Gettin' Outta Dodge

Yangshou's winding wet streets, mountainscapes and river views were magical, but a month and a half of cold gray days were wearing holes in our spirits and our socks. We needed to find the sun. By our second day we were plotting an escape route. Our desperation lead to a two hour online search for ways to somehow adjust our itinerary so that we could find ourselves on a tropical beach by the following evening. In the end, cost prohibitive flights and rooms already booked made this dream infeasible, and we were forced to call an audible. We left Yangshou with a nebulous plan to get to Shenzhen, a southern city in China on the border on Hong Kong, where the temperature might hit the mid-60s. This plan, according to our research, was going to be extremely difficult if not impossible.

First, we would have to get to the Guilin train station by bus, and then succeed in booking a same-day overnight train, unheard of in China. Add to this the fact that we had no lodging in either Guilin, in the case of a booking delay, or in Shenzhen in the event that we could board a train. Not to mention the fact that check out time in Yangshou was 11:30, the two-hour bus ride would land us in Guilin no later than 2pm, and we knew that the first train departing for Shenzhen would have us waiting for at least 7 hours.

We rolled the dice, found the bus, and jumped aboard. It was raining, of course, as it seems to every day we are in transit. After a near two hours of gastrointestinal discomfort from the previous night's hot pot and a screening of Baby's Day Out on the bus television, we lucked out by guessing our stop when all of the Chinese people got off. With minimal effort we found the ticket window, crossed our fingers and prepared for the worst.

After some pointing and picture drawing, we handed over our passports, 484¥, and were issued tickets for two hard sleepers for that evening's train! The teller seemed very surprised that we were buying a ticket for a train the same day, but don't believe the hype. It's possible, if only in the slow season. So with seven hours to kill, we hit the supermarket nearby to stock up on snacks. We got two instant noodle bowls, strange cheese and scallion savory pirouline looking things, coconut cookies, little oranges, caramels, and beer.

By this point it was so frigid and wet that after having a quick bite on the street for 10¥ each, we hit the waiting room and camped out there the six hours until our train came through.

- Ken and Davida