Yangshou, Guangxi. I’d read that, in the past, this was a sleepy little backwater, a haven discovered by those mystical wandering itinerants: ‘early backpackers’ (sounds like some new age of man).
Back then they adopted it as some hippy hangout, a quiet and relaxed place where everything was genuine and they could see some of the ‘real China’.
Today, if you consider yourself a spiritual descendent of these hippies don’t bother to visit: it’s an empty shell of its former shelf. Yangshuo is a town ruined by tourism, a monument to its excesses, where the corporations have taken over, bussing the groups in, buying up the streets and filling them with flimsy, tacky replicas of their former selves.
This is the living nightmare of mass tourism, Chinese-style. Any new hunk of meat cruising into town is sized up, chewed over and squeezed for every yuan they’ve got. Hotels are the worst - cold and damp prisons where staff are rude and obnoxious, pressing you to take tours or visit their friend’s shop.
The streets heave with tourist toot, useless merchandise and hideous variants of local traditions, scrubbed down, dressed up and flogged to death.
In Yangshuo it was one of my pet-hates: stupid reedy flute-type thingies. Usually fashioned out of a gourd or a piece of driftwood or something else suitably rustic their musicians whack out an incessant tuneless warbling, their faces a picture of timeless bliss, as they try to flog you a scratched CD from their shelves.
It turned the whole town into some kind of outdoor beginners recorder class, though I’m sure even my chums and I produced a better noise back when we were seven.
I might sound jaded, perhaps even cynical but I’m sorry there’s nothing authentic about this - they are not bucolic tunesmiths, they are aural menaces.
I must have been in this part of the world too long. Or perhaps it was the sight of great lumps of dead dog hanging up in the market, either way something had gone bang in my mind, causing me to suddenly loathe this country, blind me to natural beauty around us.
After all, this was Yangshuo and the Li River, home of the world-famous and unique landscape of Karst peaks.
I needed something different to put me right, something that would get me away from all the filth and the storm.
I needed a bicycle.
Across Asia, pedal power has been a fine friend of ours. From the suburbs of Kyoto to the Hutongs of Beijing, we have found no finer way to see the life and get up close to daily life. It had never let me down and now I needed it more than ever.
We hired a couple of basic rides, wheeling them out of the shed at the back and through the hairdresser’s salon from whom we’d hired them. Pointing north we took to the road, pedalling furiously to put some distance between us and the flute and dead dogs.
The road was busy and noisy, we were coated with dust thrown up by large trucks. We stayed to the verges which, surprisingly sensibly the Chinese had a habit of incorporating into such roads.
The peaks pushed up all around us, crowded out corn fields, casting large shadows.
We turned off the road and headed for the sticks, choosing a rutted little track leading towards a little group of mud brick houses.
The roar died down behind us, we slackened our pace.Breathe.
Peace.
It’s beautiful.
The track shadows a small river, weaving in and out of the odd house. In between lie hayricks and harvested paddy fields where water, water buffalo wallowing in muddy holes, and modest little orchards.
The rice may have been gathered but the scene is still fecund, the trees in the orchards groaning with fruit, apples and persimmons, oranges and pomellos.
And all around the Karst peaks dominated, towering over the scene like giant sentinels. Poking up suddenly through flat fields like mushrooms after the rain.
The scene is bewitching, so much so we had to stop every few minutes to take yet another photograph.
Soon we come across a wreck of a building, hard to tell whether it’s going up or coming down. A signs reads “The restaurant at the end of the Universe” - perhaps they need to work on their sales pitch.
Lara’s been excitedly eyeing up the pomellos - huge, light-green fruit, like monstrous pears - ever since we arrived in Guangxi. Now she spies an orchard full of the monsters on the other side of the yard.
A woman shuffles up to us, a baby cocooned up in a bundle on her back. She watches the new Caucasians admiring her trees and picks a couple of oranges, handing them to us. They're green on the outside, delicious on the inside.
Lara hands over three yuan and gets the pick of the orchard: choose your pomelo. She zones in on a particularly impressive-looking specimen and soon it's filling up the basket on the back of my bag, like a mutant prize from an easter egg hunt.
We cycle on, only stopping soon after for yet another photograph.
A woman trots past, leading a large water buffalo.
The creature becomes excited as it spied a female in the field up ahead. The bull starts communicating with the object of its affection, uttering strange squeeking noises, more bird-like than beast.
The female turns and he charges forward, dragging its helpless owner behind it.
An old man sitting nearby, puffing on his bamboo pipe, watches this and laughs, then comes to the woman’s aid, thwacking the randy old bull with a branch as it gets intimate with its new female friend.
We cycle on, past a woman washing clothes in a pond, and a group of boisterous blokes playing cards, their loud dance music booming out across the still air, incongruous in such a timeless, bucolic setting.They shout out excitedly to us; we continue, bouncing on the worn stones peeking up through the dirt.
People working in the fields look up as we approach and wave, a stooped old man in a dirty Mao hat grins through a gappy mouth.
Others run up to us and motion taking a photo, gappy smiles, wind-chaffed faces, posing for nice rustic pictures, hands out for yuan.
Two woman loom up ahead, each carrying a young child in a basket slung on shoulder poles. Too good to resist: I take the shot and soon my notes are being rifled through - grubby yuan gone for that perfect framed photo for the lounge.
On again, through more fields and small yards, where chickens scatter in front of us, past another grove of persimmons, more banana plants, more bamboo thickets.
A kingfisher darts across the track in front of us, an electric blue bolt in the dimming light.
Finally a t-junction appears and we tip into the narrow streets of a village. We draw stares, people sizing us up but we’re past before they can catch our attention.
Back onto the tarmac and across a bridge and we’re back on the road to Yangshuo.
Back at one with China once more my mind turns to dinner. Hmmm perhaps I'll have dog tonight, serenaded with a nice reedy flute in the background...
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