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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