A bit of rain never hurt anyone

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Geo: 24.7709, 110.487

This coming weekend is Qingming Festival weekend, tomb sweeping or clean your grannies grave. The idea is that you return to your home village and clean the family graves and set off fire crackers to frighten off demon spirits. So the valley is filling up with families whose children are off school and who have come home for a long weekend. Our hotel is full of expats (American and French) who live in Shanghai or Beijing and are taking advantage of the holiday to do some sightseeing.

The main tourist activity in the area is a mixture of cycling and rafting. The idea is you hire bicycles, cycle ten miles along the valley then get on a bamboo raft and drift down whilst a kind man with a lorry returns your bike to the start. Unfortunately the weather is not too good so the road is full of cyclists in all sorts of improvised wet weather gear trying to look as though they are enjoying themselves. Not to be outdone we also went cycling again today and got soaked, fortunately fairly close to the end of our ride and the hotel, where the showers were never more welcoming.

The bad weather has put pay to our cormorant fishing trip, bit of a shame although I suspect it was going to be a bit touristy which in China means lots of photo opportunities and not much fishing.

Tomorrow we hope to visit some caves before flying south to Sanya, the southern tip of China. When in Irkutsk in Siberian we asked our guide where people from Irkutsk went on holiday, the answer was Sanya so we expect to meet lots of Russians on the beach.

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Photos

It is now
By the time this picture was taken it was raining and we were lost - oh dear

Saved
A nice man who is now £5 richer paddled us one at a time across the river thereby saving about 5 miles of cycling.

The tourists rafts
Running the rapids Chinese style on a bamboo raft.

Wow
The scenery, even on a wet day, is stunning.