Sometimes whilst traveling one must get really resourceful if one wants to get from point A to point B in a timely manner. Take, for example, our last vacation. I think the only form of transportation I did not manage to take was motorcycle. I did take buses, bicycles, boats, vans, golf carts, cable cars, rickshaws, trains, subways, a plane, and even at one point 8 escalators in a row. That was a long ride down.
My adventure with travel started with a sleeper bus to yangshou. I've been there before, we went the first vacation, but it was such a cool spot and some of the other girls hadn't been before that we were willing to return. For those of you wondering, a sleeper bus is literally a bus with three rows of the narrowest bunk beds around. But it is better than a regular bus overnight because you have beds. The bus official was nice enough to give us the back bed all together, and rearrange some of the Chinese people around us, but it ended up being the beds right over the engine or something because that is the hottest bed I've been on here. I didn't get a lot of good sleep, but I got enough sleep to navigate Yangshou at 3am, for, once again, the bus dropped us of at 3 in the morning. I was glad I knew where we were going this time so we didnt have to waste hours trying to find our hostel and we could just go straight there and fall asleep in piles in the lobby until we could check in.
The next day the other girls decided to go bamboo rafting, but because there was an odd number of us, it was national holiday, and the prices had jacked up 3x as much as I initially paid, I decided to chill at the hostel and save some of my money. Plus, I'd had such a good time with Regan when we went, I didn't want to ruin that memory with another memory on top of it.
If possible, yangshou was even more crowded this vacation. National holiday is when the entire country gets off work and school and decides to go traveling. We struggled to find transportation and hostels a month before vacation because everything was booked up already. But even with all the additional people, we found a lot of fun things to do, like get henna tattoos and airbrush tattoos, and just having fun dancing in the street.
By far the best part of Yangshuo was the white-water "drifting" we did on the second day. We were in rafts of two, with helmets and white water, but we didn't have paddles to steer at all, which is why I call it drifting. They would stop us before the big drops just to build up suspension and I went down backgrounds the first few times. I absolutely loved going down backwards, but going down facing forward was awesome as well because then you got some serious air as the raft dropped. Either way it was so much fun! And we made friends with a German family drifting with us. They were fun to talk to and cheer on as the children passed the parents and such. When we finished, I wanted to get right back on the bus and go again. That is something I will definitely be doing again in my life.
The next day is when we rented bikes and went biking out in the countryside. We found the most beautiful field of flowers and the word LOVE that we had to stop and pose next to. But we kind of got carried away with our amazing selfies, and Taylor ended up falling in a pond.... That's a funny story. Regan told Taylor to go stand on a boat and pose with her rice hat. Taylor ran over to go climb down onto the boat, and started crawling. Then she stood up and ran almost all the way across the boat before realizing that she was very balanced and she needed to be in the middle of the boat, not the end. She walked back to the middle, took a bunch of pictures and then started to walk back to climb off the boat. But when she jumped to the shore, the boat slipped and she missed the shore, landing in the water. I've never seen someone throw their bag out of the water faster, but iPads don't do well with water... After she finally got out and we headed back to our bikes, we decided to go back to the hostel so Taylor could shower (who knows what was in the water???) and then we just explored in the city on our bikes for a while after that.
We had bought train tickets from Guilin to Changsha that evening, so we needed to make it three hours on a bus to Guilin. We had talked to our hostel about the bus station, but somehow we still made it to the wrong bus station. So we ran out into the road and found some rickshaws to take us to the other station. The rickshaw we were in decided to take ALL the backroads to the other station. Literally we crossed main roads to take the backroads instead, and we kind of were worried that with translation errors we were going to get hopelessly lost. Luckily, that was not the case and we made it there just in time to catch a bus.
Which by the way buses in China are crazy. They go off-roading if there isn't a road to get us there. Doesn't matter if the bus is huge or crowded. They just go. Bouncing along. So funny, although it's not very conducive to napping on the bus.
The first train ticket we had was for hard seats. Those are the worst because the seats are straight up and down and pretty narrow. The ride was 8 hours long and yet, I did not get a wink of sleep that whole time. We made some friends and bought some shamwow towels though. Very useful and something I've wanted for years, so I was excited for that part. I was much more excited for the second train, where we had bought beds. Oddly enough though, when we got on the second train, all our beds had been slept in earlier in the night. It was a bit disconcerting, but I was too tired to care much. I just climbed into bed and fell right asleep. Didn't wake up til 10am the next morning when we thought the train would be getting in.
When we got off the train and out of the station, we called the hostel and asked for directions. The hostel owner is the nicest man we have come across in China, which is saying something because everyone always wants to help us. He told us that instead of giving us directions he would just hop on his bike and come pick us up. It is only a 10 minute walk from the station so it wouldn't be a big deal. While we were waiting for the owner, a police golf cart pulled up to our group and asked if we needed help. We told the officers that we were taken care of and waiting for our guide, but he insisted on takin a few of us in the back of the cart. So I hopped in along with two other girls and they dropped us off right outside our hostel door. It was really kind but really random of the police to do that, especially since I don't think they ever intended to go back for more of our group. They just wanted to help three of us out.
