One morning we followed the river to Elephant Trunk Hill, whose rock formations resemble an elephant drinking water. Scores of Chinese families were admiring the peacocks, taking boat trips, photographing themselves on Love Island, and buying snacks from water vendors. Kiddies scrambled atop the park’s waterside herd of stone elephants or played on rafts. 

A taxi ride away in the other direction lies Solitary Beauty Peak, Wave Subduing Hill, and Returning Pearl Cave. Legend has it that this cave—complete with dragon guardian—was once illuminated by a giant pearl. A cormorant fisherman stole the treasure, but his guilty conscience ensured its return. The nearby Thousand Buddha Cave is said to have once contained that many Buddha statues, but the number has now dwindled to a few hundred. 

Bussing Down River To Yangshuo
Longer excursions with English-speaking guides are surprisingly costly. Certainly far more expensive than in Thailand, where I recently traveled. Arranged through Guilin’s branch of China International Travel Services, it cost $55 per person for the “Dragon’s Backbone” mini-van jaunt. This day trip visits Pingan village with its ethnic minority Yao people and 1,000-year-old Dragon’s Backbone rice terraces contouring at giddy heights around the mountains. The Sheraton charges almost $90 per person for the same trip in a private car.

With drizzly skies resembling a gray watercolor wash, I was reluctant to pay another $60 apiece for a five-hour boat trip to the riverside town of Yangshuo. We weren’t likely to see much of the fabled scenery. Plus the Dragon’s Backbone tour guide had been disappointingly uninformative—and she’d spent the two-and-a-half hour return drive sleeping.

An hour’s drive from Guilin, Yangshuo has a reputation as a legendary backpacker destination. I wanted to see it: if backpackers could tackle Chinese bus stations, so could we.

Guilin’s initially looked daunting since everything was in Chinese. But saying “Yangshuo” and holding up two fingers was all it took to get the $1.60 tickets. Timed for the next bus, they had seat numbers—and no panic about what to do next, an employee accompanied us to the Yangshuo bus bay (buses leave every 20 to 30 minutes).

With more otherworldly karst pinnacles in every direction, Yangshuo is undeniably attractive. It’s understandable why student travelers rate it highly. Dozens of cozy cafés serve pizza, banana pancakes, and other bargain-priced Western staples and you can eat reasonably well for $2 to $3. Some cafes attract customers by showing Western movies, holding music gigs, or offering free Internet access. I don’t know the cost of hostels, but you can rent bikes to explore nearby villages for around $2 per day.

Yangshuo has been on students’ maps for more than a decade, and it’s now effectively a tourist trap; certainly during daylight hours. Every few yards, pushy vendors latched onto us like leeches. No, we didn’t want to buy T-shirts or have our names written in Chinese. Nor eat “beer fish.” Nor take a countryside tour…nor rent bikes. But a straightforward “no thanks” failed to dissuade them.

“Where you come from?” 

“Ireland.”

Producing a large book, the bike renter/tour guide rapidly found a testimonial from an Irish person. After three time-wasting encounters, we stopped acknowledging them. At around 1:30 p.m., when Guilin’s fleet of daily tour boats arrive, things get worse. Yangshuo transforms itself into a bazaar (little is priced, you have to haggle), and the entrepreneurial spirit moves into manic overdrive. 

Dog Meat
Photographing water buffalo across the river’s far bank, we met a local who wasn’t flogging anything. Mo Bin, a high school English teacher, simply wanted to chat. His burning question was about dogs. Was it true that Europeans and Americans bought special food for them? 

I seized the opportunity to ask about Guangxi province’s appetite for dog meat. Mo Bin earnestly assured us of its tastiness—and that maybe we’d already inadvertently tried it. Please, no. I thought. Although I’ll willingly sample many things, I draw the line at munching puppies.

Although some guidebooks recommend bypassing Guilin and using Yangshuo as a base, I disagree. Despite Yangshuo’s wooden pavilions, riverbank setting, and awesome scenery, it appealed far less than Guilin. With everybody scrapping for tourist pickings, things felt overly commercialized. But there’s one thing worth seeking out here—indigo-blue batik (batik is the art of waxing and dyeing fabric). I probably still overpaid, but through bargaining I acquired a large, exquisitely patterned tablecloth for $7.40.

