fresh n juicy chunks of oyster :: RTW travel blog

It is near midnight. A thunderstorm is brewing overhead; flashes of lightning bathe the sky like bright white sheets that threaten to descend in a biblical flood. My skin is sticky with dried sweat and I long for the air to release its payload on me and the dirty streets of Guilin. But within this oppressive humidity and the crowd of locals laughing and drinking loudly at street foodstalls something feels different than it has for a while; it feels real.
The train from Beijing was the last time anything felt this real - all too real in fact in the bargain 'hard seat' class carriage to Guangxi province down South. These were probably the most uncomfortable 24-hours of my life; I ended up sleeping in the aisle for want of legroom. But I was a curiosity to everyone on the train, attracting stares and students eager to practise their English. It felt like it meant something like that exhilerating feeling of being somewhere you have never been before.
Then I made my way to Yangshuo, recommended to me by some random travellers as a nice place to go. The place to be in Yangshuo is West Street which has possibly earned its name by being a street for Westerners: bars, cafes, hostels, trinket souvenir shops and travel agencies are packed side by side. As I enjoyed my dearly missed English breakfast on the first morning there, however, some feeling started to creep up on me but I couldn't quite place it.
Later that day as I was sipping on coffee (a rarity in China) an old lady in tattered robes and the traditional, conical Chinese hat was slowly walking up and down the street. She came over to me and out of her basket she slammed down a plastic bracelet on my table. I picked 'no thanks' out of my vast vocabulary which had increased to an incredible repertoire of four phrases; she scowled at me and started yanking at my wristband from Bahia which is by now barely more than an ugly piece of string. She shouted something angrily in Chinese, presumably calling it ugly. After another minute of 'no thank yous' she walked off but it was then that the feeling that before I couldn't place crystallised: it was sadness.
It was a sadness about this town which lies in one of the most beautiful areas of the world and how it had become an entertainment centre for the traveller and how that once beautiful old woman had become frustrated and jaded by our being there. I imagined how she would have been content driving her family's oxen or working the rice fields; as hard as such a life would be at least it would not destroy her soul and spirit. I and all the foreigners there were responsible for what has happened. No amount of 'but we are helping the local economy' can truly excuse the transplantation of our ugly culture into beautiful places and into the minds of beautiful people. Yangshuo, albeit in China, was my first whiff of the fabled South-East Asia and its backpacking culture made infamous but legendary by books such as The Beach and common traveller-folklore with all its pretensions and high-horsedness.
But you get used to it and after a while the guilt starts to fade; I started noticing the old lady with a basket full of fruits hooked under her tiny arm and the cutest, most sincere gappy-toothed smile that has ever graced me; I 'discovered' the areas of town where the locals eat delicious foods and don't speak English; in a bar at night I had conversational English classes with the sweetest group of schoolkids from the city, brought here by their parents to practise with native speakers; and then there was the countryside, just minutes away by bicycle and where the people still drive their oxen and farm their rice-fields - where the world is still ok in my simplistic view of it.
In the city of Guilin meanwhile the downpour has come and I have walked back to my cheap hotel by the railway station. The cool rain on my skin felt amazing and even the female shopkeepers and small boys on the side of the road who tried to interest me in business with some hookers did not overly disturb me. But as I lie here on my lonely bed in this dirty room there is a suspicion growing in my mind: once I enter South-East Asia proper all this is just going to get worse...

[But all is not doom and gloom - the football commentary in China has improved miraculously and I am also one giant step closer to 'home': I bought a flight to Bangkok but am now looking for the best path out of this city.
Until I do check out Album China 2 with the snappies of Guangxi.]