Zelin Hotel Guilin

... 8217;t want to know if they&#8217;re out the back) <br><br>One of the towns main sights is the Seven Star Park, which is a 120 hectare park with limestone hills and caves. We managed to lose ourselves there for a few hours one afternoon. After a long discussion about which hill to climb we followed our trusty tourist map and ended up in a completely different place to intended, something which seems to be happening more and more, we&#8217;re blaming the maps not our navigational skills ...

... and bright yellow. During the Japanese occupation of Guilin, all of the original buildings in the palace were burnt to the ground. The ones visible now were built during the 1940's on the original's foundations. Although nothing like the originals, they are very cool and are all yellow with tiled roofs. <br><br><br>After entering the main gate I could see a large courtyard with a building built in the center of ancient stone balustrades. The palace is split down the middle ...

... continued to make a dumpling! we were sick, we payed our tab, and ran out before our food even came. Another day, one of the Buckland employees took me to the dentist to get retainers. The dentist and doctors offices looked like scenes from a horror movie! Everything was dirty, and the dentist didnt even use gloves. He showed me some retainers from around 30 years ago, scared the **** out of me, then i ran out. I would rather have crooked teeth! haha i was like um ...

... men. The average smoker in China smokes ten cigarettes per day*. That's 3650 cigarettes in a year. Are you with me so far? If each one of these 417 million smoking men smokes that many cigarettes in a year, that's 1.522 trillion cigarettes smoked by men in a year. (Consider that, at it's peak in 1981, the monstrous US tobacco industry sold fewer than half this number: 640 billion cigarettes.) Now, the ...

... and what can only be described as a trailer with seats. We squeezed six of us in with all our bags and zoomed off down the country lanes which basically dirt tracks with pot holes. Holding on in the freezing cold we made it to a bus that took us to Yangshuo. The trailor seemed like it would tip over at any minute. As part of chinese new year we made dumplings in our hostel which were tasty and then headed off for a few drinks to bring in the new year. We met up ...

... 200m away is smog, you will be bitterly corrected... because there is no smog in China... wink wink... Anyway, the point is, dispite it being very touristy, I felt like I'd arrived in a town that I could really spend some time in... which is just as well because we had a few nights there... The first night we decided to watch some hawk fishing, also known as lantern fishing, as the fish are attracted to the bright light hanging from the ...

... stop at that moment! Hope to come another time and spend some days here in the tranquility. Bicycling in Yangshuo was also a pleasure, you never know what to discover in the countryside, the buffalos, the hardworking farmers or the stone-climbing fans. The rest of time, we just walked around Yangshuo Xijie to find nice food, western or local. The roast chicken in Yuanshiren was ...

... Finally we walked along a river and viewed Elephant Hill. Elephant Hill is located at the confluence of Li River and Peach Blossom River in the southwest of Guilin city. It looks like a huge elephant stretching its trunk drinking water hence the name.

... I take it that for many reasons the Chinese prefer foreigners to go dine in more upscale restaurants. But I increasingly liked it like that. The only possible downside to it was that on my own I would have no way of ordering what I would like to eat there, for in places like this one there was neither a menu nor anyone spoke English, but for the moment it didn't matter, either, since Yan Hua was with me all ...