The Gigglers Of Nanning
A four-hour drive from Guilin, Nanning is Guangxi province’s capital. Hoping to find property investment opportunities, I came here because the environmentally conscious authorities intend to turn it into China’s “Green City.” It provides a good illustration of how provincial cities are being transformed into shiny modern metropolises—but with hindsight, it was a mistake. Unable to unravel the phone directory’s mysteries, I discovered no agents to speak of.

The Guilin-Nanning bus (tickets $10.80 apiece) had a smartly dressed hostess. Apart from handing passengers a box of sugary rolls, cough drops, and bottled water, her only duties involved changing video movies. After a Chinese version of MTV came some nonsensical kung-fu film, played at full decibel level.

There were few cultural sights, but Nanning wasn’t a complete waste of time. It was fascinating to experience a down-to-earth Chinese city and to people-watch: the outdoor barbers, trash collectors on trishaws, platoons of landscape gardeners, and families taking late-afternoon strolls around the lake in People’s Park.

As Nanning isn’t on Western tour groups’ itineraries, you won’t feel like one of a crowd. We were stared at constantly. One cyclist was so intent on turning around for a better look that he tumbled off his bike.

Schoolgirls nudged each other and burst out giggling. Female store assistants and hotel reception staff giggled, too. Although it can be irritating—I wondered if I’d suddenly sprouted three extra heads—there’s no point being offended. Just accept that you’ve acquired a kind of celebrity status. 

Antiseptic Underpants, Anyone?
Again, booked through Sinohotel, Nanning’s four-star Jindu Hotel costs $28 nightly for a double, including a mini-bar with Coke, beer, coconut milk—all less than a $1— and a useful kettle for the green tea bags or giant-sized $1.20 tubs of pot noodles. There were also playing cards and bags of pistachio nuts. But what was this bizarre listing for underpants?

Nothing resembling Calvin Klein’s finest in the mini-bar itself, but a box of men’s stripy briefs lurked amongst the lotions in the bathroom. Advertised in English as “healthy and antiseptic” and ticketed at $1.20, the box also contained a condom. Naturally I bought it—I wanted to give the hotel’s receptionist something to really giggle about. And nobody back home would believe me without evidence.

Buffet breakfast was included...Asian breakfast. Unlike Guilin’s Sheraton, the Jindu makes no concessions to Westerners—no coffee, no cereal, no toast. Tackling noodles and green beans with chopsticks is tricky enough, but at 8 a.m. it’s almost impossible. I certainly didn’t crave blackened eggs stewed in tea, nor the unidentifiable chunks of dark meat (Michael hazarded a guess at oxtail, but could it be dog?). After scraping away the synthetic cream, the only remotely edible cake was a dry Swiss roll-type concoction. Thank goodness for watermelon and pineapple.

Along with some dog-meat stalls near the bus station, downtown Nanning boasts MacDonalds, Pizza Hut, and KFC. While hole-in-the-wall eateries are plentiful, proper air-conditioned restaurants seem scarce. But we didn’t need to resort to fast food, fried Fido, or do-it-yourself pot noodles. Along with buffet dinners (similar to breakfast) for $2.50, the Jindu had a separate Chinese restaurant. 

Unfortunately, nobody has yet translated its menu. Making us feel like star attractions in some freakish sideshow, six goggling wait staff crowded the table as we struggled for 20 minutes with an inadequate Mandarin-English phrase book. They understood requests for rice (mifan) and beer (peeju), but trying to say anything else proved impossible. Only by pointing at the book did we get a tomato omelet, some barbecued pork, and a tureen of neon-green soup. Not the best meal ever.

Unspoiled Yangmei
If you visit Nanning, spare time for Yangmei Ancient City, a 17th-century village of 7,000 people. It’s the real deal—a chance to see timeless scenes of rural life at close quarters. Women do laundry and wash plates in the river, every shady nook has its card and mahjong players, and villagers freely offer you small bunches of lychee fruits. 

