A German and a Dutchman rowing against the current for a free show.

December 14, 2011. Written in Hong Kong.

A German and a Dutchman rowing against the current for a free show.

A few days after having taken Man and Keiko on a one-day-tour with my bamboo-boat, we left my boat at the riverbanks near a small village a few kilometers away from Yangshuo.

When I told my new German friend Lars about my bamboo-boat and my adventures on it, he said that he wanted me to take him on a one day-tour too. I told him that we would have to walk to the place where I had left the boat.
He asked how far it would be to walk there and I told him that it would probably be about 30 minutes.

While walking, I explained Lars some details about my boat. How it almost sinks when you get on it, how there is only one paddle and the other one has to use a stick, how it is not faster than walking and how your butt will start to hurt from sitting on the hard bamboo. Lars told me that it was exactly the kind of boat he had been looking for, but that it would be even better if we could somewhere find a paddle for him. On our way, we looked if there wasn't an abandoned paddle lying somewhere on the streets, and asked some people if they didn't have one. But whenever we tried to make rowing gestures with our hands, all the people got dollar signs in their eyes and tried to take us for a tour on their motor boats.

Then, we found a riverbank beneath a bridge with many old abandoned bamboo boats. There was a pretty big chance that we might find an old paddle lying around somewhere there, and decided to go down.
There was however no paddle to be found, but I found a small chair that could come in handy on the boat instead.

It seemed to be much further to get all the way to the place where I had left my boat, and it took us at least one hour. It was a nice walk though, and luckily Lars didn't really seem to care either.

When we finally reached the place, I took my own paddle in my hands, and we headed to a big boat nearby to ask the owner if he had "something like this" meaning the paddle in my hands.
He said he had and went inside his boat and came back with a half-broken paddle. He said he wanted 20 Yuan (200 Yen or 2 Euro) for it and he wouldn't allow us to bargain. It was a nice man though and Lars decided to pay the price.

So now my boat got upgraded! It had now 2 paddles, 1 stick and a small chair! We were ready to go!

First we had to decide where to go. Of course it was possible to go further downstream, but then I would have to walk even further to go and get it next time. Thus, Lars and I got the idea to try and row against the current to bring the boat closer to Yangshuo than it was now.

The idea was good, and in places with little current there was no problem, but whenever the current would get strong, we had to get off the boat (the water wasn't very deep) and push the boat through the currents. This cost us lots of time and hard working, and Chinese people that passed us with their motor-boats looked at us as if we were totally crazy. We didn't give up though, and went on for a pretty long time. Even when the water was too deep to get off the boat, we would row the boat at full power to try to somehow move forward. It must have been a funny sight to see the two of us row like crazy, while the boat was hardly (or not at all) moving forward.

When we finally got closer to Yangshuo, we decided to not go all the way into the city, because the boat might get stolen.

We found a quiet riverbank to put the boat, and then took the stairs to the top. But when we arrived there, we found ourselves in the middle of a famous outdoor show held every evening. Tickets for this show are terribly expensive, and cost at least 500 Yuan (5000 Yen or 50 Euro). We where now standing there watching the show in our swimsuits, and could just take an empty seat somewhere next to all the high-class ladies and gentleman formally dressed. We decided that it was not a good idea to keep the boat here though, because it would be impossible to get it back next time. We went to the exit to see if it was possible to pass without showing a ticket, and found out that this was not the case. Then, a guard found us and told us to get out immediately. We tried to explain to him that we had came here with our boat, and wanted to leave this way too, but he didn't seem to understand and followed us to the riverbanks. When he saw us getting back on our boat, he looked as if he had never seem something crazy like this ever happen before in his life. He took his phone out of his pocket to tell his wife what was happening right now, and kept looking at us rowing our boat against the current for a long time.

After a while, we found a better place to put our boat. This place obviously belonged to a restaurant, but it seemed possible to sneak around it.
We got off our boat, and tried to walk the stairs back to the road, but found a lady of the restaurant on our way. Lars was about to approach the lady, but I stopped him from doing so and took him to the bushes to hide. When the lady wasn't looking, we grabbed our chance and quietly ran the stairs to pass the lady.

When we were back on the road, Lars complimented me on the quick decision I had made.
"You know, I always try to explain the circumstance to people, but there is no way explaining that you are walking around in the middle of someone's terrain!"
Before going back, we looked if there was a good way of sneaking back down to the riverbank, and called our boat-tour a day.