Guiyang - China

In the town of Guiyang we were the only westerners, and absolutely no one spoke English! They looked and stared and even laughed at us. We had somehow fallen off the tourist trail, which would prove to be our most challenging experience in China. We had come to this particular city on Jacque and Jason's tours's (no of course I'm not blaming them for choosing it, we just didn't have our own itinery) to see the Huangguoshu Waterfalls which is 90kms from the town. It was hard enough trying to figure out how to take a public bus to get there, which we did actually manage, and we had a picnic lunch, and walked behind the Falls. The off putting loud Chinese music from speakers all the way to the Falls, did not blend in with the natural surroundings. There was even a long escalator (that you had to pay for) to get back up to the top - which of course we did not take. This place did though have some amazing old, large Bonsai trees. We were back in the mini bus ready to go an hour before it was due to leave, so we played International Shit Head - a card game that all of a sudden I've picked up and remembered and I am more than happy to play (unlike in Peru when Ian and his mates played it all the time, which was just abit much). One of the things I did enjoy about this city was eating in the back streets and sitting on the street having food cooked up infront of us. The phrase book was needed this night just to tell them what food we wanted, and we all ate from the hot plate. Jacque and Jason found a young 12 yr old boy and his mother having dinner at the stall next door and he had some English which his mother was encouraging him to use with the foreigners, so it was at a slow pace. I had a young girl give me a note written in Chinese, apart from the "I want you", which left us somewhat confused as to whether she fancied me, fancied one of the boys, or whether the little hairdressers she was in was actually one of the many 'red light - ladies of the night - posing as a hairdressers shop' that we had come across all throughout our China tour. We later got the note translated, and all it was, was this girl wanted a photo with us. How hard could it have been to put a camera in our faces. So many others had easily done this and wanted photos with the foreigners. This is our nightmare of getting out of the town and onto our next place: Usually we can get away with getting someone to help us with booking onward train tickets if we couldn't manage it ourselves, but this time we spent a lot of time getting nowhere. In the end Jason worked out an alternative to get to our destination, via another route. From what he had concluded from the travel book, we would have probably come to the same conclusion, he managed with his phrase book to buy train tickets to an alternative destination with the idea of then having to get a bus. As the 3 hour expected train journey drew near we were ready to get off the train - 1.44pm, and we showed our ticket to a Chinese passenger, as the destination is written in Chinese. He had a timetable and we were soon to discover that it was not 1.44pm, BUT 1.44am the following morning. Whow! A 15 hour trip on hard seats, with a sick coughing Chinese woman spitting out the window the whole way. Then onto a 4 hour bumpy sleeper bus, and then we got to Guilin which is one hour away from our destination of Yangshou, and instead on getting on a public bus we paid for a taxi, because we were all very over it, slightly grumpy and tired! 19 hrs traveling in total! Arriving at 6am.