A Great Business Model in Yangshuo

There is no doubt that Yangshuo  is a beautiful place - the locals suggested the best season for visiting is Autumn when the temperature is perfect with less rain (although there was no rain for the 4 days we were ther).

Yangsuo's summer is very hot. We sometimes felt dizzy in the heat and felt even more dizzy when the troops of locals were trying to sell us something every second. The only two places that you could avoid their nagging selling was the hotel room and the boat you caught.

In the beginning I turned cranky with them, after a while I just ignored them, then I started to study them. All the nagging sales people were actually women, there was not a single man nagging us. Later we noticed that there is a fixed common business pattern in Yangshuo -  they were husband & wife businesses - while the wife was being the sales person getting customers in town standing in the hot sun, the husband, being the boat driver, enjoyed the beauty of the scenery on the river (and the cooler breeze).

If unmarried, the girls would work with their family or other relatives - keeping the business in the family.

It is a very efficient business pattern because everyone is working for themselves - the harder and longer they work, the more money they make.

The whole township seemed to be made up of small family business. We hired a bike to ride to the river where guides rafted you down the river on a scenic 2 hour trip. After hearing our plan, the guy we hired the bike from said he would be our tour guide for the day (for 10RMB - A$1.70). It turns out that his family owns a couple of rafts. So we paid 10RMB for the bike hire, 10RMB for the guide and followed him off to where a raft was waiting for us for the river ride. A very effecient business model.