Liugang Business Hotel Liuzhou

... of poverty (and the Chinese like there meat alot). One of the girls doesn't eat Vegetables (which is a little wierd) and is pretty much surviving off cakes which Im sure cant be healthy (not that im an expert on food nutrition). After wandering around the town centre trying to find a western restaurant for those two we settled for a buffet style Chinese restaurant. Here you go around to all these different ...

... in Thailand and Laos beforehand, I found myself reaching for a non-existent bowl of chillis. However, I was extremely impressed by the fresh, zesty herbs utilized in Vietnamese cuisine. In between these "safe" meals, I did courageously try some of John's sauteed camel which proved to be quite decent, though a bit chewy. Big mystery is WHERE the camel came from!?! I have not seen a live camel since I stepped in Southeast Asian soil 5 weeks ago! Don't want to think ...

... a group coming that would need the room. When we did take our bags down at a couple of minutes before noon there was nobody around to check us out anyway for a while. It seems Thomas had to go out at 11:30 and wanted to get us sorted out first. We were eventually checked out by one of the ladies of the family. No problems getting our key deposit back and they seemed quite pleased that we paid for the second lot of bike hire. (We could have argued that it was part of the tour ...

... up from Vietnam. We drank some with them and then went to the local food market to eat some barbecued meat, vegetables and try out a dried rat a cook chopped up and fried with hot peppers for us. Delicious. After so much fun it was hard to get up for the sunrise, but we were determined to maximize what we did on our short trip. Immediately following our sweaty sunrise, we caught a quick Western ...

... the 5.10a's and 5.10b's, sometimes with plenty of rests on the way up! The highlight for me and Brian was a 100m 4-pitch climb called Happy New Year, which we bagged on the second day of the chinese year of the pig. At the top of the second pitch some previous climbers have kindly left a guestbook and pen in a small cave. Its a pretty wierd experience signing a guestbook while being suspended 50m above the ground! The climb reaches almost to the summit of the ...

A travel day, from Ning Ming to Liuzhou, via Nanning. About 9 hours travelling on public buses. We headed out to the bus station at about 8am and I wasn't looking forward to the two bus journeys that it was going to take to get us from Ning Ming to Nanning and then on to Liuzhou. Each leg is about 400km so we had a lot of ground to cover. In the past I'd travelled on local buses and it had involved packing 80 people into a bus designed for 40. No air-con, and sometimes ...

... just taking a look around. We went into an upmarket bar which was mentioned in Lonely Planet and our local tour group guide. We weren't really dressed up for a night out, and soon left when they told us they had a minimum charge, having gone in and sat down amongst the dressy boys and girls feeling slightly out of place. On the way home we stopped in an open air bar/restaurant place, and had a quick drink and a game of cards before reaching the hotel.

It's raining! In bucket loads and there's not much to do except to head for the internet cafe or take my language learning books to the corner of a bar and scratch my head. Much of Yangshuo's appeal is the lazy pottering and wandering outside or heading for the countryside and river. Now, there is nothing to do except wait for the typhoon to pass through dumping more of this rain ...

... depth and perspective between mountains more easily. Seeing the water buffalo beside the river really made my day though! :-) Today's Enterprise Award goes to the men who paddled over to our boat on little bamboo rafts to sell souveniers through the boat windows. And by 'raft' I mean four or five lengths of bamboo lashed together with a small packing crate nailed on top for a seat... They weren't good ...

... girl I had met 2 years ago. I couldn't remember exactly how to get to her house and we took a roundabout route to find it. It again was a hot day and we wondered if we were ever going to find it. I was quite relieved when I recognized her house up on the hillside. I rode up in the yard and her Dad saw me and called for his daughter. They all came outside and kind of looked at me like I had fallen out of the sky. I did not think they recognized me from before so I ...