Mud Bath

Me and h took a seat on the bus, it was older than me and with a thick layer of dust covering the dark green vinyl seats. “This bus hasn’t been used in 100 years” one of the passengers complained. They refused to sit down until the driver came round and cleaned every seat with a dirty rag. One hour later each and every one of them would be writhing like
ecstatic hippopotami in knee deep mud, deep inside a cave below a kirst, smearing it over their bodies and faces like a magical elixir.

This was never my idea of fun but H was we’ll up for it so I agreed, we waited for a rainy afternoon and shopped around for cheap bathing costumes and Yangshuo fisherman shoes and made our way to the travel agency (where H had already spent 30 minutes arguing us down to a 40% discount)

The adventure started as soon as the bus fired up, I’d chosen a fabric seat, different from the others and at the first pothole the seat collapsed through the steel frame (apparently it had been taken from another bus with slightly smaller seats) and left me only supporting myself by pushing down with my feet and leaning back as hard as possible with the steel frame of the seat digging into my legs. Changing seats was impossible, the bus was charging down a long dirt track, 3.5km long, which saw us constantly bouncing and lurching wildly from side to side, I quickly understood why they use such an old bus for the journey.

At the caves we were loaded into a single, narrow boat, just squeezing two abreast into the seats, the slightest movement sent the boat pitching dangerously as we waited for the oarsman (all the other boats we saw only had one person per seat but for some reason we HAD to double up).

As we entered the caves we had to duck right down between our knees because the ceiling was so low and then after a short boat ride we pulled up at an underground shore to begin the tour.

Initially we explored the various stalagmites and stalagtites in the enormous cave, all of which were massively overly-narrated in the typical Chinese fashion. Our guide pointed to a stalagmite “this is an old man”, she explained, “he is waiting for his wife but he has been waiting for a long time because she has gone to the moon”. Later she pointed to another stalagmite amongst a group of 20 or so “this is a fisherman, he has been successful and caught a lot of fish, but there were more than he could eat, so he has hung them from the ceiling over there” (points torch to a stalactite which splits into two at the end on the opposite side of the cave).

Eventually we arrived at the mud bath, I’m not sure how real this was, the mud was real enough but there was a man made wall around the outside containing it. H was just about the first in, followed by me, it was ice cold though and I managed about two minutes before calling it quits and retreating back to my clothes (while constantly being pelted with mud by H). Everyone else climbed in and stood around not sure what to do, with constant encouragement from the staff “there are many minerals, much more than normal mud, it is good for the skin, it will make it very smooth and good for the health, it heals diseases”. At that everyone started smearing the mud over themselves and writhing around, at which point the photographer appeared. H had a great time, she was giggling like a naughty child the whole time and rolling around in the mud, trying to swim, throwing mud at me etc.  They stayed in the baths for about 20 minutes while the photographer snapped pictures of everyone before it was time to shower and move on

H looking fabulous in mud

After the mudbaths we moved to the underground hot spring which cascaded down this weird gigantic stalagmite which had formed with pockets the size of bath tubs where you could lie in the warm water. We had a quick go in some of these and they were so uncomfortable that we moved down to the large pool at the bottom.

Along with me and H a French guy was bathing with his Chinese girlfriend, neither H nor the French guy’s girlfriend could swim. I started showing H how to swim and after a while noticed that the French guy was doing the same with his girlfriend, I overheard his conversation and realised that our teaching methods pretty much summed up the difference between French and English.

My instructions were literal and exact, “put your arms like this and do this with them, then at the same time put your legs like this and do this with them, keep your body flat in the water and your head up”.

His instructions were abstract and philosophical, “you ave to imagine zat you are ze feesh, you ARE ze feesh, BE ze feesh”

It reminded me of the time I saw a French documentary about insects, an English documentary would have been all “there are 37 varieties of ladybird, of which this is the most common, they have on average 16 spots, live for 8 months and mate only once before laying up to 100 eggs on the underside of the leaves of the elm tree…” whereas the voiceover on the French documentary was all “ze beautiful ladybird, dancing a sweet tango around ze flowers, so lonely as she watches the sunset, yet so elegant..”

Anyway, regardless of the differences we both failed, neither of the girls improved in the slightest.

Fin..