Yangshuo, China: The Best Boat Ride, Pretty Landscape, and Adventures in the Town

After weeks of hustling around China on crappy trains, we made it to the ‘relaxation’ portion of our 5+ weeks in this country – four days in Yangshuo, on the Li River. The area is quiet, a make-your-own-adventure sort of place, with incredible natural beauty both on and away from the river. I prefer water beauty, so the boat ride from Guilin to Yangshuo down the Li was my absolute favorite (abfav) part, which is a slight shame considering it barely counts as the beginning of this section. It only gets worse from here! No it was all fiiine. We’ll get there. The journey takes about four hours, and despite the chaos of the boat station (it cannot be called a marina or a ship terminal; the typical Chinese chaos makes it a boat station), the boats themselves were sleek and nice – with the usual full-volume phone noises and screaming children (and adults), naturally. 

Our hotel/teahouse (it’s hard to tell what’s a hotel or hostel here; nice places are like, teahouses) in Yangshuo booked our boat tickets for us and had a bus (full of other tourists and other pickups, naturally) pick us up at our Guilin teahouse (the Traveling With, loveyou4eva) and take us all to the overflowing boat station, where a nice lady gave us all our tickets. Thanks to the Tea Cozy, our Yangshuo digs, we had Second Floor tickets and not just measly First Floor. Supposedly that means a better view, quieter/well behaved crowd, and an overall better, ‘upper floor’ experience. I think it definitely is worth it for the views – that’s what this boat ride is about! – but I laugh at you if you think elevation helps crowds of Chinese people behave civilly. Yes this trip is making me intolerant! Make it stop! 

We were seated in a comfy chair section of 6 (all the floors on all the boats look like this, pretty surprising) with two Chinese couples, one with a child who was, let’s just say, not well behaved, as per uzh. At this point in our trip, Z was ill. He will downplay it now, in hindsight, but it was quite flu-ish and awful, so he just wanted to sleep, but this kid sitting with us wouldn’t let that happen. Actually no one onboard would let that happen. We took turns going out to the deck for pictures and fresh air (haha no that’s where everyone smokes there’s no fresh air in this country) (I guess we just went out for sunburn then, and lots of it (I’ve never been so tan I hate it)). At one particularly nice stretch of scenery early on, I asked Z if he wanted to go take a look for pictures and he said “I might go out just to throw a Chinese kid overboard.” We learned soon after that the parents sitting with us had just returned from a year at Oxford…so…oops. Unclear if they heard it, but they definitely speak English. But hey, your kid’s obnoxious. 

There were so many other screamy kids that soon it all balanced out with noise coming from all angles, so it was okay? Is that how it works here? I especially loved this little girl who was wearing a shirt covered with PICTURES OF KRYSTEN RITTER. WHAT??? Whoooo do the parents think it is? Is she big here? I mean I hear Jessica Jones is great and I quite enjoyed Don’t Trust the B**** in Apartment 23 but on a toddler’s t-shirt? In China?! Such random shit here. 

The boat ticket includes lunch, but of course this being a lawless, orderless land, there’s no way to get a specific sort of meal, like, say, vegetarian. Everyone gets the same tray, and that tray includes stuck-together rice (not sticky rice, that’s different, just poorly cooked rice), frozen peas and corn, a section of breaded crayfish I think, and a section of breaded chicken strips. Cool. Cool cool cool cool. At least I had peas and corn and rice. I hated wasting the other food and it was frustrating that they didn’t have the option of not wasting it in the first place. The bar downstairs sold chicken nuggets and watermelon in addition to the regular soft drinks and potato chips so I had watermelon. Isn’t that so interesting. 

Aside from the overall minor noise and the food issues though, this boat was so amazing. As usual, the signage was great; I got a few of the goods. The second picture is blursula so check the captions. 

​I think I would love a cruise through scenery like this, I guess they do them down the Yangtze. But then again it might be like just a loooong wavy version of the train journeys so far so maybe not. Dammit other people ruining everything. Well they didn’t ruin this. It was too beautiful! 

​It really was incredibly sunny, as you can see from my trademarked Sun Face.

​I almost didn’t want the gorgeous ride to end, but I was excited to get to our boutique teahouse in the countryside of Yangshuo for four days of relaxation, swimming, hiking, biking, climbing, kayaking, whatever. Z chose the Tea Cozy Hotel, which had a very nice room with an amazing view from the balcony (which was too hot to go out on, but still, what a view). 

