Huang Guo Shu Anshun

We wake up very early as always, to have a quiet walk near the hotel, we get into a vegetables market, and see how the people make their businesses. It starts raining, so we go back for some breakfast, and then we go to the first visit: The 1000 peaks forest. It is a zone with so many hills, it seems they never end. They are sorrounded by rice fields, and the visit is quite nice, except for the little rain. We ride a little tourist train with a chinese ...

The old lady is all smiles, but her grip on my sleeve tightens. She brings us through the high, sliding wooden doors of her lofty-ceilinged stone house. She's short but stocky and waddles a bit in her traditional skirts. The entry room, a large area that seems to double as a garage, living room and shop, is hung all around with blue and white batiks-the signature craft of this area. "I made them," she tells us proudly in hard-to-understand Mandarin ...

My father has been kidnapped by girls in silver headdresses. Silver tassels dangling and jingling in the waterfall draft, they giggle and check each other's red and blue garb while they arrange themselves around Dad, their bright clothes eclipsing his black baseball hat and blue jeans. My mother stands to the side; I can't decide if she wants the same fame my father is experiencing or if she's hoping that they don't notice the blonde, blue-eyed woman ...

The weather was back to cold and drizzly today. We decided we'd just take a random bus ride and later find the No. 11 bus which would take us to the Confucian Wenmiao Temple. We caught a No. 1 bus outside our hotel, paid our Y1 each and had a scenic ride through the city of Anshun. We passed a pagoda high up on a hill, but decided not to explore it further, due to the weather. Eventually I noticed that we were now on the same route as Bus 11, so we asked another ...

We got a wake-up call for 7:30, and went across the square to last night's restaurant where the lady and the daughter were still asleep while her husband was on duty. A bit slower-moving than his wife, but he cooked me a very nice fried rice and Yoong a noodle dish that was nothing special. We walked across to the other hotel at 8:30 and were picked up eventually by a guide who took us by taxi to yet another hotel where we waited for the tour bus with a family ...

The first thing we did when we arrived at Guiyang last night was to find out how to buy tickets back to Guangzhou. After being misdirected to the queue for people who want to return unused tickets, we eventually got to a ticket counter and were surprised to find they could already sell us tickets for next Thursday. We expected we'd have to come back three or four days in advance. We feel much more secure with the actual tickets for our return home ...

Someone in Guizhou got the idea to make Chia pets out of a nylon, ribbons, rubber bands, and googly eyes, and sell them at the outdoor market. I bought one about a week ago and it's doing pretty good. I call him Rui, which is Chinese for King, due to his resemblance to Don King The outdoor market here is pretty exciting. It covers about a square block and is so crowded that we have, on occasion, stopped at the entrance, looked ...

... on their menu. Their roasted mutton is awesome, but pretty expensive. We also go to hot pot once a week, usually on Mondays in between our last classes (which end around 5:30) and when we start an English movie for our students (around 6:30). Our students look forward to the movie, because they do not have televisions in their dorm rooms (which sleep eight students per room). Movie theaters here are generally much too expensive for ...

Dylan: As we moved away from Guilin I saw less and less limestone hills. We were moving slowly away from the equator and the climate was getting colder. We slept on hard sleepers which are just a hard mattress with a mat on top. Raymond's Travel Page