Yangshuo Mountain Retreat Blog

The scenery around Yangshuo might seem unique, but the reality is that karst formations stretch from high in the Tibetan foothills right down the Mekong through to Southern Thailand.  For the last twenty years, Yangshuo has been groomed for tourism.  Industry has been relocated and international VIPs have been escorted here en-masse.  Few people realise that there are hundreds of other Yangshuos without these advantages, and yet still yearn to be major tourist attractions.  Here is a snapshot of just two.

Chunwan is only a few hours from Hong Kong, but who has every heard of it.  Foshan with its Bruce Lee museum maybe; Yanjiang Knife city where laid off factory workers sell samurai swords on every street corner perhaps, but Chunwan?  Not likely!  A few observant train-spotters arriving from the South, might spot the signature caves and the ‘Lord of the Rings’ landscape, but for everybody else it remains almost completely unknown.

Stepping out of the bus station, (a charitable description for a ticket cage and a few plastic chairs) do not expect any obvious signs of tourism.  In fact, the only sign offers a choice of questionable hospitality at the local jail or a quick route back to the big city.

Arriving at the Dragon Palace, the best hotel in town, visitors might be forgiven for thinking that they have arrived a little early.  About twenty years too early judging by the state of the exterior. (maybe even longer if the workmen continue taking extended afternoon naps.)

  The new owner Mrs Sun, previously a successful coal merchant in Guangzhou, purchased the run down shell last year and is keen to jump on the tourist bandwagon.  At the moment, Chunwan only attracts tourists (not prisoners) from nearby Yangchun, but she is banking on that changing in the near future.  At the moment, the hotel still leaves a lot to be desired.  During a March visit, the tiled floors made the hotel rooms colder than the car park, and the only other guests were exuberant locals, seemingly intent on setting a new world record for karaoke decibels.  Of course, this is not to say that the place does not have potential, it is a just a question of how long you are prepared to wait.

The surrounding farmland is endowed with an abundance of mango trees, and karst pockets litter the landscape.  Perhaps therein lies the problem. 

In Yangshuo, the mountains and caves stretch away as far as you can ride.  Here in Chunwan, they are clustered in small groups which has led to them being fenced off, complete with coach parks, ticket offices and subway type turnstiles so that visitors can be charged 30 RMB to enter a relatively small ring of about a dozen or so mini-mountains. (Locals and savvy tourists wait until after 5.30 when the staff go home and they can stroll around for free.)  It is ironic that for centuries Yangshuo’s popularity has been that Chinese philosophers have seen the area as a landscape in miniature, a geomancers’ dream where China’s vast landscape is reduced to a garden scale. Nature in microcosm, where hills, mountains, oceans, and rivers are reduced to rocks, karsts, streams, and pools.  Chunwan has taken this a step further and has become a Yangshuo in miniature, a tiny carbon copy, complete with a fairy lit cave, souvenir stalls and even a three room Butterfly Museum.

Sadly the town lacks any of the conveniences that makes Yangshuo an ever popular destination.  There are rows of newly open restaurants but all serve the same local fare.  At the top of the menu of the first establishment  we visited was bull’s penis, hardly an appetizer for western tastes.  Nowhere are there bikes to be hired, and the ever present grey haze from local heavy industry puts pay to the blue skies and fresh air for which most modern travellers yearn.  Chunwan reminds me of the Gucci handbags for which China has become so famed.  Superficially, it has the correct appearance, but any more than a casual glance clearly shows that it is just another shoddy fake.

North of Guangzhou, about an hour outside of Qingyuan, is a far more promising destination.  The small town of Jiulong has such attractive karst geography that it has long been known as little Guilin.  A number of attempts to replicate the success of Yanghsuo have already tried and failed, but recent development show that this might be the right time for adventurous travellers to give the place a second chance.  Climbers especially have been raving about the place and its proximity to Hong Kong (plus the newly opened highways) means that it may soon experience a tourism renaissance.

Express coaches hurtle between  Guangzhou and Qingyuan every fifteen minutes, taking just an hour to reach the new bus station.  Visitors can break their journey here at the convenient Xin Jin Yue Hotel, located just across the road, and whose restaurant excels in the local speciality, Qingyuan chicken. For those in haste, a quick cab across the city (fixed price 20 RMB, no meter, no haggling) to the old station and a public bus up to Jiulong, provides rapid egress from the city.

Like most small towns, Jiulong is a hideous rash of tightly packed concrete boxes.  Its saving grace is that magnificent karst scenery encloses it on all sides, scenery  that matches Yangshuo, but without the hordes of ever present tourists.  Jiulong Guest House on the main street, is cold, overpriced and unwelcoming.  For more colourful accommodation, head north along the side streets until you spot a monolithic green government building.  Despite its harsh appearance, this hulking monstrosity also doubles as a government guest house.  While I was certainly put off by its stark ugliness, if it was good enough for communist party officials, then it was good enough for me! 

            Old Comrade Luo, the septuagenarian security guard always has a warm welcome for what are admittedly rare foreign visitors, and the building itself only has ten guest rooms, the rest of the space being taken up with cavernous meeting halls, bureaucrat’s offices and compulsory re-education facilities.  Expect the usual tiled floors and squat toilets, but apart from that it makes a quite satisfactory base from which to explore.  Occasionally, the odd bike tour comes up this way, but usually the other guest rooms are occupied by chain smoking officials, gambling huge sums of cash across the Mah-jong table until the wee hours of the morning.  (Outright bribes are now frowned upon but a popular ploy among Chinese businessmen is to invite their favourite government bigwigs for a night of mah-jong, and then politely lose their shirt or the equivalent amount that they were planning to give as a backhander in the first place.)