Unlike Yangshuo, Yangmei hasn’t been spoiled by endless visitors. A couple of enterprising ladies will guide you around in an ox-cart, but there’s little else to indicate China’s great leap forward toward tourism. The only “souvenirs” were doll-size slippers made by a wrinkled granny. 

Highlights include a “wishing tree” festooned in scarlet ribbons, and a Confucian temple full of brightly painted statues. The lowlight for me was lunch. In a simple eatery with no menu and no English-speaker, I thought I’d scored a chicken dish. And so I had. After being weighed, a newly butchered chicken was chopped up in its entirety. I was presented with everything save its feathers—bones, skin, the lot.

Including the driver’s three-hour wait, the taxi trip cost $37. I arranged it through Nanning’s Jindu Hotel. Yangmei is only 25 miles from the traffic-congested city, but roads are partly unpaved. Getting there takes more than an hour.

SIDEBAR 1 Karaoke Hell
Our hotel in Nanning (the Jindu Hotel) had no lobby bar, so I suggested a foray into what its directory listed as the “Nightclub and KTV Lounge.” Huge mistake. No nightclub, no lounge bar—it was an entire floor of private karaoke rooms. 

The only place to obtain alcohol was inside our own karaoke room complete with bathroom and plush couches. (Intriguingly, the “lounge” had a lockable door.) But trying to operate a karaoke machine, whose multi-buttoned control zapper is in Chinese, is problematic, to say the least. We couldn’t even reduce the volume or switch it off. The cacophony of Chinese rap songs blasting out was sheer torture. 

Not realizing the control also had a service-call button, I kept pressing it in an endeavor to escape the diabolical music. Servers kept banging on the door, then shuffling in on their knees waving drinks lists. We couldn’t understand what they wanted—and they didn’t understand why more alcohol wasn’t required. 

Beer was unaccountably served with a shot glass. There was a never-ending parade of baffled barmen. Cartoon creatures shrieked and danced across the KTV screen. Now permanently stuck on full volume, the machine was squawking like a colony of demented parrots. Another gibbering shuffler with a drinks list appeared. Time to abandon the beer, the microphones, and flee. Both of us were rapidly approaching mental breakdown. 

A Chinese hotel manager later explained that karaoke set-ups often provide a venue for meeting prostitutes. (Honestly, I don’t deliberately seek these dens of iniquity—they find me.) But it explained the lockable doors and ladies patrolling outside the elevator. With prostitution illegal in China, hotels don’t take a cut from hookers’ earnings. Instead, they charge clients big for their karaoke pleasures. 

We escaped, paying only $6 for two beers. Obviously realizing these particular foreigners were complete idiots, the Jindu didn’t bill for the karaoke room. (The hotel manager in Sanya in Hainan Island told me the minimum charge for a room there is $37.) 

Sidebar 2: A Survival Guide To China—Seven Tips For The Traveler 
1. Print out your hotels’ Chinese names and addresses (they’ll be on the hotel booking site), you’ll need them for taxi drivers. Few cabbies speak English, let alone read it.

2. If you’ve never used chopsticks, buy some and practice before leaving home. Outside international hotels and Western-style restaurants, you won’t encounter many knives or forks.

3. Take a phrase book containing food listings. Even if you can’t pronounce the words, you can point at standard items such as duck, pork, vegetables, etc. Provincial China eats early. Lunch is generally from midday until 2 p.m. Dinner is from 5.30 p.m. to 10 p.m., though some restaurants close earlier.

4. Always carry toilet tissue. Women should travel in frocks or trousers that roll up above the knees easily. You’ll often be using holes in the ground, known as squat toilets.

5. It’s not always possible to book internal flights through airline websites. In some instances, there’s no on-line booking facility in English. For two flights (Nanning to Haikou on Hainan Island and Xiamen to Shanghai), I used an American-Chinese booking service, Wings Across Continents. The tickets were waiting upon arrival at my Shanghai hotel. See: www.wacts.com. 

6. Not all airlines issue e-tickets. You’ll get a booking reference number and will need to collect paper tickets at the relevant airport desk. 

7. Official taxis are metered—the minimum fare is displayed on the side. Depending on the city, it’s generally 7 to 10 yuan (86 cents to $1.20) for the first two miles.