Rongchang Hotel Liuzhou

I'm on the train to Guilin now. I got a soft sleeper from Zhangjiajie. Before I get ahead of myself, let me sum up how things ended up going with the tourguide in zjj. At first things weren't so bad. I was ind of happy that I found a place to stay in the park and I thought I might even end up staying an extra night. However, the walk up the mountain was actually pretty tireing, even tho I wasn't the one carrying ...

... We said farewell to our leader Bom, Kiwi John, Georgina and Rashmi (although these two we met up with later out on Cat Ba Island). The next day we met our leader for the last segment of the trip, a 23-year old Aussie named Elinor (I feel really old now!). She has lived in China for a few years and is fluent in Mandarin so a perfect fit for our travel to Southern China where very few speak English. We also picked up another passenger, Bruno, a 31-year old ...

... snake. This turned out to be part of the meal for the tour group. They milked it and served the blood and venom to those who wanted to it, then took it away to cook. I was offered the drink too, but was not tempted to try it. Before 8:30 p.m. we went back to the hotel to prepare for departure. Thomas took us to the bus station, where we waited while he collected three girls from somewhere else. Eventually Larry turned up. No sign of any tickets, but there were plenty of ...

... down the utterly quiet river, the boatman poling us through the shallows, over a carpet of hairy algae and through the most impressive scenery I've seen in China. The raft was more buoyant than I thought, with water coming through the cracks to our feet only once in awhile. Every several hundred yards we'd come to a short weir in which case our boatman would try to launch us over the ...

... countryside. We hired (ladies) bikes and pedaled through rice fields which are situated amidst splendid green-topped limestone peaks which was certainly one of our favourite memories of our trip thus far. As adults you forget just how much fun riding push-bikes can be. Other than riding pushy's around we simply wandered the streets for a few days practicing our very bad Mandarin on the local ...

... by. I assume the road system is quite new but must've costs millions to develop. The landscape is quite like a land version of Halong Bay. Lots of limestone hills and columns. The road has been cut straight through them. Lots of cutting and the odd tunnel to keep the road as straight as possible. We reached Liuzhou at about 5pm. First thing we noticed when we got out of the bus was how much colder it was. We crossed the Tropic of Cancer today, but it feels like we ...

... it eases the Westerner into China a little more gently, rather than the usual culture-shock bump. It's a bit weird how every third café is bearing a hand-painted sign alleging it's a Starbucks, though. Spent the morning cycling around some of the countryside around Yangshuo (there's also plenty of bike hire places!). It was a glimpse of your traditional view of rural China- the sort of thing I'd not been entirely sure really existed. Men up to their ankles ...

... a few weeks, you don't want to waste it examining the bathroom furnishings :-) Also on my chore list was laundry- fortunately it was an easy job to drop it off at a local travel agent's office. For some reason they do laundry on the side- I decided not to ask silly questions! This afternoon we had a mandarin lesson, which was really useful. I'd already been doing my best with my guidebook lingo, but Mandarin ...

... out her bike and we rode through the citris orchards to the river. We parked the bikes on the bank and walked down near the water where Frank and Hung Yen proceeded to have a blast throwing rocks in the water and splashing each other. We walked up the river bank for awhile past the water buffalo grazing to a place where a guy had a huge flock of geese. Since it was getting late in the day we rode back to her house and told her we had to get back to town. She said ...

... with most of the other passengers. It did get pretty annoying after a while and you do sometimes just want to shout "What!" at some of the more lingering stares either that or break in to a little song and dance routine to at least give them something worthwhile to stare at. A few did at least come up and speak including a guy from Korea who was just glad to see another foreigner to speak to since he spoke no Chinese at all despite me thinking he was Chinese ...