The biggest problem was the same problem that plagues all of China – despite many official ‘no smoking’ signs, the staff didn’t bat an eyelash at the many, many Chinese men (I don’t even think they were all guests, just like random taxi drivers and who knows who) who would smoke in the lobby and throughout the main floor, PLUS for a few nights our next door neighbors were smoking in the room, which is REALLY not allowed. Even the staff got the teensiest bit upset that someone was smoking in a room, but there was ‘no way of figuring out who it was’ apparently and while we had this conversation 4 different men were smoking near us in the lobby. FFS CHINA. (And yes, it was billed as a non-smoking hotel when we booked online.)

Another main drawback was that it didn’t have a pool, and like, the #1 activity in these parts is seriously ‘having a pool’. The staff had promised us months ago that we could use the pool at their sister property 1 kilometer away anytime we wanted, and that they’d take us there. That’s not the most convenient but hey it’s better than nothing! Of course, of course, this being wild west China, the pool at the resort had to be emptied the day we arrived for some reason, and this being a land of low-to-no technology, it took more than 3 days to fill it. So despite asking every day ‘can I please go swimming now?’, I was repeatedly told that, sorry, the pool only has a foot of water in it/two feet/three feet/red fish/blue fish. Only on our very last day was I able to go, and only because the sister property’s guests had apparently had enough and they were swimming even though the water STILL wasn’t up to the proper level! So the other staff told my staff ‘sure send her over there are people swimming anyway so who cares anymore.’ Thanks! It was a pretty nice pool, kind of cold and…I don’t think chlorinated? Also it wasn’t until I was leaving after my swimming time that someone decided oh right we should be constantly filling this pool to get it back up to normal and then stuck a hose in. I mean. Get your shit together. 

 
​This sister prop had really nice grounds (ours was just a single building) and apparently had a gym too, so I was a little disappointed at first that we didn’t choose this one, but like, I think I’d be even more pissed off if we chose the place that had a pool and paid for that amenity and then COULDN’T use the pool for three out of four days. If I were the guests there I’d be demanding money back. 

So, our staff of apparent teenagers? felt bad? about how I couldn’t go swimming? and about the smoke? no I don’t think they did I think they just sensed my rage and didn’t want me to hulk out, so they gave us teacups as presents. Now, that’s a very nice gesture, don’t get me wrong, but you’ve heard about the state of our backpacks. We now have bubble-wrapped orbs sticking out of them, taking up valuable peanut butter space. I hate living out of a backpack. 
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We had all these high hopes for exploring the Yangshuo countryside, but Z’s illness got worse, or at least didn’t get better, which sucked for him, so one day we asked the staff if someone could drive us into town to a pharmacy we saw one night. They got a driver to take us TO  A WITCH DOCTOR. We wanted to go to a regular (for China) pharmacy in the town where we could try to find recognizable stuff. Instead, we were driven to a dusty garage area where an old man stood at a dusty brown counter in front of a wall of hundreds of brown dusty bottles that an old woman sorted through for the small line of patients. It was, shall we say, not trustworthy. It was kind of frightening. But we couldn’t communicate what we actually wanted because the driver didn’t speak English, so we just went ahead with this freakshow. When it was our turn at the shack opening, we handed the witch doctor the list of symptoms that the hotel lady had written down for us. Then the old man and woman started sorting through no less than 18 different bottles of pills and sorting combinations of 18 pills into 7 different hastily folded little paper corners to hold them. Z was like ‘…this isn’t all for me, right? I have a bad cold maybe.’ But no, all those pills were for him. They communicated to take one combination of all 18 pills THREE TIMES A DAY. That is a LOT OF SHIT for what might just be a horrible cold and even for what could be the flu. TOO MUCH WITCH DOCTORING. Z was like…um…okay…sure…and then the witch doctor was like oh wait stop, and ALSO take two of these other pills that are in a regular foil pouch morning and night. We looked up the characters on the foil later and it was amoxicillin. Pretty sure he didn’t need that but whaaat. All of this medicine cost 18 yuan, or like, $2.75, so at least it wasn’t expensive to tempt fate like that. 

​Z did indeed take the pills a few times. I know! The next day, after 3 or 4 epic pill-swallowing sessions (SO F-ING MANY), he looked at me and was like WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING TAKING THIS I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS! I went into town and got him regular cough medicine (children’s, I think, best I could do).

