Biking Through The Villages of Yangshuo – Yangshuo, China

Biking Through The Villages of Yangshuo
Yangshuo, China

Emerging from my hotel on a side street early my first day in Yangshuo, I passed typical hole-in-the-wall restaurants serving up noodles for breakfast. I made my way toward the Li River, hoping to get some nice early morning photographs. I didn’t think I had gotten up that early, but even at 8:30 a.m., the streets of this small Chinese town were empty and the tourist shops and cafes along West Street were still boarded up. Only a few trinket vendors were setting up their carts, waiting for the hordes of Western tourists to roll out of their hostel bunks and find a café that served fresh coffee and banana pancakes.

On the banks of the river, which was more than half way dried up during my visit in January, women with metal pails filled with clothes were softly humming while they did their laundry amongst the postcard-perfect peaks of Southwest China. A teenaged boy sat on rock practicing his English.

“I want my money first!” he yelled out, over and over.

I had read so many accounts of this well-touristed part of China and had seen so many breathtaking photographs that I found it hard to describe their beauty without using worn-out phrases. I continued walking, staring in amazement at the unique peaks that intermittently rose straight up out of the flat earth.

After giving in and buying coffee and yogurt for breakfast at one of the many cafés on West Street (I still can’t get used to Chinese breakfasts), I was approached by a small, but nonetheless aggressive woman looking for people to take on a bike tour of the surrounding villages.

Minutes later I was bargaining for a mountain bike rental. At first I had argued against getting the mountain bike. I ride a Chinese one-speed all over Hangzhou, I thought, certainly I can ride one around here. My guide said I better get the mountain bike so I reluctantly agreed. It felt a little extravagant to be on a bike with gears after months of riding Mao (meaning cat, not leader of the communist revolution), my gray one-speed that cost me approximately $15US.

After we turned off the main road and into some bumpy dirt and rock-covered paths, I was happy I ended up getting the mountain bike. My guide, on the other hand, was on a Chinese-style bike and I still couldn’t keep up with her. She wasn’t much of a talker and I never got her name (something I still regret). She spoke pretty good English and understood every question I threw her way. She told me her family never had enough money to send her to school, so she learned English by talking to travelers passing through Yangshuo. I learned that she has three daughters – one who is in college. She was a small woman with a big smile who wore a tourist hat with the words “Guilin, China” on it.

She took me on mile after mile of dirt back roads, through villages and past fields dotted with the occasional water buffalo eating the leftovers from the rice harvest. It was a classic China scene. The limestone peaks rose up from the flat earth and looked like they could touch the moon and the stars. By mid-day, they were all still shrouded in mist.

There is a large amount of poverty in the villages we rode through and in Yangshuo itself. Though some have made a good deal of money from tourism, most live in mud brick and bamboo houses without running water or sewage. On my bike I felt so close to the people we passed, the farmers hauling vegetables from the fields.

We rode and rode, up over small hills and past patchwork field after patchwork field – most of them brown because it was the dry season. And finally we got to Moon Hill, a karst peak with a round hole in it. I climbed to the top while my guide waited with my bicycle. Many steps later, I was near the top, and the views, still obscured by the mist, were amazing nonetheless.

I quickly made my way down and saw my guide chatting with one of the women selling postcards. We got on our bikes and headed down the road a bit and made a left turn into a village. It was my guide’s village and she was going to make me lunch. While she cooked, I waited alone in an outdoor seating area covered in bamboo mats. It was her home – transformed into a tourist rest stop. Although her home looked like all the others in the village, impromptu structures of brick, I guessed she made quite a bit of money and was probably using the money to pay for her daughter’s education, as well as the small pavilion that had been built to accommodate her tour participants.

We ate and left, just like that. My guide scarfed down her food in a couple of gulps and sat watching me while I ate the snow peas and mystery meat piece by piece. Soon we were back on our bikes and I could feel my muscles tightening, getting more and more sore. This time we rode on the main road back.

Transport trucks passed at light speed and vehicles with tractor engines attached to the front would slowly chug past, half in the car lane, half in the bike lane.

My guide was quiet much of the way back and I pumped my legs as fast as I could to keep up. We sped past more fields as the road wound around more peaks. I couldn’t have been happier with the fresh air blowing against my face as I chased a tiny Chinese woman.

Back in Yangshuo the streets felt like Shanghai compared to the nearby countryside, crammed with cars and bikes. The outlying areas we had pedaled through were so calm and beautiful that any sort of population density felt constrictive, loud and crazy.

My guide and I parted ways, and again I made my way down West Street looking for a place to relax. Amongst the crowds of tourists, sitting at an outdoor café eating the unthinkable – a burrito – I couldn’t help but compare my position in the world with my guide’s – my privileged position by accident of nationality, hers of poverty, looking in on, and taking advantage of, a whole other world that she would never be a part of.

In the evening we went back to our worlds – I to West Street, she to her mud-brick house. Though we are worlds apart socially, economically, culturally, our worlds overlapped for a few hours that January day.

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