Unlucky Yangshou
Trip Start
Nov 28, 2005
1
29
48
Trip End
Aug 12, 2006
Yangshou, China
Saturday, April 15, 2006
We got to Yangshou and after a fair amount of searching, found a hotel room. It was fairly central, and things were pretty quiet at the time. Unfortunately, just as we were getting to sleep, everything kicked off and it turned out we were staying in the Ibiza-esque area of the town. So, after not a wink of sleep, we packed and spent the next morning looking for somewhere else to stay... and we found somewhere... only to be told after one night there that they had made some mistake with the booking and the hotel was full, so we had to move yet again...
So after three days in Yangshou we had very little chilling out, and felt like we had seen every hotel in the whole town in an attempt to find somewhere to stay. A bit unlucky, but it wasn't doing anything to endear the place to us!
We did have one very good day in Yangshou when we rented a couple of bicycles and got out of the town. The area is completed surrounded by huge limestone carsts, which are truly stunning. A lot of the carsts have caves in and underneath them. We visited one of the 'smaller' ones, because it was a bit less touristy, and it was easily the biggest cave either of us have seen.... Truly spectacular.
The other upside of Yangshou was the availability of lots of western food.... which we have missed during our trip through China. (Is is just me, or have we started talking about food a lot in these blogs?) We also found the first second-hand book store we've seen in a very long time, so we swapped out the huge number of books we'd been carrying in anticipation of just such a moment, and we now have a big supply of books to read during our time in Bali.
We booked a bus from Yangshou to Shenzen, which is just outside Hong Kong (there are no buses all the way there...). It was supposed to be a nine hour overnight trip.... but it ended up being one of the longest and most horrible trips we've made so far on the trip. The sleeper-bus (a not-to-be-recommended experience, if ours is anything to go by), ended up taking around 22 hours to get to Hong Kong. During the night, the driver had to stop in the mountains because the fog got so bad. He just fell asleep, waiting for it to clear. It was like something out of the twilight zone, being there, in the cold, in the middle of the night, with swirling fog twisting around the bus. No sooner did we get started the following morning, when we got stuck again because of road works for another 5 hours or so. At this stage, Andy's 6ft body was starting to sieze up in the coffin-like sleeper beds... We were so relieved when we finally got to Shenzen... despite the fact that we had to make our way through to Hong Kong from there. We just wanted off the bus SO badly by that stage!
So, overall, bad luck seemed to take its toll on us in Yangshou... we're looking forward to a change of our luck in Hong Kong.