​Unfortunately, because of Z’s sickness, it hindered what we could do with these four days meant for exploring nature and being all outdoorsy and stuff. I mean, most importantly, poor Z was sick, yes that’s what I meant first. Further down the oh no list is how it affected my vacation of course. He just slept all day every day, pretty much. So I had that one day of swimming, I worked out a lot, we watched the one channel on the TV that had English movies (cut by ads at worse times than they do in the UK, which is quite a feat, like midsentence instead of the UK’s preferred right-as-a-sentence-ends-but-before-you-hear-the-enunciated-end-of-the-syllable-so-it’s-crazy-abrupt cuts), I went into the town by myself and had a shittonne of bubble tea, I went to a wacky expat’s wellness center for a yoga class (we’ll talk about that later). I should have done more myself, but a) I would have gotten so lost you can’t even believe, b) I probably would have gotten injured, knowing me, and then been injured AND lost, and c) it was a nice bed, so, we were lazy and it was nice. At least we still got to enjoy the incredible karst scenery from the nice bed. The karst scenery is the kind of limestone landscape that got eroded into cray cray bananapants shapes like caves and grassy hills and overall mountainous terrain that juts out of nowhere, so it seems, and surrounds the village with peaks that seem completely alien to what should be there, like they were dropped in from nowhere to make the area look like a foreign planet with huge peaks and valleys of green. It’s pretty awesome, and I guess I should have explored more by just like walking around it, but again, see above a, b, and c. The village our hotel was in was still the dusty dilapidated sort, and the town was only a slight improvement on that, so I think seeing the view from the balcony (from the bed) was probably the nicest way to enjoy the area. Or at least that’s the story I’m sticking to for my benefit. 

So about that yoga class…
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There are two HappyCow places in Yangshuo town, a vegetarian Chinese restaurant we went to twice, called Lotus, and a Western hippie’s wellness center + cafe called Mood Food Energy Cafe, with juice, smoothies, salads, and other western health food like tahini sunflower burgers, plus massages, meditation, yoga and other classes. I was eager to try their yoga classes, and maybe get a massage or try the ‘tourmaline sauna’ that the owner had raved about when I visited the first day just to gather information. When I went back for yoga, my first of what I hoped would be daily classes, I went in assuming, because the owner was an English-speaking man and all the staff i’d seen so far were white, that it would be in English. Fair guess, right? Everyone was white! I was the first student to arrive so I made myself comfortable and stretched on a mat. It was a pretty nice studio. Then an older lady walked in. I pointed to the mat set up at the front of the room for the instructor and then pointed to her, asking ‘are you the instructor?’ She smiled and went over to that mat and lay down on her back and started doing scissor stretches with her legs and arms. So I copied her. For like five minutes. We just laid there kicking one leg up then the other just chilling and getting warmed up, I assumed. This is a lot of assuming that has happened by now. And then, three other people came in, plus a younger Chinese lady who said something to the older lady which I’m gonna guess is, “hey that’s my mat, I’m the instructor and that’s where I go”, and took her rightful place at the front. So I had spent five minutes following some random old lady’s old lady stretches because I thought she was the instructor, and she apparently thought I had said, ‘hey I got a mat out for you and put it at the front of the room, lady I don’t know and didn’t know was coming!’ So I was already deathly embarrassed before we even started.

And then it started, and it was in Chinese. The instructor spoke English and tried her best to repeat everything for me after she’d explained to the others, but there’s only so much time in a day so I’d hear like 3 minutes of Chinese explanation of a pose and its benefits or whatever, and then in English she’d simply say ‘reach your shoulders like this.’ So I didn’t get the maximum benefit, I imagine. 

It would be fine, not knowing the language of instruction, if it were a yoga class like any I’d ever done before. And I’ve done yoga since I was like, 17. That’s a whole lot. But it wasn’t a flow or anything familiar, and she didn’t say the sanskrit names for poses. Because it wasn’t really a ‘doing poses’ kind of yoga! It was so herky jerky and random. Like, we did a few sun salutations to warm up, that was great and familiar. But after those two minutes, we all got belts, and she wrapped them around our shoulders and we reached overhead for like, 15 minutes. It hurt! I have extremely tight shoulders and upper back, which has only worsened this trip with the backpack, and she was not happy about that. So instead of being like every other yoga professional in the world and gently offering ways to improve or stretch in a certain way to safely expand on this movement, she hoisted the belt back and up so hard that she almost dislocated my shoulder, and I was screaming in pain and she kept pulling my arms up and up where they clearly would not and could not go, until I looked at her and said ‘stop!’ Like, are you kidding me? What kind of yoga is this! Is it just because you can’t sue for anything in China so they’re like screw safe practices?! 

