Travel in Guilin

The next morning, we booked our train tickets over to Kunming for later in the week before heading out to explore the seven peaks park. We stopped en route to pick up lunch from the street sellers along the road and enjoyed a delicious picnic in the park (well a quarter of a picnic, as we had eaten most of it in the taxi ride over) consisting of bbq’d and generously spiced beef skewers, freshly baked plain and sweet flat breads and watermelon.
Afterwards we walked around the park for a couple of hours enjoying the beautifully landscaped scenery and exploring a massive and absolutely beautiful cave. Once we had had enough of park life, we decided to walk back the long way into town of Guilin amongst the hundreds of other Chinese pedestrians. As we walked we noticed how smartly dressed everybody was; their leather boots making me feel woefully inadequate in my clothes and very un-cool trainers. As flip flops were no longer an option in the cold weather, I decided that I would need a pair of pumps to minimise the wearing of the clown style trainers. The first shoe shop we stopped in made it apparent as to why everybody had lovely boots: the prices were ridiculously cheap. After discovering this, I proceeded to drag Tom around about a hundred department stores looking for ‘pumps’ but all the while secretly checking out the genuine leather high heel boots, that although being completely impractical, were about fifteen pounds. Eventually I found a pair that I convinced myself I needed and although I would have to carry them around in my bag for the next 3 months it seemed like a good investment.
By the time the shoe shopping antics had culminated in one pair of boots and one pair of 50p pumps from a street stall it was dark outside and the city had transformed itself into mass of fluorescent signs and billboards. We had consulted from our China tour advisor where we should go to see the local life of Guilin and do some shopping here. The atmosphere was fantastic with hundreds of people rushing about, shopping in the techno lit shops, browsing the markets, eating, drinking. In a way it felt a little like the build up to Christmas back home which we had missed. We wandered around the city until our feet ached, trying to soak it all up. On our way, we noticed the way the Chinese share meals; they will order about 15 dishes and share them between one another. We also saw how they over ordered by about 75%, some dishes barely being touched. They would also order a new round of beers drink a couple of mouthfuls before paying the bill and leaving. The latter being considered practically a sin in Tom’s book. Although we found this custom strange and wasteful, but the local guide from Top China Trip said before that it is considered polite, alongside leaving half of your food spread across the table cloth, the sign of a very good meal and a massive comfort for those new foreigners trying to get to grips with chopsticks. An even stranger concept to us was the large rat-like creatures that were kept in cages outside of the restaurants assumedly waiting to be picked by somebody as their starter. Bizarre. As we continued to walk around the city, we began to realize just how huge it was. On a China scale it was tiny with just .... million people, but on an England scale it would seem more comparable to Manchester. At about 9pm we both decided we were hungry and would try some more street food. We then asked the private tour advisor from Top China Trip they recommended us go to a vendor that seemed to have a lot of customers. So we went and we decided to order something to eat which tasted delicious. Once our nutritious meal had been thoroughly washed away and our feet felt too tired to go on, we decided to call it a night. We stopped briefly en-route to buy a boat ticket onwards to a city called Yangshuo, for the next day, before flopping into our rock solid beds (literally rock solid as well, Tom nearly broke his bum with his over enthusiastic flopping.) Our first travel China impressions of China and Chinese people had been fantastic; the people were lovely, the cities were exciting and the landscape was beautiful, (not to mention the reasonably priced shops.) All in all, we had turned up not having a clue as to what to expect from China and had been more than pleasantly surprised, and our impressions were set to just keep getting better.