Alone again…I bid farewell to Rita and James this morning after breakfast as they are heading back to Canada by way of their Chinese ‘home’ and Shanghai. I’ll miss their company: Riding the bicycle alone through the YangShuo scenery might be faster, but also more quiet. Yesterday, we had spent a relaxing day ‘hanging out’ at YangShuo, not doing anything. Rita was still a bit handicapped, and so we stayed for 3 hours at the breakfast cafe, separated for a few hours (they shopping, me organizing a parcel back to German and a fax to the US), and staying from 5pm til midnight in another cafe, emptying various coffees and no less than 13 bottles of beer (for James and me) on the occasion. Life can be so simple and wonderful… Continue reading YangShuo (III) Moon Hill
Tag Archives: Bike
YangShuo (I) Cycling in the Fields
YangShuo (阳朔)
…again. I did this very same tour already once in February this year. But it was exactly what I wanted to do again when coming to YangShuo once more. No difficulty convincing Rita and James either. And so we got 3 bikes and set out. With me now knowing the way we could save some detours and everything went very well and nice, until….somewhen later.
YS_20070723_110646.jpg: Harvesting rice in the ubiquitous rice fields arond YangShuo. The rice in the fields was in very different states of maturity, some ripe to be harvested, other fields just harvested, yet others looked like half-way through, in yet other fields farmers were just planting new plants. We quickly got the impression that they are farming here all around the year.
20070223_123701_Yangshuo.JPG: To confirm or counter this theory I thought of a picture I had taken in February, which is this one (5 months ago, nearly eactly to the hour),..
YS_20070723_111207.jpg: …and did basically the same picture again (though I forgot that the original one was portrait, not landscape…sorry) at the very same spot, looking into the very same direction. In February all fields are just empty. Now in July some fields are empty, but they look like just harvested (some stalks still protruding through the water), other fields have fresh green plants.
YS_20070723_112003.jpg: Anyway…at the moment you find all kinds of maturity, embedded in the every same beautiful landscape.
YS_20070723_112011.jpg: Yea…as said…rice fields in beautiful landscape.
YS_20070723_112240.jpg: Or ducks.
YS_20070723_113924.jpg: But mostly rice fields 😉
YS_20070723_115739.jpg: We met very few other bikers, it was pretty hot. Quite OK as long as you moved, but if you stopped for a good picture you could cut the standing hot air with a knife. Rita and James ahead of me on the road here, some farming device parked to the left, the ubiquitous limestone hills forming the backdrop.
YS_20070723_120309.jpg: These farmers emerged from their lunch location shortly after we passed and briefly rested in the shadow of a tree. I have a series of 4 pictures how they walk up the street, and the smiling front guy keeps smiling through all this pics, though he cannot possibly know that he got photographed as I did these picture hidden as hip shots to preserve the farmers naturalness. Especially watch his oversized golden front tooth, possibly the reason for his everlasting smile 😉
YS_20070723_120324.jpg: He again against a backdrop of house ruins and hills.
YS_20070723_121530.jpg: Ripe rice fields…until the limestone hills cut off the horizon. Doesn’t look unlike wheat fields back in Germany, in the end its all some kind of descendant of grass.
YS_20070723_130133.jpg: Harvested fields next to fields, of which I cannot identify what’s growning on them. In the background the Li River and…yea…limestone hills.
And not too long thereafter our attention turned away from taking pictures: Rita fell off her bike unluckily and for no reason we were able to reconstruct. Nothing really serious happened, but on the stone-covered dirt roads she suffered from some bad cuts, which we could only very provisionally look after and which must have hurt badly. One cut was especially deep and urgently needed to be properly cleaned and desinfected by a professional. Rita stood it great but understandbly couldn’t go far any longer.
As it so happened it was shortly before reaching our planned turning point, i.e. as far away from YangShuo as possible. We turned around and could for good money convince the owners of a truck to bring Rita, accompanied by James, including their bikes, back to YangShuo to a hospital. I returned on my bike. In the end we happened to return our bikes nearly at the same time with Rita been seen to by a doctor. The rest of the day was mostly a relaxed search for coffee, dinner, and beer. We found all 😉
Today’s Lesson: If something happens, you’re as far away from home as possible.
Categories: Asia, YangShuo
Originally Created: 07/24/2007 04:04:55 PM
Last Edited: 07/24/2007
Germany Interlude
The fly-back started off so great…but continued quite disappointing. I had my last project fly-back, paid by my company, thus, Business Class, on 27-APR. The first time with China Eastern, which I in the beginning had some concerns with. But a word of a colleague proved true: They aren’t so long in the long haul business, their planes are brand-new. And so it was: Very comfortable and relaxing.
Arrived in Germany an hour late, but no issue, was still 6am. The sun started to raise into a cloud-less sky, the weather promised to become as great and hot as reported over weeks in the news. I made a very very good decision: I threw my suitcases into a corner of the room, briefly checked my racing bike, which I had not moved for 2.5 years, filled up some air into the tires, loaded 2 bottles with water, changed into some biking wear and off I went: At 7:30 I was cycling out of Frankfurt. Not much traffic yet, fairly chilly. But fresh clear air you never get in Shanghai. As soon as I left Frankfurt behind me I enjoyed nature pure, even saw rare birds (I believe one was a buzzard, another right beside the street was definitely a pheasant). I was pleased to note that my bike ran as smooth as ever and that I was still able to do 50km in a good 2 hours. 😉 Continue reading Germany Interlude
Yangshuo 阳朔
“Ah, Yángshuò, that legendary backpacker hang-out just 65km south of Guìlín. Guìlín gets all the press, but Yángshuò , a great, laid-back base from which to explorer other small villages in the nearby countryside, arguable surpasses it visually. […] Pedalling through the rice fields amid the splendid green-topped limestone peaks for a day, or three, is for many their top China experience.” Lonely Planet China guide Book introduction to Yangshuo. While I would argue if LP was right on Guilin I have to say: It is absolutely right on Yangshuo!
Continue reading Yangshuo 阳朔