Guilin/Chongshou

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Neihow!

Greetings from Chongshou. Sorry for the delay in emailing but I have
been in some pretty remote spots lately. I'm sitting in a sweltering,
stuffy internet cafe in Chongshou having just arrived here this
morning.
To backtrack, we arrived in cosmopolitan Chengdu and enjoyed the sites
and especially the Szechuan Hot pot meals (although I declined the
alcohol pickled snakes in the jars in the front window. The hot pots
were however Burn-your-mouth-off good. From Chengdu we were off to
spend some quality time with the Pandas at the sanctuary. Helping to
harvest their meals from the Bambu forest and then of course the
inevitable cleanup. The are so gentle and expressive. I really enjoyed
spending time with these rare creature. Even got to hold some of the
new borns in the nursery.
From Chengdu we were off to the mountains of Emei to spend three
wonderful days with the monks. Our accomodations at the monestary were
sparce but the monks were so so gracious and charming. We ate our
meals with them - which were fantastic. We hiked to remote hilltop
temples and woke each morning at 4 AM to the drums and the prayers of
the monks. Really a great experience.
Then it was back to the real work with a 8 hour local bus ride to
catch the overnight train to Guilin. We are getting to frequent
travellers on China's 3rd class rail system. The "hard" sleepers are
remarkably okay. It's amazing where you can sleep when you are
exausted and rocked a bit. This morning at 5 AM we arrived in Guilin
and tranferred to a local (aka maniac) bus to Chongshou. Spectacular
postcard China scenery here. Tonight we go fishing with a local
comerand (sp?) fishermen, the tomorrow we are bicycling most of the
day, stopping for lunch in a small village for a home cooked meal from
the farmer's garden. I had a rather disturbing discovery today,
walking through the local fruit/veg/meat/fish market to discover my
first cats and dogs in cages waiting for their demise. Some already
skinned and cooked and being sold. Really awful. ELLIOTT, you better
be behaving!
Enough for now, soon I will be heading off to Hong Kong for a couple
of days then back to amazing Beijing for a week more of discovering
before I head out to Tibet!!!

I hope you all are well. Any snow yet?

Take Care

Love

Jeff

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