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Fairy Tale Mountains
Travelling and eating in Yangshuo with a young guide called Jack.
The man at the night food market wasn’t taking kindly to the tourists gathering around his stall. I had arrived first, folding out my camera tripod, and then other passing tourists drifted over to see what the fuss was about. More cameras came out, accompanied by much gawking at the array of meats – snakes, rats, rabbits, dogs, snails, and birds we didn’t recognise. The man then looked up and his face turned purple. “Hello,” he hollered, “bye” – and he waved us off with a violent fling of his hand.
“We are obstructing his business,” Jack said. “Let’s go eat.”
Jack – Chinese name, Zhou Hong Guang – was my guide in Yangshuo, in Guangxi state in China’s southeast. Having finished a degree in civil engineering, Jack had decided that being a guide in Yangshuo – one of the top ten most-visited places in China – would be more interesting than building roads. And now we went to the Tribe Bar and ate stuffed snails – the best I ever tasted, stuffed with minced pork, chopped snail meat, and a sprinkling of spices. It’s a Yangshuo specialty, as are many other dishes, so many in fact that I didn’t have enough time in a week to try them all.
“I recommend snake and chicken soup,” told me Li Xue Ping, a waiter. Then, after a moment, she added: “Chinese people like it, but Chinese people eat everything – everything!”
I could not stomach snake, dog, or rat. But I found the rabbit, whose meat has a chicken-like consistency, full of flavours when cooked in a soy-sauce-based soup. “Local people eat rabbit twice or thrice a week,” told me Grace Diao, a local woman who worked in tourism. “In winter, when it is cold, people eat it straight from the steaming wok. It’s something of a family feast, accompanied by lots of beer.”
Everything is a feast in Yangshuo. Crowds of Chinese tourists fill the restaurants until late, gobbling impressive amounts of food, guzzling lots of beer, and raucously playing card games. Touring, for the Chinese, is only a peripheral interest, and the highlights of any holiday involve eating and drinking. And Yangshuo – which now gets 3.5 million visitors annually, most day-trippers from Guilin up the river – has become a place of infectious merriment. The small town’s wonderful old quarter is host to a stream of tourists; in the evenings, among an orgy of twinkling neon and traditional red paper lamps, the crowds become boisterously heady.
Originally an artists’ retreat, and a backpackers’ hideaway in the eighties and nineties, mass tourism in Yangshuo spilled over from the more famous Guilin in the past few years. Not that Yangshuo is second to Guilin; Yangshuo’s landscape is more dramatic and its way of life is quainter (the county is now also emerging as Asia’s prime rock-climbing playground). The largest increases in tourists have been among foreigners, which amounted to 650,000 in 2005. Foreigners find the town especially amenable thanks to many good Western restaurants, funky club-bars, and excellent value for money – Yangshuo is inexpensive by Chinese standards.
Yet the main allure is the classical landscape reminiscent of traditional Chinese paintings: thousands of karst mountains, set among mighty meandering rivers, and quaint fishermen’s villages inhabited by fishermen who set off in their flimsy bamboo rafts to catch fish by fishing rods or cormorants. Many traditional paintings, associative of quintessential China, were in fact made in Yangshuo; long before tourism became an industry the province was a favourite artists’ retreat. Even now, it remains an outlandish pocket of old China, a place where the markets are cluttered with strange foods, herbal medicines, old men yakking over card-games, and old-style characters – old men in Chinese traditional garb, characters that could have walked out of Chinese fantasy paintings.
So, food and beer in the evenings, and then burning the calories by day: in one week I walked up four mountains. Most famous is Moon Hill, which takes its name from the arch cut through the mountain near the summit; virtually everyone who visits Yangshuo walks up to the summit. The other summits were quieter, despite the fact the two of them are in town itself, the best one being Green Lotus Hill, which we climbed early one morning when the world beneath us was a sea of mist, the mountains emerging from the ethereal grayness like phantom apparitions. The highest mountain we climbed was in Xingping.
Xingping, 24km north of Yangshuo Town, has an old quarter that is 500 years old, full of stone houses set along twisting alleyways. Many doors were open to allow the breeze to waft through, and through the doors we could see groups of Chinese assembled around tables in dim rooms – playing cards or mahjong.
“I can teach you mahjong,” Jack said.
“It’s more interesting to climb that mountain,” I replied.
The mountain, a pinnacle almost perfectly cylindrical, has 1157 steps to the summit, or 25 minutes of heaving. But the view from the top was worth every step: far below, a wide bend of the Li River and the tight-knit tapestry of Chinese traditional roofs in the old town, and, in every direction, the rotund mountains marching all the way to every horizon.
Afterwards, we took a boat twenty minutes downriver to see Yucun. It’s the most atmospheric of all old towns in Yangshuo County; a stone village, built in the style of the Qing and Ming dynasties 500 years ago, girdled by a perimeter wall. And, inside the maze of alleys within the walls, the stone houses have intricate wooden doors, high walls topped by ornate stone-works, and traditional ceramic roofs covered in patches of moss and bristles of grass. It’s perfectly preserved, thanks to its isolation (with no road access, the village is reachable only on small boats), and it was also largely overlooked by most tourists until Bill Clinton’s famous visit in 1998. (Many other heads of states, including Chinese leaders, also paid homage to Yangshuo over the years.)
There are many places Bill Clinton didn’t visit – and the tourists haven’t discovered – particularly the entire southeast corner of Yangshuo County. The two main scruffy towns in this part of the county give way to a scattering of small quaint villages set along secondary rivers and rice paddies. We explored these backwaters on mountain bikes, cruising past farmers working in their rice fields with water buffalo and, in the villages, young children running beside us and shouting, ‘Hello, hello… what is your name?’ There are endless routes – many of the towns have wonderful old quarters – and in the smaller villages, surrounded by a watery world of rice paddies, we wandered whimsically and frequently got lost, the local people eventually pointing us in the right direction back to Yangshuo town.
It’s in this part of the county, in Puyi Town, that I found the most outlandish market. My surprise was that so many foodstuffs exist that I had never seen before despite the fact that I have lived in Asia for many years. Jack said, “But why are you interested in these strange foods?”
I was particularly intrigued by the many stalls full of traditional herbal medicines – dozens of different elixirs, most of which looked like dried twigs or seeds to me. Did Jack know what these elixirs are?
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “I have never seen these things before.” I made him ask, and I got Chinese names written in Chinese, names which no one could translate to English – so I had to content myself with wonderment.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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