After a couple of days in Guilin we took a boat to Yangshuo. There is no way to rent a private boat, you have to go on a boat that is full of tour groups. And they are quite expensive, the boat we took was a cool RMB 420 per person. But that’s the way it is when a city discovers tourists, and I am sure prices will keep on rising. Why? Because the boat trip is absolutely stunning, and it is one of the things that you must have done at least once if you visit this part of China. If you have the chance to go here, do it.

Yangshuo itself has become pretty touristic as well. More tour groups than backpackers nowadays, but it still has the laid-back feeling. One of the very few places in China where East truly meets West, and where the Chinese go to look at the foreigners, instead of the other way around. To describe it in terms of other places, a mix of Ubud (Bali), Hanoi (Vietnam) and Lang Kwai Fong (the bar street in HK), maybe with a bit of Houhai (Beijing) thrown in.

The best time is early morning, when the tour groups from Guilin have not arrived yet. Having a coffee and a banana pancake in an almost deserted Xi Jie (West Street) is very relaxing. Around 1 PM the place becomes alive when the first boats from Glin arrive, and it does not get quiet anymore until late at night. Lots of bars with cheap beer and wine, and decent (but not great) food.

But there is much more to do than just relax with a good cup of coffee or a beer. I did not bring a Lonely Planet, but that did not matter much. In every bar you find people with the latest information about what you should (and should not) do. What you should absolutely do is rent a bike. A 18-speed mountain bike sets you back only 5 RMB, a normal bike is double the price (this is something I cannot explain – isn’t a mountain bike much more expensive?). But you get what you pay for, because my mountain bike broke down 7 km out of town (with a broken back axis – never happened to me before). Luckily my wife had saved the phone number of the bike shop in her phone, so the owner could pick us up.

You can buy a local map, but don’t depend on it too much. The map is not very accurate, and sometimes roads are just completely missing. But if you don’t mind turning back every now and then, it is a good help. Another solution is to rent a personal guide (for between 50-100 RMB per day) who will ride with you and show you the hidden gems of the Yangshuo countryside. The must see’s: some of the old bridges over the Yulong river, the beatiful scenery with rice fields in the foreground and mountains in the background, and the moon hill (a mountain with a hole in it in the shape of the moon, you can climb to the top in about 20 minutes). If you want to do some climbing or cave exploration this is also the right place.

There are plenty of hotels in Yangshuo, from backpacker hostels for 30 RMB per night, to the 4-star Paradise Resort. We stayed at the Yangshuo Regency with a top location (at the end of Xi Jie), a great view from our balcony, and an unbelievably huge king-size bed. I can recommend this hotel, but make sure you get a renovated room (right now that means a first floor room, the old ones do not get good reviews, but they will be renovated soon), and make sure it is on the Xi Jie side of the hotel, otherwise you won’t have a balcony, nor a view of the mountains. We pay RMB 298 per night (listed price is over RMB 600 but nobody pays that), a very good price for this kind of room.

If you do not want to spend time in Guilin, you can also take a taxi from the airport directly to Yangshuo. This should cost you around RMB 200, and takes about 90 minutes. Taxi vans in Yangshuo can be rented for about 30-40 RMB per hour, for trips into the countryside.

One of the main attractions in and around Guilin are the karst stone formations. These mountains, that pop out of a mainly flat landscape, contain many caves and some of these can be explored.

Having visited a fair share of caves in my life, but mainly in Europe, the caves here surprised me a bit. All of the ones that can be visited are lighted in all colors of the rainbow! Furthermore, the Chinese visitors have to be entertained, so all kinds of structures that look like an animal, plant or person are given a name. They then put a (lighted) sign in front of the structure, and the tour guide will point out the shape and where the head, ears, eyes etc. are. Some shapes that are not very clear are even helped a bit, by putting an eye on it or so… The Chinese tour groups love it.

This whole namegiving of structures is not my thing, but I do like the lighting, it gives the cave a very different look, and it makes for beautiful pictures. We visited several caves over the past days, but the best one by far is the Crown Cave, about 40 kilometer outside Guilin (you also pass it by boat between Guilin and Yangshuo). If you have time, go there. It’s totally worth it (taxi will cost you about RMB 200 roundtrip, based on the meter). But be warned, because sometimes you wonder whether you are in a cave or in Disneyland.