            English here is practically non-existent and while the officials treat foreigners like cold-war spies, the two ladies that look after the guest rooms (Miss Wu and Miss Lee) will bend over backwards to do everything they can for you.  If you smile nicely, they might even let your into one of the meeting halls, so that you can have your picture taken on the stage under all the red flags, doing your best impression of a politburo coffin-dodger. 

            Despite the novelty value of staying in a government office, Jiulong’s real draw is its karst scenery, and the best way to experience this is to get out and explore.  Motorbike taxis loiter conspiratorially all along the main road, and they will happily take you out to all the main sites, most of which are worth avoiding, especially those with exorbitant ticket prices.

            A better place to start is Dong Tian Xian Jing 洞天仙境(Immortal’s Cave) about five minutes outside of town.  This is the embarkation point for a boat trip into a stunning cavern, popular with domestic tourists. Although a look at the sluice gates and the pre-war hydro-power generators (pre-opium war by the look of them), it is not worth the ticket price, especially when there is a much better rear entrance.

            At the main gate, follow the stream that flows away to the left, past the paddy fields.  This is actually an irrigation channel that leads to an aqueduct across the main cave-fed river.  Follow the path across the bridge, and on up to the woodlands ahead.  Half and hour along this track will bring you around to a large gully below a strutting spur, where you can survey the entire valley.

We had elevenses here and watched a pair of eagles climb the rising thermals;  they too were obviously ready for a mid morning snack.        

From here, keep moving east through the orange groves, keeping the stream to your right, until you come to the ancient mud brick village of Zhuyan竹岩村, which looks as though it has barely changed since the dark ages.  They have a half-collapsed tower, and a very authentic ancestral hall at the back of the village.  Unfortunately the myth of antiquity will be quickly dispelled as you exit the tiny hamlet on the other side, passing a tourist restaurant that seats more than two hundred people.  This is followed by a large sign which translated, states in no uncertain terms that all tourists must pay 50 RMB to enter the village and those who do not, will be forcibly escorted to the police station, where they will have to pay double that in fines.  Luckily the sign is just as much a relic as the village, from days gone past when there was a big tourism push in the area.  Pay no attention, and look instead for the lovers’ swing to the left. Opposite is a concrete path that leads away to the right, and is probably the best find of the day; a back entrance to the water cave.  Here, deep in the bowels of the mountain that we have been skirting around all morning, you can park yourself on one of the benches, and wave at the Chinese tourists as they float past, herded and life-jacketed onto pontoon boats. 

Smile generously, safe in the knowledge that they have all paid through the nose for a five minute boat trip, while you haven’t spent even one jiao for a delightful morning’s walk to the exact same location.  And it isn’t over yet.  (Those of you with prankster streak might like to conceal yourselves high above the waters edge, waiting to howl and moan horribly as the boats float underneath, giving the local tourists that little extra thrill for their money)

 Back at the swing, bear left until you come to another mud-brick row of peasant cottages on the right.  If you are lucky Mr Liang, one of the few remaining residents, will be sat out front, barefoot, with his scaredy-cat dog, weaving bamboo chicken baskets.

Smile politely and he might even let you sample the satsumas and pomeloes from his orchard.  Far removed from the surly, power-corrupted officials in town, the original peasant stock are humble but friendly, unwilling refugees in time from a by-gone age very different from our own.

Just around the corner, and you are back onto the hard-top.  From here it is a half-hour stroll back to the outskirts of town, and after so much natural beauty, a sharp jolt back into back into the miracle of Chinese development.  To the left is the town’s overflowing garbage dump, leeching a toxic cocktail of industrial chemicals down into the orange groves.

To the right is a large metal casting plant, turning the streams black, and creating its own ever growing garbage piles.  Heading back to Chinese reality on the shape of an electric sub station, and you are almost back in town.

A destination like Jiulong is much more about exploring than following the guide book, so this is just a taster to whet your appetite.  Head up there yourself, and check the obscure places such as Triplet Mountains (San Ma Shan 三马山) or the the derelict Dragon’s Cave (Hui Long Dong 汇龙洞), just stay away from the nearby village that claims the name of Little Guilin (Xiao Guilin小桂林).

Travellers Toolbox

Chunwan 春湾镇

Transportation – Two trains per day from Guangzhou – 17 RMB soft seat.

Accommodation – Dragon Palace Hotel龙宫酒店  (tel: 0662 7623188)

Eating – Lan Xiang Restaurant兰香食馆, Chun Guang Da Dao春光大道 (tel: 0662 6825826)

Jiulong九龙镇

Transportation – Regular buses from Guangzhou Provincial Bus Station 广州省站 to Qingyuan New Bus Station 清远新汽车站 – 34 RMB.  Buses every hour from Qingyuan Old Bus Station 旧站 to Jiulong九龙 – 17 RMB

Miss Huang at Star Travel 星辉旅行社just around the corner from the hotel and bus station (tel: 0763 3862730) can provide English speaking guides.

Accommodation – Qingyuan – Xin Jun Yue Hotel新君悦酒店, Opposite the New Bus Station (tel: 0763 3862212)

Jiulong - People’s Government Guesthouse (Renmin Zhenfu Zhaodaishuo人民政府招待所), Jiulong Xing Jie 九龙新街(tel: 13922568583)

Eating – Chaozhou Lang潮州郎鱼蛋粉小吃店 – Jiulong’s most popular noodle store on Feng Ling Jie峰林街

Reliable motodriver – Mr. Bao (Mandarin and Cantonese only) (tel:13076697200)