One Woman’s Escape to China

I’d been to China a couple of times before my trip to Guilin and Yangshuo. I have family in Guangzhou, a bustling city in the southeast that’s growing so quickly many analysts have it poised to surpass Hong Kong in terms of industry and tourism (the number of hotels and resorts that sell timeshare has tripled in recent years) within the next decade. While Guangzhou stunned, shocked, and enlightened me in many ways, it wasn’t until I caught my first sight of the terraced mountains, bamboo forests, and tiny villages of Guilin that I felt I’d seen the real China.

Perhaps that’s not a fair assessment. China is just as much it’s glittering cities and ever-growing industry as it is quiet mountain towns and verdant natural surroundings, still, as we embarked upon our journey up the more than 1,000 steps to our mountaintop, tree-house hotel, I couldn’t help feeling that this trip would change the way I viewed China forever.

I was traveling with my boyfriend, younger brother, and his girlfriend, Yuan. Thank goodness for Yuan. We called her our “X Factor,” which she didn’t quite understand, but thought was very funny. Yuan was our voice for the trip. She haggled for us (a skill you’ll need to hone should you ever decide to travel anywhere in China), managed to rent timeshare in Yangshuo, ordered our meals and even smashed a spider the size of my fist with her bare hand.

Oh, and did I mention that she did it all in four inch wooden heels? Yuan was also our tour guide, securing our transportation (we rode sixteen hours on a triple-row bunk-bed bus), accommodation (our tree-house hotel in Guilin and timeshare rental in Yangshuo) and our agenda (from a river-boat ride down the Li River to spelunking in one of Yangshuo’s natural caves.)

The village of Long Gi is a small farming town (mainly peppers), yet it’s rolling hills make it necessary to terrace the fields. The mountains look like giant green staircases, the flats of each covered in crops. Our time there was exceedingly peaceful. Our lodgings were sparse and our days were spent hiking through the bamboo forest to natural waterfalls and visiting with the locals. After a few days under the bluest sky I’d ever seen, we headed to our next destination.