It starts already at the entrance. You don’t walk into the cave, but ride there yourself on an electric slide. It’s a 10-minute ride through the rice fields before you enter the mountain, and the last 200 meters you ride through the cave itself. At the end tour guides are waiting to take you through the mountain. Normally you have to go in a big group, but I did not like that idea, so we asked for a private guide. Although at first this was not possible, a bit of money goes a long way in China and we managed to get one.

The cave tour itself takes about two hours, but without a group holding you up you can do it in about one hour. Which was actually good, because I had to do a radio interview with a Dutch radio station later that afternoon, and needed to get out of the cave on time in order to get a mobile phone connection. The cave was fantastic, probably the best I have ever been to. It seems not many independently traveling foreigners go here (according to our tour guide), because it is too far from both Guilin and Yangshuo, and foreign tours normally do not include it either. This is a shame, it is so much more better than the Reed Fluut Cave (Chinglish for Red Flute?) or the Seven Star Cave where you see most of the foreigners.

OK, it is sometimes more than Disneyland than a authentic cave, but that’s part of the experience. Ever taken a glass elevator inside a cave? Here you can do it. A ride on a wooden raft on a subterrean river in total darkness? It’s all included. And even an electric train ride, that was taken right out of Disneyland. Including dance performances that you pass during the train ride! But for me the highlights were a huge ‘hall’ inside the cave where according to our guide 30,000 people would fit in, and a beautiful waterfall. What was less nice is the 1000-year old turtle (do turtles really get that old? Did not check it yet) next to the waterfall, that was touched by all tourists. The guide said that the turtle did not mind, because ‘he is used to it’. Right…

Pictures of the cave will be on my Flickr account soon (no way to upload them here, speeds are incredibly slow).

As I already noted in my post about our first day in Guilin, taxi drivers are quite commercial here. Every time we take a taxi the driver starts to talk with us, and every time he or she (many female drivers here) tries to sell us tickets or wants to drive us to another tourist location.

I am not exactly sure how it works, but in the meantime I have figured out that there is something behind all of this. This morning we drove to the Seven Stars Cave, close to downtown Guilin, when the driver asked us to go to a different window to get a piece of paper for him to show that he took us here. Upon doing that the ride was for free! Yesterday we had a similar experience with a taxi driver that also needed a paper (for points, she told us – we did not get a free ride though). It seems that the some organization awards drivers that bring tourists to certain locations, and awards them more than the cost of the ride. Nice for the drivers, but a a pain for tourists who now have to listen to sales pitches every time they take a taxi. But luckily not many tourists take taxi’s here, as most are either here on group tours (both the Chinese and the foreigners!), or are backpackers that normally don’t take taxis.

Monday we had breakfast at Gourmets Coffee Café (118, Bin Jiang Road – on the river, 100 meters north of the Sheraton). When we sat down we noticed a sign saying that if you order a coffee you get a free breakfasts. I first thought that they made an English mistake, and that they meant to say “if you order breakfast you get a free coffee’, but it really was the other way around. Coffee was great by the way. The owner is a retired couple, the woman from Guilin, the man from Taiwan, who retired here. The lady told us her successstory in a typical Chinese way (we now have so many houses, so many coffee shops and a car), but I enjoyed it. She was very proud that only foreigners come to her café. I did not point out to her that that may be due to the Western prices (EUR 2-3 for a coffee – OK, including a (Western) breakfast). Gourmets also has a branch in Yangshuo, where we will be heading on Wednesday.

One thing I do not like about Chinese hotels is the fact that the “Do not disturb” sign is often totally ignored. You put the “Do not disturb” light on or put the card on the door, but the cleaning lady will walk into your room anyway in the morning. It happened to me several times in the past already (but, to be fair, also once in a 5-star hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia), and this morning it happened to us again. Luckily the cleaning lady first rang the doorbell. Trying to explain that we put on the light because we do not want to be sleep a bit longer does not help, she only said “I am sorry” and moved on to ring the bell of our neighbours (I could not see if they also had their sign on).

After a flight of over just two hours from Shanghai our plane landed in Guilin, the former capital of Guangxi province. The airport is (like most airports in China) located about 30 kilometers out of the city, so we took a taxi to our hotel. All taxi’s are metered, which spares you the hassle of negotiating a price. The young driver immediately tried to strike up a conversation, and within a few minutes the conversation turned to a sales pitch for cheaper tickets for boats and shows that he could arrange. Bad luck for the driver, because I never buy anything in China without checking prices at more than one other location first. Especially not when I am not even sure what I want to do during my vacation.