After we tore our shoulders apart, she had us wrap the belts around our thighs and do variations on chair pose for 20 minutes. I didn’t understand what kind of baby squat they were all doing until after she did her Chinese shpiel and then said to me, simply, ‘like chair pose.’ Thanks, finally! That was intense, obviously when held that long, and everyone was laughing through the pain but like, is this yoga? So strange. For this, since she kept wanting to pick on me for everything, she realized she hated my feet, like, a lot, and she tried to pull my big toes out to make them straight. I’ve told you before, I have bad bunions, so like, pulling my big toes to make them straight REQUIRES SURGERY, woman. After I realized what she was doing I was said ‘clearly they aren’t going to do what you want them to do, fake podiatrist!’ It was ridiculous! Was she trying to break bones to see if the center could heal them with crystals or something after? Or was she just an idiot? Needless to say, despite the great thigh DOMS I got later, I did not return as I had originally planned. What a shame! I was so excited for a real yoga class with other people after all these months of travel and then I find one with a crazy lady literally trying to break all my bones. If anything though, this kind of made me want to get certified as an instructor JUST SO I could balance out her awfulness in the instructor universe with my normal-yoga-doingness-that-doesn’t-lead-to-broken-bones.

​After this super random class, I went downstairs and had dinner in the cafe. I was so excited for a big salad and other health food-y stuff, but honestly I have to say, while I liked the food okay, the service was abysmal. The friendly owner I had met days before wasn’t there, and it was full of all these women who were kind of glaring at me the whole time. There was an office-type room full of white women working on computers – I think getting massage training? according to some signs in the room? – and they just kept staring and giving me resting bitch face and I was like duuuuudeeeee what is wrong I changed my sweaty clothes what am I doing wrong? Despite how awkward it’s been for us as the only white people in a lot of these parts of China that we have trouble understanding and grasping, THIS was the most uncomfortable I’d felt in weeks – surrounded by other white women. 

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​I did get my big salad though, and guys, it was covered in nooch! Nooch! It’s been so long, I’d forgotten how much I loved it! Yay! It was a really good vegan health food store take on a Caesar, so, in fact, nothing at all like a Caesar, but just how I like it, a lot of lettuce and tofu and nooch. I also got salad rolls (so much salad!) that were fine, if needing a little more substance inside. I got that tahini-sunflower burger to go for Z plus a pita and hummus plate, which they wrapped up HILARIOUSLY with the hummus and other dips in those tiny tiny little plastic bags, like thumb-sized. Not enough hummus for your prices, guys! But clever packaging, I guess! The burger was decent (of course I ended up eating it the next day, Z’s first desired solid food in days was not going to be yoga center health concoctions) but the dips were weird. I wanted to try all the vegan desserts and smoothies and stuff but the service really was bad and honestly, despite seeming on the surface like a place tailor-made for me, I couldn’t get out of their fast enough. Kind of sad. But what an experience!

​A much better food experience awaited at Lotus Vegetarian, on the happening pedestrian West Street, near plenty of clubs and coffee bars and, a new fave, a place called Mango, where they specialize in mango smoothies of various sorts. I know! Amazing! We went to Lotus a few times and tried so much that was all pretty good, some great. They also bring you a dish of watermelon and a little set of peanuts, corn, and pickles right when you sit. 

Above, we have my standard big ole plate of broccoli order, this time coming with black fungus (fun mushrooms) and noodles (because why not just throw noodles in everything); next is the Homestyle Tofu, which was very good; and then it’s the Guilin-style stir-fried bean noodles, tofu skin, and mixed vegetables. Loved this dish! It combines all my favorite things – vegetables, tofu skin, and beans in noodle form! Good stuff. 

Above we have a huge plate of bok choy and mushrooms, most of which I put in our room fridge and had cold the next day, and then a really good black noodle dish with MORE bok choy (GIVE ME ANOTHER VEGETABLE MAYBE ONE DAY) and spicy tofu that was so spicy that I didn’t even realize at first that it was STINKY! It wasn’t TOO stinky so it was still good, but yeesh! China luuurves its stinky tofu! 

