Guilin and Yangshuo

I’ve spent the last few weeks on a bit of a holiday from my trip. I’ve spent the better part of 2 weeks in Guilin with a 4 day trip in the middle to Yangshuo. Here’s the story!

So I took the train down from Shanghai over two weeks ago now.. It was a good trip, and I’m glad I took the train instead of trying to cycle it! I kept my GPS running the whole time, and it worked out at over 1600km! You can see the route on my Actual Route page here.

It was a good ~20km ride across town to Shanghai South Station. I was glad I’d checked out where to take the bike beforehand, it made it very straightforward to sort it out. I met a guy I’d spoken to earlier who spoke English and stepped me through the process. They even put all my bags (which were in carry-alls as well) into a big reasonably tough blue bag which made me feel better. Here’s Indie and the bag ready to go..

Shanghai South Station is pretty new. It’s circular and quite impressive engineering and design. The whole big passenger area is open and cavernous, and then you go down a level to the actual platforms and trains. I had a few hours to kill, so made good use of my Kindle, as well as doing some people watching.
Here’s the inside of the station.

I splashed out and got a bed in a soft-sleeper compartment. It was probably overkill, and when I travel on from Guilin I’m going with a hard-sleeper. The soft sleepers have 4 beds in a compartment and a door that can be closed. The Hard sleepers are 6 (stacked 3 high) and there’s no door- the whole thing is relatively open. In my soft-sleeper compartment (berths are for ships), it was just me and a middle-aged Chinese woman who didn’t speak any English and ignored me pretty much completely. The journey was supposed to take about 20 hours but ended up taking 22 as they’re doing a lot of work building a new line near to Guilin. Important lesson I learnt on the train- it’s BYO toilet paper. Of course I have some in my panniers, but they were making their way to Guilin on a different train! Needless to say, the extra 2 hours weren’t much fun!

Some photos from on the train:

So I got settled into the hostel in Guilin, and hung out a bit. Here are some photos from Guilin city (which has ~700,000 people- a small city in China)- including the Sun and Moon pagodas..

So it was that Friday that I hit up the Longsheng Rice Terraces, you can read all about that day here.

I’ve been staying at the Wada Hostel in Guilin, and I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s back from the street quite a bit, and it means that you can escape it all if you want. The young women that run are very friendly, and have remembered my name from the start. The atmosphere seems a lot different to the hostels I was in in Europe and even Japan. Here it feels like more of a meeting place of travellers rather than tourists. Well, as much as a traveller as you can be in this northern extent of the Banana Pancake Trail. There seems to be a lot of people here who have come across the Trans-Mongolian railway, or who are on longer journeys. At one stage we had 6 long distance-cyclists at the hostel! More on that later.

Another good thing about Wada is the events they have- Friday sees an All-you-can-eat BBQ for pretty cheap and they serve some very tasty food- heaps of meat skewers and BBQ’d vegetables. Monday night is Dumpling night where they teach you to make dumplings, and then you get to eat them, all for free!

So I saw a window of opportunity- I could do Monday night’s Dumpling party, go riding for 4 days to Yangshuo and make it back in time for the BBQ the next Friday!

Tuesday morning saw me heading out of Guilin, only a little less happy than these guys appear to be!

The road was pretty flat for the first 20km, but it was also quite busy with tourist buses taking people to cruise down the Li River on a bamboo raft.

Then suddenly I turned off the main road and after some switchbacks riding uphill left the concrete (the most common road surface here is concrete instead of asphalt or chipseal). The road appears to be getting upgraded for the next ~40km. I’m pretty sure they’re preparing it to seal it, but they seem to be doing it all at once instead of a little bit at a time! Something tells me this won’t be the last time I hit roadworks on this trip!

I really enjoyed the ride- yes it was bumpy and challenging, but after the relatively easy riding of Europe and Japan it was just what I needed. You had to concentrate with big rocks in the road and soft patches of dust, but the scenery was amazing.

Note: YMMV (Your mileage may vary)- speaking to some other cycle tourists who rode that section (one couple who have just started, and someone else who was on a recumbent), they really hated it. Each to their own I guess.

But I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

Xingping is a little town about 35km from Yangshuo. During the day it’s quite busy with tourists passing through, but in the evenings it’s dead quiet. There’s a great hostel there (called “This Old Place”) who serve great wood-fired pizzas and have a nice cafe in town that give you a discount if you’re staying at the hostel. They also have a roof-top terrace that overlooks the river to watch the sunset from. It was pretty awesome, and I wish I could’ve stayed a week, but I had a date with a heap of cyclists (what’s the name for a collection of cyclists?) and a BBQ back in Guilin a couple of days later. I did stay for two nights which was great.

At the start of the year one of my friends, Ross, did some cycling in this area, and kindly uploaded his GPS track to the Garmin website.. Thanks to that I knew that there was a road I could follow to Yangshuo on the other side of the river. Parts of the road aren’t show on any map I could find on the web- Google, OSM or Beidu (China’s equivalent of Google). But knowing that they did it gave me confidence to take a ferry across a river and ride. It turned out to be a great road- nice concrete and very little traffic. A lot of it was riding past citrus trees, contemplating stopping and picking some fruit! Parts were pretty steep, especially as I was riding hard up them- i was kinda breathless for the rest of the day! But like the day before, I really enjoyed the challenge and was glad I didn’t take the busy flat main road from Xingping to Yangshuo.
Here are some photos from that ride.

I arrived in town, and it was a bit of a shock to the system. Super-touristy and a bit too busy for me, I rode through and out of town. I knew of a couple of places I was hoping to stay at about 5km out of town. The first, The Giggling Tree, had dorm rooms, but they were all full. I tried the other place, Outside Inn, and decided to splash out and get a room to myself. It was relatively pricey, but it had been almost a month since I hadn’t slept in a dorm room, so thought it would be worth it. The place had such a different feel to a backpackers- quite a few children and older people around. And I sure got some strange looks wheeling my bike past the flashpackers the next morning!

It was a long, flat, straight ride back to Guilin. There was pretty much just the main road to follow, although it did have a nice wide shoulder on it so I never felt threatened.
The first part was beside a river with lots of bamboo rafts on it, like lots of them!






So I’ve been back in Guilin for a few more days. I got back in time for the BBQ. There were 6 cyclists there- a Belgian couple who had ridden through Central Asia and are getting towards the end of their trip, a German/Irish couple who were about 3 days of riding into a trip to Singapore, and an American woman who’s travelling through SE Asia with a bicycle Couchsurfing and looking at food as she goes! We all had some good chats and ate a whole lot of food whilst comparing notes about roads past and roads ahead. It was especially good to mine Claire and Tim (the Belgians) about travelling through the remoter parts of China, as in a few weeks time I’ll be heading through a part of Yunnan province that is barely mentioned in Lonely Planet!

Now I’m all ready to move on from Guilin. It’s been a great few weeks but I’ve got a train ticket to Lijiang in Yunnan province, and my bike (Indie) is already on its way! I take one overnight train to Kunming, hang out there during the day, then take another overnight train up to Lijiang! Exciting times.. Lijiang is at 2400m- about the same height as the top of Mt Ruapehu in NZ, so it might be a bit cooler than here!

And finally, today’s token shot of a surveyor (‘s assistant/chainie)

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