Shitscared and headfirst into Chaos

It’s been a few days since I have updated my blog and finally I feel like I am seeing parts of China that are worth seeing. A few days ago we were staying in a hotel in Guilin called Eva Inn. The hotel was quite good but it’s toilet was a different matter altogether. It seems that they were undergoing plumbing problems which systematically resulted in poo rising up and surfing round the bowl while slowly draining the water out to let the detritus of bowel waste to settle gently in the bowl. Interesting, to say the least, but really quite disturbing.

Guilin is much like the rest of China in some ways, scary drivers, Scooters and the streets echoing with cries of “Hullo, Hullo, you want!!!? Only five yuan.” It gets to the point that as soon as you hear a hullo you start to flinch and prepare yourself for having to fend off some tout trying to carry your bags or give you a ride on a scooter or sell you a tour package. That aside Guilin is in a nice area but there is no mistaking the fact that it is a city, complete with hoards of people and flurries of smog. It may not be on the scale of Hong Kong or Guangzhou, but you feel the presence of its 700,000 population quite keenly.

 All these things aside, if you get to Yangshuo, which we are finally in, you notice the difference straight away. This place is awesome, touristy as hell, but much more in line with what I thought China would be like. The Karst Mountains jut out of the ground in all their limestone glory, erupting from the flat green landscape abruptly. They loom over hotels, streets you name it. There is no mistaking that they are the prominent feature of the area as at night they are illuminated as if they were giant natural sculptures and Yangshuo is the gallery.

It really is a beautiful area yet the heat and humidity is still crushingly hot. Last night we were given a room with a balcony overlooking the town. It was a spectacular view, but coupled with shitty air conditioning and Eve’s OCD like behaviour in trying to make our room a mosquito free zone (she started taping up the seams of the fucking balcony doors, thinking this is perfectly normal behaviour), it made things a hell of a lot less pleasant. The funny thing about this is that after sealing the doors with masking tape, Eve hopped online and chatted to her mum. The topic of mosquitoes came up and I heard a response that crawled across the digital pathways from Australia, that made me laugh. Her mother said “Just tape up the doors that will keep them out.” To which Eve responded “I already have.”