sat in bed with her two cuddly companions, watching the karaoke words scroll across her phone as she tried to keep up with the English lyrics.

The journey between Guilin and Shanghai is a long 1,600km. With a vacuum flask of hot water provided in our soft sleeper compartment we made our way through several cups of tea, offerings of marshmallow cakes (we politely turned down the spicy chicken feet) and fruit teas that the mother insisted would help with my cough (sweet and not overly pleasing on the taste buds it made me forget I even had a cough).

As the food trolleys passed, the young girl was keen for us to sample everything, bouncing her way towards the trolley attendent before returning with three large punnets of fruit, which were peeled and welcomingly forced upon us.

Our T class train was possibly the smartest we had had in China. Together with our smiley, singing carriage friends, the 21 hour journey quickly passed and the haze of Shanghai soon descended.

Shanghai’s South Railway station is relatively modern and comes complete with luxuries such as ramps that seem to forego every other Chinese station. With no queue for taxis we were soon heading towards Shanghai’s amazing skyline on the elevated high way. We are staying at the Rock and Wood hostel in Changning District. The setting is beautiful, with a koi carp pond and bamboo decking.

In the evening we slurped huge bowls of soupy noodles at the trendy Taiwanese restaurant, Noodle Bull, located on the corner of Donghu Road in Xuhui district before window shopping at some of the late opening boutiques in the former French concession area.

First impressions of Shanghai are good ones, it seems that there will be a great variety of interesting sights, shops and restaurants to enjoy here!

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But what happens if, on the holiday of a lifetime, just when you are having an amazing time, having adapted to the culture shock, strengthened your stomach to the different food types and catalogued in your head all the things you still want to see, do and buy, you end up in a hospital?

I hate to say that this is exactly what happened to my notably better half’s mum. Having clocked up the sites in Beijing and having a spent a week in Shanghai (including watching the Almighty Murray on Sunday), whilst at the Shanghai South Railway Station awaiting a train for a daytrip to Hangzhou, she slipped on a wet floor, fell and well and truly destroyed her ankle. Forget worrying about her missed day-trip excursion and even the fact that she’d never make it to Hong Kong for the long weekend, she’d broken her ankle in China. Disaster.

The first I knew of this was the 5 missed calls from my beloved which I discovered on finishing my Chinese class. Knowing he’s never THAT keen to speak to me, I returned the call to learn that they finally were in an ambulance (concerningly my beloved’s phone doesn’t seem to allow him to call the emergency numbers…) and were trying to work out which of the numerous hospitals to go to. Several phonecalls with the not-so-helpful insurers (based in the UK and therefore requiring international phonecalls…) and discussions with the ambulance and the decision was made to attend the People’s Sixth Hospital (a Chinese hospital) for the simple fact that it is apparently famous for this particular area of surgery.

Five days on and she’s still there, though she has had the operation and is hopefully fit to the leave the hospital (to come home to our “tender” care) tomorrow. However, for her and my resilient other half it’s been 5 long days of:-
1) screaming at the UK insurers who have been less than forthcoming with the payments, meaning that a) a fair amount of money has had to be forked out upfront and b) the operation was delayed as the insurers had failed to make payment on time;
2) quickly learning the Chinese for “painkillers”, “bandages” etc and desperately trying to translate how frequently the drugs can be taken and the severity of the injury (pretty bad with what’s looking like a year to fully recover) as no one can really speak any English;
3) a little too much congee for breakfast and whole fish with bones in for lunch for my poor ma-in-law-to-be’s slightly sedated self to contend with;
4) the exceptionally drab “VIP” room with Chinese TV and an air conditioner which seems to drip water onto the floor at a rather alarming rate (not so amusing when it was a wet floor which led to this delightful hospital trip); and
5) waiting for one of two elevators which seem, on average, to take about 10 minutes to come and in which you are squished right up against everyone else and usually forced to half lean over some poor, unconscious soul in a stretcher.

I have a rather sneaking suspicion that my boyfriend’s mum isn’t going to rate Shanghai quite as highly as I do now…