That day we ha hoped to buy cable car tickets and make our way up to the tienmen mountains, but due to high volumes of people they had already stopped selling tickets, so we decided to talk to a travel agency around and see what we could do for the afternoon. We wanted to go zip lining, so we talked it over with the only agency that had an English speaking man, and bought transportation and tickets into the park. The ride was a lot longer than we expected, nearly an hour and a half up the canyons, and when we got there, the park was unexpectedly closed! It was really frustrating trying to figure out what we were to do with a driver who didn't speak English at all. Luckily the agency man had given us his number so we called him to figure out what was even going on. He said he could change our tickets to somewhere else, but by that time we were tired of being in a car, and we just wanted to go home and try again the next day with our own plans. So we drove the hour and half back down the canyon to the agency, where we got most of our money back (they had to pay transportation even though we didn't do anything because we did use the van) and then hung out in our hostel for the evening.
We had asked our hostel man about hiking the Tienmen mountains and got all the best info on where to go and what to see, so the next day we started out really early in the morning. We didnt want to take any chances on tickets being sold out, and the line would still be atrocious. I think we waited in line for two hours (at least) before we got on the cable car to go up the mountain. Lots of line games came up, and I learned a few that I'd never played as a child, so that was pretty cool.
The Tienmen mountains are beautiful. They are so much taller than anything I had ever been on before. They are so tall that the clouds seem to come down and kiss the tops of them. Everything was a little misty and hard to see far. We contemplated if that was all cloud or if some of it was smog, but the air felt so much fresher and lighter that I doubt a lot of it was pollution.
There is a glass walkway in the mountains where you can walk on it and look down forever. It was amazing, and we had to wear little booties over our shoes that were so funny. They gave us pointy toes and heels. Other than that we spend the day walking up and down and around places and mostly embracing the picture taking enthusiasm of the Chinese. They must get bored of so many Asian faces so when they see us westerners it is so novel they have to take pictures with us. If we stand in a big group for more than 30 seconds there are always people with phones and cameras suddenly out taking pictures of us, or hopping in to take pictures with us. We decided to embrace it while on the mountain, so we allowed that to happen a lot.
The next day we went to the Tienzai mountains, also known as the Avatar mountains. The background to the movie Avatar is loosely based on those mountains. It is spectacular there. I have never never nor will ever see anything like them ever again. Pictures cannot capture what I saw, and hopefully my memories will never fade so much that I'm not able to recall the beauty and magnitude of those views.
We started at the bottom of the canyons and hiked to the top up stair after stair after stair. It wasn't really that hard, but it still took a while. I decided to enjoy nature and took my time about it. Each new rest stop up provided a new and often improved view of our surroundings. We also made friends with a group of Chinese people hiking up at the same time as us. I had actually met them the day before on the Tienmen mountains, but this time we all became friends. He was so nice! And funny. The first rest we all had together they asked for pictures with us, and jokingly we said ¥5. They laughed but were careful around us for a bit until we explained that we were joking. The main man (we learned his name was Fish, or something) bought us all oranges and cheered us on. Later when we ran into him again he bought us bamboo sticks to gnaw on. Bamboo is surprisingly sweet sometimes (there were some hit and misses among our group) and full of water when it's fresh. For someone who forgot to bring a lot of water with her I was very appreciative of the moisture. Once we got to the top of the mountains there were so many people we didn't see Fish or his sister again, but it was a pleasure to hike up with them.
I don't know what else to say about the Tienzai mountains. We took so many pictures, saw a monkey, bought some whistles, and generally had a blast. At one point we looked over at an adjacent mountain and saw a man swinging from a rope along the side of the mountain. It was crazy. Legitimately. We don't know what he was doing, but then he calmly climbed up the rope and back to the top of the mountain. We aren't even sure if anyone else saw the performance or if he was just doing it for his own amusement.
The following morning we went to the airport to take a plane back home. We did so much on our vacation that we were ready for our own beds and schedule. But the adventures weren't quite over yet. We got to the airport at 8:15ish, and nothing was open. None of the counters or security points. We aren't even sure if the automated check in booths were working. So we chilled in line. The part that surprised me the most when the counters did open and we got all checked in was the fact that checking a bag didn't cost anything extra. I ended up needing to check my backpack because I had brought my contact solution bottle, which is way over 4oz, and I also had a pocket knife in my backpack... You never know when you'll need something like that, but security didn't think I'd need it in the passenger part of the plane. I agreed with them.
By far the plane was my favorite form of long distance transportation, although beds on trains are my second favorite. Altogether I had so much fun on vacation, and I'm glad we had the opportunity to take so many varied forms of transportation to and during all our different adventures. I'm grateful for all the views I've seen and all the people I met and all the pictures I've taken to try and capture moments that will live on in my mind forever.
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