Bye bye Vietnam
Trip Start
Aug 12, 2006
1
20
31
Trip End
Sep 11, 2006
Huashan,
China
Thursday, August 31, 2006
The scenery wasn't much different, but as we were driving through Southern China to go to our guest house about 3 hours away, it generally seemed more 'developed'. There were still areas of poor living, but the towns were generally quite advanced. The Chinese writing everywhere looked authentic and exotic.
We arrived at our guesthouse in a small place called Huashan, near the 'flower mountain' in the afternoon. It was a wooden guesthouse, in the middle of the mountains, with a small river flowing nearby
Balloon crazy
. The weather was good, with the sun beating down on us. We took a small boat along the river to see the ancient cliff paintings. Apparently these were painted high on the cliffs over 2000 years ago, historians are still unsure how they managed to reach up high to draw the pictures of huntsmen, dancers and other such people.
It was a pretty riverboat drive, if a bit slow. We're used to speed! Well, relative speed.
We chilled out around the guesthouse in the afternoon as it was too hot to walk around, and there wasn't a great deal to see. One of the group had bought some balloons in another town to give to local children, so we blew those up and walked around the area with them. A bit odd it was.
There weren't really any children around, not really anyone around at all, just mountains, sugar cane fields and the guesthouse.
After dinner, we were treated to a local culture show of dance and singing, which was quite pleasant. We played a few card games in our room afterwards to kill some time, and got an early night as there wasn't a lot else to do.
