Our Beijing correspondent Thomas Rippe recently took a trip to southern China, to soak in the atmosphere of Yansghuo in Guangxi province. Based on this trip, he told us about what stuck in his mind as the most interesting or puzzling aspects of life in this burgeoning southern town.

Tell us about your experiences traveling in southern China

I went down to a small town called Yangshuo, which is near the provincial capital Guilin in Guangxi province. Yangshuo is about an hour outside of the capital town and it's been a tourist town for a long time. When I was first in China about 15 years ago, there were two towns: one was Yangshuo and the other one was Dali in Yunnan province, and those were the places where people - the expats living in China at the time - went to if they wanted a little break from China without actually leaving China. So, these were the two towns they would go to.

Are they more like backpacking destinations?

Yeah, definitely. If you've ever seen any sort of Chinese landscape photography or paintings, you will have seen Guangxi province. It's home to these oddly-shaped mountains with steep sides going straight up and down and then there are these misty rivers winding through them and it's very lush and green. So, this is a big backpacker area. I was not in Yangshuo when I was here 15 years ago, but I was in Guilin, which is a nearby town, and actually my parents were visiting and we attempted to take a boat from Guilin to Yangshuo. This isn't a problem normally, but that was the dry season and it had been an abnormally dry dry season and so there wasn't enough water and the boat kept getting stuck. So we didn't actually make it to Yangshuo, but I was nearby.

One of the things that struck me on that trip was that these tour boats were pretty popular back then for Chinese and foreign tourists and it was still a relatively new thing... But what shocked us as foreign tourists was that you'd get on these boats and they'd serve you lunch and then take all of the paper plates and cups and napkins, well not knives and forks - but chopsticks - and throw them out the window and into the river, thereby spoiling the landscape everybody was going out there to see! I was pleased when I went back to the same river this time around because I didn't see any of that happening and the river definitely a lot cleaner than it was. I was happy to see that. The town itself I hadn't been to before, but it's like other Chinese tourist towns where there's a lot of stuff going on. I think 15 years ago, I remember reading or hearing from friends, that there were not more than a half-dozen hotels in town, and now there are about a half-dozen blocks of hotels! There are hotels and bars and restaurants all over the place and there's this whole section of town that has been kind of turned into the big tourist area.

Is there anything left of the original town?

I think the town used to be a lot smaller and there would still be people around who'd been born and raised there that are native to Yangshuo, but a lot of the Chinese people I talked to that were working there or had businesses there, were commuting in from Guilin, which is the provincial capital, about an hour away. One guy who owned and ran a restaurant that I ate at a couple of times, was a Guilin-native, and I think some people in Guilin, especially those that speak English, are able to capitalize on the tourist market. So a lot of those people with businesses there weren't from Yangshuo.

Wat was is like traveling in China during the Chinese New Year holiday?

Yes, it was interesting traveling during the Chinese New Year because all of China was on holiday. I ended up actually leaving on the 14th, on New Year's Day. On that day, the train wasn't completely full, it was pretty full, but there were still some empty spots on the train that I was on. And the train station itself was very easy to get through. Then when I wanted to come back to Beijing, trying to buy a ticket to get to Beijing was hopeless, so I ended up flying. I took a flight to come back, and that was easy. The airport in Guilin was very uncrowded.

Is it cheap to fly in China?

Thomas says people in southern China are more entrepreneurial than in the north. (Image: Radio86)It can be, but one thing that happens is that, I think my plane ticket was about 2,5 times the normal price. The hotel was also probably about 50 percent more than it would normally be. Because everyone is on holiday, all the ticket prices go up. Plane ticket prices, both domestically and internationally, and hotel prices go way up. So, it's not a cheap time to travel around.

Were the hotels at your travel destination fully booked even though the New Year is traditionally a time of homecomings?

Increasingly, families will take trips together. When I looked at some of the Chinese tourists there, it was families traveling with kids a lot of the time, but not all of the time. I also saw a lot of young couples, too. I do think some of the tradition is broken down. Not really dramatically, but to a certain extent. For example, the holiday period is a lot shorter than it used to be. Chinese people this year only got three days off officially – it used to be a full week. It also used to be that nothing was open, none of the stores, during the Chinese New Year, so you had to stock up on food and eat at home cause you couldn't eat anywhere else, unless you were in a really big foreign hotel. But now a lot of stuff stays open. There's been a bit of a breakdown in the traditions of the Chinese New Year, so there were a lot of Chinese tourists around, but I didn't have trouble getting a hotel room. I didn't have a booking when I went down there because I noticed that the prices they were asking for bookings online were way too high, so I decided to go down and look around and there were definitely places open, especially the ones that were catering more to the foreign crowd. I think some of the Chinese hotels would have been fuller.

So what kind of an impression did Yangshuo leave on you?

Yangshuo was great. One of the other things that was great about being in that area was... There are all kinds of things that people do there; they take boat trips up and down the river. In the summer there are more things like rock-climbing, and caving - there's a lot of limestone caves where you can even go swimming in. So, a lot of that stuff that you want to do in the summer time. But it was surprisingly cold down there, even though I took 20 hours on a train to go south, and it was almost the same temperature as Beijing was... So I spent most of my time wandering around in the small rural villages nearby Yangshuo and that was interesting because when I had been in that area before, it used to all be mud brick houses thatch roofs – very poor rural villages - and now, you see a lot of new construction in these local tiny villages. So, I saw some surprisingly nice house in these villages in the middle of nowhere. I had read somewhere that it's much harder for farmers to lose their land if they have built a home on it, so they tend to put more money in their homes. In some cases, a part of the building was left unfinished. Apparently they had built the overall structure at one point and then they would finish each floor as they had the money to do it. It's also kind of interesting to see the growth of Chinese tourism. When I was first here, there were no Chinese tourists. Very, very few people had the money to travel at all, and now, a lot of people do. When you get to a place like this, that's one of the more popular destinations... If it's popular in China, that's a lot of people! And there were definitely a lot of tourists in town, so that's and interesting process to see the growth of Chinese tourism since the last time I was here...

Have you made note of any particular differences in the people in the north and south?

Did you come across any ”interesting” local dishes?

They do eat interesting things. The hotel I was at, where I ate a lot of my meals, had a local menu, and the one thing I probably should have eaten but didn't, was snails. Apparently they eat a lot of them down there, in this particular area. The other thing was what they called 'beer fish.' It was sort of like a whole river fish cooked in beer.... it can't be that old of a tradition because they haven't had beer in China for more than maybe a hundred years. So, that was sort of interesting. And then there were rice noodles - everyone was advertising Guilin rice noodles, which taste like noodles – noodles are noodles.

Would you recommend Yangshuo as a travel destination?

Yes, it's definitely worth a stop. I think it's important for people, depending on how long people are going to be in China, to get away from Beijing and Shanghai and the big eastern cities. You need to see other parts of the country to get a full feel for what's going on here. Yangshuo is a good spot because it does give you this kind of classic-looking Chinese landscape with these mountains and rivers and stuff. It's got a good tourist infrastructure - it's easy to get around and it's not far from the original transportation hub – it's only an hour away from Guilin. And the hotels are nice. They've been dealing with a lot of international tourists for a long time now and the service at the hotel I was at was very good. It was a small place – I don't think it had more than ten rooms. But the people were nice and friendly and the food was good and reasonably priced.