Finally, we have this stupid hot (temperature! wasn’t spicy and also spicy is never stupid) fluffy tofu and vegetable claypot sort of jawn that was delicious, and probably my favorite dish from Lotus, the Kung Pao Chicken mockery. I tried to bring most of this on the train the day after ordering it; NB, bringing leftover Chinese food on a train is a bad idea. Eating all this stuff in a restaurant when it is cooked is a great idea though! 

I only had one meal at the hotel, because the food was fine, but some of the staff members really put me off. Like they commented on how much food we ordered when it was literally like a salad, a tofu, and dumplings. That’s a normal amount of food for one hungry person, let alone two. Shut up. Anyway, the food was just okay. The tofu was really good but the dumplings were not. And guess what kind of salad it wassssss yes you know it. 

Dinner at the hotel was really only worth it because the other tables were occupied by a group of Italians, which led Z to make THE DAD JOKE TO BEAT THEM ALL: “What’s an Italian’s favorite Chinese food? CIAO MEIN.” oh my god it still hurts. 

Lest you think Yangshuo town is all food fun and no drink fun, I must admit that my favorite part of this entire four day stay was my drinkage. I went to the aforementioned Mango a few times – there are outposts of various sizes on literally EVERY block – and got the regular mango smoothie (most others have milk) and a cup of plain mango. Each time, I tried a different bubble topping because as we know by now I am obsessed with the bubble tea bubbles. Mango has a CRAZY bubble/pearl menu. The first time I went, I didn’t realize that their offerings weren’t just the regular tapioca balls, and I was HORRIFIED when I bit into one and it was the juice-squirting kind. SO GROSS. I do not want a little thin-skinned ball full of fruit juice; I want chewy weirdness! Luckily my second attempt was a total win. For some reason I pointed to the pearl option that said sweet potato – I guess I was just super curious. Lo and behold, the little thin skin of the pearl ball gave way to an inside of cooked sweet potato! WHAT. Just tiny little droppings of cooked sweet potato inside the bubble ball pearl dot. Can you EVEN. Because I COULD NOT. I am so obsessed! WHO MAKES THESE. 

But you know what’s coming. Obviously I saved the best for last. Right up the block from where our hotel’s shuttle (regular car and driver who I think only drove me around the whole week) picked up and dropped off was a GONG CHA! My favorite of the bubble tea chains! Now, I’m pretty sure that this is one of the fake, copyright-infringing imposter Gong Chas that Jojo warned me about, BUT, I think I actually liked it more than the real! I KNOW BUT HEAR ME OUT. What are my main requirements for good bubble tea? A menu with English translations that I can point to, with a section for adding bubbles, and a sugar level chart so I can get low-to-zero sugar. CHECK, CHECK, CHECK. And, unlike all the others, they actually listened and didn’t make my drinks diabetes in a cup like all the others. And what’s my favorite thing about bubble tea? THE BUBBLES. And this amazing imposter Gong Cha gave more bubbles than any other place! Like, to the point where I was STRUGGLING to catch them all after I’d finished the liquid. It was so great. I love that stupid fake shoppe. 

One time we forgot to pay – we each thought the other had paid and the worker didn’t seem to notice – and we didn’t realize until we were at dinner later! Luckily we were still downtown, so we just went back after dinner and saw the guy and were like, we didn’t pay! And it wasn’t until we took money out of our wallets that it clicked for him and he was like ahhhhh you didn’t pay but I didn’t even realize you didn’t pay! Good thing too or we would be in a some scary Chinese jail. Where I doubt they give you bubble tea. 

Given that the town had my favorite tea shop, a lot of mango smoothies, good vegetarian food, fun yoga adventures, and a decent overall vibe, I think I enjoyed my time there more than I did out at the remote teahouse – the complete opposite of what was supposed to happen. It’s just that Yangshuo is meant for nature-tourism, and aside from looking at the beautiful scenery, I didn’t actually do that. Maybe I squandered my time in the end, but I enjoyed myself in my own way. Also I slept a decent amount, which has been seriously lacking this summer so hooray! Despite its issues, we were able to relax at the Tea Cozy as intended and enjoy that view. So cool. Here’s one last piece of karst for you!