Budget: 450 Yuan/$75; Spent: 751 Yuan/$125.17
Patty here.
Omg, does it feel like we are being spoiled. We love our accommodations at the Yangshuo Village Inn. It’s an amazing Eco-friendly boutique hotel that we just happened to book when we decided we needed a break from the crumby places we had been staying at time after time. And, the best part was that we got a great deal on our stays here. It has only cost us $42/night because it’s low season here. In spite of the great price, our experience at this hotel has been outstanding even to western standards. All their furniture is made of bamboo, and the rooms have such a warm country feel to them. The window to our balcony is enormous and lets in so much of the sunlight and the view in! We feel like we’re on holidays. It has been a good reminder that you most definitely pay for what you get! We have our own private room, our own bathroom, AND even a balcony with a stunning view of the Karst mountains of Yangshuo. Their Italian restaurant (Luna) on the rooftop is simply a pleasure to eat at and it has been the cherry on top of a great few days here.
Jeff woke up before me as he always does and did his thing checking e-mails and reading articles online. He finished his blog from yesterday, and I snoozed til about 10am. Jeff made us coffee in our room and we sat in our robes looking out at the view from our balcony for the next little while. Jeff gave his mom a call afterwards and before we knew it was just about 11am which is about the time breakfast in the restaurant on the rooftop ends. I headed upstairs to make our presence known, and that we wanted to get breakfast, but since I’m pretty sure we are the only other guests in the hotel, breakfast past 11am was not too much of a problem. Ahhhh, the beauty of being somewhere during the low season! And to think, we were originally planning on staying here for only one night!! Not sure if Jeff mentioned it, but the moment we got in here, we were greeted with ginger tea and cookies in the lobby and at that moment we were already pretty much sold on booking another night at the place?
Here is Jeff and me at breakfast this morning. That’s freshly squeezed orange juice in our glasses. They give us drinking water for free here, so we weren’t worried about the juice being watered down with tap water.
Jeff got an omelette filled with garden grown tomatoes inside. Yes, the hotel owner has bought land to grow the restaurant’s own vegetables and herbs which are often hard to come by in this area. This decreases their carbon footprint and is another way they are establishing their business as an eco-friendly hotel - so awesome. The owner had a big group of people at dinner last night and we think he’s Canadian. He’s definitely North American but since we overheard he went to a University in Toronto, we think he may be Canadian. What a cool guy though. And what a unique business he has running here. There’s a little blurb from him on the first page of the menu at Luna and he basically says he had been travelling to Yangshuo as a tourist for years and noticed there was so little variety of food options, that this prompted to him to establish the first ever Italian restaurant in Yangshuo. The chef at the restaurant is a trained chef in Italian cuisine, and it shows. The food has been delicious. Right after breakfast I couldn’t wait til the next time we got to eat there! Everything just tastes so fresh, what a difference this makes.
After breakfast, we purchased a map from the front desk which was a first for us, since all our hostels have given them to us for free; hostels have their own benefits too I guess. The map plotted all the tourist sites on it, and even had little blurbs about each attraction. Moon Hill and the water caves are both conveniently located to our hotel so the plan was to see both today. First stop was Moon Hill. It’s a Karst mountain but with a huge hole inside. Yangshuo is so neat because several hundred million years ago most of it used to be under the ocean. The topography which includes Karst mountains is evidence of this as the sea water dissolved and wore away at the limestone layers of the mountains, which eventually shaped them underwater into what they are now.
Here are some highlights of our climb up to Moon Hill which reminded us that we are not in shape!
In this last picture, I’m not sure if you’ll be able to tell but there’s a guy rock climbing on the left he’s wearing a black t-shirt and he’s practically doing the splits as he climbs up. On the right, there’s a girl in a green shirt and a guy in a red shirt. All of them are climbing this thing, and sometimes upside down! We immediately thought of Darren, a former co-worker of mine, and his wife Meghan, who are both avid rock climbers and thought we need to tell them about this place!