The hotel we stayed in, the Guilin Bravo Hotel, was a typical 4-star Chinese hotel. A bit older already, with staff that did not speak much English, but good enough for me. There are a couple of other good hotels here (including even a Sheraton, right on the river), but none of those has an outside pool. One of the things I like to do during a holiday is spend at least a few hours with a good book at the pool, so that was the key selling point for this hotel.

At night we walked to the river and has some Guilin food in a local restaurant (two meals including beer, soft drinks and tea for less than USD 3). Very tasty, and more spicy than I has expected. Note to self, when back in Shanghai find a good Guangxi food restaurant. The meal was followed by a foot and leg massage in the parlour upstairs of the restaurant. My legs were a bit sore from an extended run in the hills the day before, and this was exactly what I needed. The masseuse gave my legs a ginger treatment: she prepared some muddy-looking ginger paste that she put all over my lower legs, and put hot towels over them. First I did not feel much (but I smelled the ginger!), but soon it got warmer and warmer. After about 20 minutes I asked her to take if off, because I felt my legs were on fire. My soreness was gone though.

After the massage we walked along the river and decided to take a river cruise. At a small shop on a street corner I bough two beers for during the 100-minute boat ride, because I expected they would not sell beer on board (which turned out to be correct). The cruise, called “Water System in Guilin” in English and “Two rivers, four lakes” in Chinese was amazing. At first I was not too impressed, because the 20-person boat also had a tour guide who decided to use a megaphone to explain all the things we were seeing. But once we went off the main river into the canals of the city the outdoor deck was opened where I did not hear her, and had a much better view.

Guilin started this cruise in 2002, and it seems a winner among Chinese tour groups. I did not see a foreigner on any of the boats, although there are quite a lot of them here on their way to Yangshuo. Maybe the English name “Water System of Guilin” should be changed? I loved the cruise, especially the part over the canals and lakes of Guilin city. Beautiful pagoda’s and classical Chinese structures (surely rebuild, but that does not matter too much), and everything very nicely lighted. It was not cheap: at RMB 150 per person it was equal to the price of 10 dinners in local restaurants, but well worth it.

… we got married today (pictures!). On 9-9 we did the registration, and on the 10th we had a big party. Time flies, but my wife and I look back at a very nice first year of our marriage. An exciting year, that started off with a honeymoon in the Philippines, and later included trips to among others Hong Kong, France, Italy and Holland. Workwise it was an extremely busy year for both of us, but it was also quite succesful. A year ago Spill Group Asia did not even exist yet, now it’s a fast-growing company with some great gaming sites and we even have our own game development team. Toodou received two rounds of funding during the past year, and was voted one of the Red Herring Asia 100 companies. Gary has managed to grow the company to over 40 staff. And now Qi also spends a lot of time there building Finance and HR. Let’s see what the next year will bring us, I plan to make it even more successful – both businesswise and privately.

To start it off, Qi and I decided to have a “second honeymoon” during the next week, to relax a bit and spend a lot of time together. I try not to be online too much, therefore expect some lighter posting over the next couple of days.

Today we went live with several new functions for our Chinese flagship site game.com.cn. We decided to add some interactive features to the gaming site, and more will follow soon. One feature we added is a rating system for games. If a user is logged in, he/she can give a game a rating of between one and five stars. Based on this we calculate which games are the highest rated games on our site, and we can publish a ranking.

Another feature is that you can leave comments about the game (they can be seen right below the game). For example, you can tell other users some tricks that you found out about or whether you like the game (or not). You can even upload screen shots of your high score, so others can try to beat that.

The site also includes a BBS (forum), where users can discuss about all kinds of gaming related topics. Several threads were already started this morning.

But most important is probably the points system that we introduced. At this point you can get points by among others logging in and registering, by providing more information about yourself, by inviting friends to the site, and by rating and commenting on games. For the BBS you get points for posts that you make. In order to encourage people to participate in discussions we give away nice prices to users with the highest scores during one week or one month.

If you can read Chinese, give it a try. We tested the system for a week already, but there may still be some bugs. One known bug is that the site has some problems with Firefox and Safari, but we are working on that. Please let us know if you find any other bugs (I might give you some bonus points :-). Happy gaming!