Day 12 – “You wanna pay HOW much to see a TREE?”

I was supposed to travel to the rice terraces on this day.  My traveling companions, Tom, Radek, and Aga convinced me to stay at This Old Place for one more night.  They didn’t really have to try very hard. 🙂  So, we began the day by taking the local bus to Yangshuo.  I had previously spent about 10 minutes in this city…enough time to get off one bus and get right on another.  Yangshuo is a pretty neat looking city.  Imagine the karst mountains from the previous post and in addition to the river, put a city there too!  There are TONS of foreigners here.  It is Backpacker Junction.  Also, coincidentally, it is the sister city to Rapid City, SD.  There’s your fun bit of trivia for the day.  You will all sleep better knowing that.  (by the way–I got that tidbit of information on the wikipedia website about Yangshuo as I was planning my trip)

We spent the first two hours walking around (all while being followed by a man wanting to rent us his bikes.)  And then we found it!!!!!!!!!!  A Chinese Puzzle Shop!!!  (For any of you that actually know me well, you will understand how exciting this was for me.) 🙂  I wanted to stay there the rest of the day and solve all the puzzles.  (They were all wooden-type puzzles (not jigsaw), some are blocks of wood, others are wood with strings, wood with metal…etc…) I was in heaven!  I didn’t actually get a picture of the shop. I’m regretting that as I write.  So, we did spend a bit of time here as Yours Truly tried to decide which puzzle to buy…because there would definitely be buying going on.  There were a few that were easier, so I didn’t buy those.  Then I found one that I fell in love with.  It is all wood and has many blocks that all have to fit inside a square.  Each block 5 cubic units in volume, but each one is a different shape.  (except one block which is only four cubic units and is in the shape of a square.) The goal of this puzzle is to put all of the pieces into the box so it fits exactly.  Needless to say, whenever I had ANY downtime for the rest of the trip, I was playing! 🙂

After the puzzle shop we found a place to rent bikes.  That was our main goal for heading into Yangshuo that day.  So, we bargained our price for the bikes…actually, the man wanted to rent us mopeds but I quickly vetoed that.  (No, I’m not a chicken.  Another Beijing FOC friend got rear-ended on a moped and broke his collarbone not to much before this day.)  I had a sweet mountain bike. (I’m sort of a bike snob now after using my sweet-awesome bike in Beijing) 🙂

We were off for the day. 🙂  We immediately biked out of town to find Moon Hill and the big Banyan Tree. 

Here is a photo of me (front), Aga (next), and Radek (back) on our bikes outside of town. It was a beautiful day for a bike ride!

We had lots of fun interacting with the locals while riding.  It was on this bike ride that we tried sugar cane also.  Eventually we made it to the Big Banyan Tree.  (Now, people, for those of you who have this at the top of your priority list when visiting China, I can tell you that you might want to skip it. Sorry to burst your bubble.) 

So, It wasn't just a tree. It was a whole park. You could do a bamboo raft ride by yourself if you wanted to. You could stand on a raft and have your picture taken. Many types of food were available on a stick. We were there for about 30 minutes. We saw some monkeys. That's all. A really big tree. A really big waste of money.

After the tree we pressed on toward Moon Hill.  This was another karst mountain but with a really big hole in it.  Again, we had to pay to climb it.  (What is it with these people and their entrance fees for nature?)  I wasn’t all that interested in climbing the hill.  I mean, I had just trekked the gorge, scaled another mountain to see the sunset, and would soon be trekking around the rice terraces. Do I really want to climb another one? Fine. It’s here. Why not?

This is Moon Hill. It wasn't as bad of a hike as the other mountain. We only climbed to the opening. It was okay.

After visiting Moon Hill we began our journey back to Yangshuo.  Along the way we had fun again.

"Hello, Bamboo!" This truck turned on a road next to us as we were stopped. About two minutes later, it turned past us again. 🙂

This was Tom the German trying to be cool. He's also sitting on the bar in one picture but this one is cooler. Also: do you see the red lantern-type things hanging in the trees? We saw these 'lantern' things the ENTIRE bike ride. I would not want to have been the person whose job it was to hang them.

After making it back to Yangshuo, we found a restaurant for supper, (and also ran into the German couple from the train) .  We grabbed some cheap Chinese beer for the bus ride back to Xingping.  When we got back to the hostel we taught Norman how to get on Facebook in China! 🙂 

Aga and Radek asked me if they could tag along to the rice fields the next morning! Great!  Tom said he would catch up to us the following day!  So, I still had my travel buddies for the next few days!