From Moon Hill we decided to go straight to the Water Cave we had been told about in our Lonely Planet book and recommended by Lander the Spanish dude we met in Yuanyang. We thought, for sure the map we had paid good money for would lead us there with no issues. But, no the map was rubbish. We walked approximately 5kms total, in both directions even, as we were being told different things by the locals on how to get to the caves. This was very likely a result of the combination between the crappy map and the language barrier. But, we spent the next 1 and 30 mins or so, trying to find Moon Cave. When 3pm rolled around we saw we were only seeing signs for the Silver Cave which was 8kms away from the farthest point we reached, we gave up. We began walking back to the hostel and we decided we would bite the bullet and see if we could hitch a ride back to our hostel. The odd thing was that on our way to that point we had not been offered a ride once even, but as soon as we decided to walk back, a local on a motorcycle honked and we called him over. After negotiating a bit, we gave him all the change we had (14Yuan) to get us back to our hostel. Both of us hopped on the back of this guy’s motorcycle for an exhilarating 10 minute ride back:
I closed my eyes the first few seconds as I thought if we fell off, we were toast. The way the Chinese drive, and honk, and buses pass trucks by squeezing by them into on-coming traffic while honking at the motorcycles next to them, I thought we were being crazy, but I didn’t care, and after a few seconds I forced myself to open my eyes to enjoy the scenery and the wind blowing at our faces. We were probably going 60km/hr at one point and it was some of the most fun I have ever had! Can’t wait to do it in Vietnam!
Can’t believe how fast we got back. If it weren’t for this nice stranger, I don’t know if we would have had time to make to the water cave. When we got back to the hotel, the receptionist was all ready to make arrangements for entrance tickets to the cave and for someone to pick us up and drop us off at the site. We had read in Lonely Planet that the prices for entrance to this cave are not standard and to therefore negotiate so when the receptionist was going to charge us 120Yuan per person, Jeff insisted we walk there on our own and buy tickets at the entrance. She was very persistent about us buying them from her and she seemed a little annoyed when we refused and we later learnt why. We ended up walking only about 7 minutes to the cave from our hotel… too bad we hadn’t just asked for directions from the hotel after Moon Hill! Once we got there our plan was to play dumb as if we had just stumbled upon the tourist site and had no idea what the attraction entailed. We walked up to the girl who immediately explained there were different prices for each part of the cave tour and for the entire tour it cost 320Yuan per person. We said no way that’s too much. A girl beside her said okay we’ll give you a discount and she asked how much do you want to it for. We said 50 per person. They came back and said no you’re crazy…. And then offered 80Yuan right away!! We said no, 70. She came back and said 150 for both of us which we ended up agreeing to. We saved 90 Yuan going there on our own!! We were so proud of ourselves. Props to Lonely Planet for the advice. Poor people who end up paying the asking price…. Or buying tickets through their hotels. It was pretty funny though because right after we paid for the tickets we had to walk quite a ways down to the actual entrance of the cave and the girl from the ticket booth ran to catch up to us to tell us that we would need our bathing suits. We think that she believed that we had actually just stumbled upon the place unprepared but when she caught up to us, we said “oh no, we have our bathing suits on already”. We had a good laugh since that was probably the first time she felt taken advantage of by some tourists!
The cave turned out to be pretty fun. The ticket included a guided tour through the several million year old cave, a mud bath, and a hot spring bath at the end. We paid 10Yuan for a locker to put our camera away in which we are happy we did since who knows what could have happened to the camera in there. We also got sucked into buying 2 pictures for 30Yuan though. So 150 turned into 190 Yuan for the experience. Anyways, we had a good time, and it was certainly a first for us. It’s not everyday you take a mud bath in a cave. The cave itself was kind of hokey. It had neon lights all over the place, and the guide kept explaining what all the formations looked like, for example 2 Buddhas which the cave is named after (Buddha cave), one place looked like it had women’s breasts all over the roof, another spot’s formation looked like a throne, and the photographer who came along with our tour had everyone sit in it for a picture, which they then tried to sell to you. So, that part was kind of annoying, but the mud bath was interesting, even though it was kinda dark and murky and perhaps a little unsanitary, though we were told otherwise. The worst part of the experience was getting out of the nice warm bath. We had no towels to dry ourselves and we froze our butts off walking back to our hotel. But, we made it, and we had a beautiful clean, private shower to get back to so it wasn’t so bad in the end. We washed up for dinner and just outside our room we walked up the few steps to the rooftop restaurant Luna for our last dinner in Yangshuo. It’s the first time we were both sad to be leaving a place. We had a great dinner again. Here’s what we had:
We also had an amazing Mediterranean salad with tuna and shrimps in it with their garden cherry tomatoes and homemade Italian dressing. The other dish not in this picture was called Baked Ziti, which was baked pasta with ricotta and mozzarella on top. That dish was not so good. The sauce had a few too many spices in it for our taste. Overall it was a great meal to end a great day.
Patty
This place sounds awesome. I'll have to remember it in case I ever get Tressa to China. :)
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