southeast China
Guilin Day 2: Annoying local fishermen, and riding the Yao Mountain Cable Car Ride
On day 2 of my trip to Guilin I woke up very early in the morning around 5:30 AM. Maggie was taking the sleeper train into town from Shenzhen so I had to go to Guilinbei Railway Station to meet her and bring her back to the hostel. I caught a couple nice looking views from the cab on my way there.
After meeting Maggie, I brought her back to the Li River around 6:30 to catch the sunrise. It was breathtaking. We were also surprised to see a ton of fishermen there trying to catch some fish from the river. In Chinese I asked them if they had caught a lot of fish. They looked at me very annoyed as if I was making too much noise and said no.
We headed back to the hotel, had a shower and some breakfast, and then we were off to explore Guilin! We planned to go to Yao Mountain on this day, and that’s what we did. However first I had to buy a pair of pants because the mosquitos in Guilin are terrible – I got 15 mosquito bites on my first day in shorts. The remainder of the trip was spent in jeans. (Which I buy in the video) After that, we took a bus ride to Yao Mountain and found that you actually had to walk quite far from the bus to reach the mountain. Regardless, we found it and the cable car ride was AMAZING.
So the cable car costs 65 RMB ($9.79 USD) to go up one way, and 110 RMB for both up and down ($16.57 USD) per person. It was well worth it though. Hiking to the top of that mountain, despite how much I love hiking, in that heat would be miserable. Plus, the views you get from the cable car and the nice breeze is unforgettable!
Going up the cable car was even a bit scary for me, but poor Maggie had an absolute meltdown. In fact I plan to do another video on just how funny I thought her freaking out was. She was truly terrified on that cable car ride.
As the ride came to an end, we even caught a picture of a beautiful butterfly that landed on our cable car. Make sure to check out my YouTube channel and check out the video of this day at the top. Let me know what you think in the comments! See you next time! I am off to Vietnam tomorrow so expect tons of good video logs and blog postings from there as well! I will be there for two weeks, and I still have videos scheduled to post to my YouTube channel while I’m gone, and I will see what I can do as far as updating the blog goes.
Riding a Chinese sleeper train from Shenzhen to Guilin in China
I spent the last week traveling in Southeast China – mainly in the area of Guilin and the surrounding towns Yangshuo and Xingping. It was a wonderful journey, and I documented every second of it. First I wanted to talk about the difference between these sleeper trains and the high speed trains that China is so famous for. Firstly, I would have taken the fast train if I could have. They are much nicer, newer, and of course faster. However, the tickets for these often sell out fast. I could have gotten fast train tickets going there but I actually wanted to do the long ride in order to document what the sleeper trains are like. This is the inside of a soft sleeper (1st class) cabin:
They are relatively comfortable and the bottom bunk costs a bit more than the top. You have fresh blankets and a private space with a door, like a room. The beds are only stacked two high, and not three. There is a table in the middle, and under the table (Not pictured here) there is a power outlet where you can charge your devices, etc. These beds cost about twice as much as the hard sleeper cabins – which are a bit different. They are all stuffed into one cabin (So over 100 beds to a car, and can be very noisy) and the beds are stacked three high. (If you’re on the top, it totally sucks!) The cost of my soft sleeper ticket was 433 RMB which translates to $65 USD. The hard sleeper, comparably, is about half the price. Anyway, as we made our journey outside of the big cities and into the Chinese country side, I got a lot of cool shots!
At around 4:30 PM I began my journey to Guilin from Louhu Station, in Shenzhen. The evening began to come around and darkness began to fall.
And above are some night shots I got as we were exiting Guangzhou. As we made our way into the Chinese countryside, it was really pitch black since there were no cities or towns so I waited until morning to get the rest of my shots. Here they are as we are entering the Guilin area.
Getting out of the city is something you absolutely must do, even if it’s just once in awhile. The feeling of being out in nature is like nothing else. Guilin is absolutely breathtaking, and I spent a wonderful week there. I will be updating every week with new videos and pics of what we did there. It was a crazy cool adventure! Make sure to check out my YouTube video of the train ride below, and don’t forget to tell me what you think in the comments!
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