Saturday 4 July 2015

Day 251: It's getting a bit steamy

After a breakfast of jam and crackers in our compartment, the girls played with Tina, a little Chinese girl from the adjacent compartment. At about 10am, we arrived in Guilin, where we would be spending just the one night before heading down the Li River to Yangshuo. Once outside the station we managed to get a taxi pretty quickly, even manage to haggle the price down to 50 yuan. Pretty soon we had made it to our accommodation for the night – the Riverside Hostel (which, as the name suggests, is located on the bank of the Toahua River). There, we checked in and while the girls made use of the foosball table, Kate and I booked a 'bamboo boat' to get us to Yangshuo.






Then, after dropping off our bags, and with dire warnings of the abundant pickpockets said to roam the city, we headed out to find an ATM and some lunch. In a little street running parallel to the main road near the hotel we found a restaurant selling rice dishes cooked in bamboo steamers. The idea is that you get a steamer with a big serve of rice inside and then choose the other components of the dish, which are piled up on top – carrot, corn, pork of various types, duck, chicken, sausage, frog (we figured out what this one was when we saw a delicate little hand reaching up out of a mass of pink meat and dark-grey skin). Once you've built your meal, the steamer is placed over a hole in the end of the cart that contains the ingredients. Underneath is a big container of boiling water that cooks everything for you. When it's ready, the 'chef' (who was wearing a pair of 'sleeves' to stop his arms being burnt by the steam billowing from the cart) sprays over some sauce and adds a few condiments and hey presto, you have a lovely, tasty dish of rice, meat and veges for the equivalent of a bit more than a pound. After we had ordered we bought some drinks across the road and were soon tucking into our meals sitting at a tiny little table on tiny little stools out front of the restaurant on the edge of the street.




After lunch, we went exploring, finding a cool little market and checking out the rivers and lakes that are scattered around the city. We bought some lychees off one of the women who ride around town selling them from their bikes and a little My Neighbour Totoro purse. Lunch hadn't quite filled us up, so when we found a restaurant selling rice dishes cooked in little clay pots (a similar idea to the bamboo-steamer place we'd eaten at earlier, in that you got to choose your ingredients), we grabbed a couple of those too. 











Then it was back to the hotel for some two vs. two table football and a game of rummy. Unfortunately, the latter went on a bit too long, and by the time we made it back to out to the bamboo-steamer restaurant for dinner they were closing up (we've discovered that people eat very early in China and we we've been struggling to synchronise our eating times to their). We walked a bit further down the road and sat down at a hotpot-style place, but they didn't have an English menu and the whole thing was a bit too scary, so we gave up and went on a frustrating search for an alternative. Without a clear idea of where to look, we ended up walking along a lot of restaurant-free shopping streets. When we did find a proper restaurant street, all of the restaurants were too brightly lit for our liking. As in Huangshan, many of these places had large collections of live animals outside, including some sort of large rodent that was attempting to gnaw through the wire bars of its cage. In the end, we gave up and went back to the claypot place at which we had eaten earlier and which was, thankfully, still open.




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