The Cheap Seats

"Impressions" is a nightly performance event in Yangshuo, China employing over 500 workers and performers to create a dazzling display of lights, music, and theater. The Chinese love their neon lights - in caves, in clubs, on the sign for the post office, etc. - and they spared no bulb in the creation of the show. However, instead of being tacky, they managed to create a pretty incredible show with nice visual effects of colored lights on the water at night with hundreds of performers rowing individual boats in patterns along the river.

A show this intricately designed obviously comes at a price, a rather high price at that. So instead of buying the tickets from the ticket office, I obviously set about asking around town for anyone who could sell discount tickets to the show. After a little prying, I found tickets at less than a fourth of the original price. The only catch was that we'd be sitting on the "second platform." Not sure what this meant (I was listening in Chinese and trying to translate to mom what our cheap tickets included), we blindly decided to take the deal.

I should have known something was wrong when we turned onto the dirt road, through the chickens, behind the old chinese houses, and through an empty field. Smashed cozily into a rickety Chinese minivan with several other Chinese tourists, my mother and I sped through the back "roads" of Yangshuo hoping that we were simply taking a shortcut to the river venue. As our driver parked the van behind a pile of old bricks, we should have guessed that we were in for a nontraditional viewing of "Impressions."

In an Underground Railroad fashion, our driver pulled out a lamp and directed us down a narrow dirt path through several different fields, yelling for us to keep up lest we be lost among the spinach plants. After crossing a few small streams and shuffling down a dirt embankment we found ourselves at the river's edge facing a bamboo raft bridge. Before us lay a collection of floating rafts tethered together to form a walkway out to larger barges outfitted with shoddily hand-made bleachers. A swaying and slightly damp walk out to the bleachers was followed by a shaky climb up a small wooden ladder to our lofty floating perches. So that's what a "second platform" is apparently...either they didn't quite tell me the truth about our "side seating" or something got lost in translation.

Despite our seating in the prop area of the river, we managed some great views of the show and enjoyed the brilliant colors along with the rest of the Chinese tourists. It was an adventure for sure, and I think that my mom will remember our jungle walk to our seats much more than she would've ever remembered a show.