Away from the cities

After a over a week in some of the biggest cities in China, and even Xian has over 3 million inhabitants, we finally escaped the madness in the south of the country. On Monday (23rd) we flew to Guilin, for a day, and then took a bus a couple of hours out into the countryside. The city and the country are both incredibly hot and muggy down here, with temparatures in the early 30s and humidity 70 plus. Just walking quickly makes you sweat, and there's little respite even in the evenings. In Guilin we spent most of the day chilling out in a big park, which was lovely apart from a very weird zoo! In seems China's animal rights lag behind their human rights. Loads of different animals were caged in crampt, dirty conditions and tourists were encouraged to have their photo taken with various dressed and tethered animals, including monkeys, peacocks and most disturbingly a yak. The poor thing looked like it was about to die, standing in the heat with its huge winter coat with nowhere to go. Only the thought of being told to recompense an unhappy Chinese man for his lost animal dissuaded me from cutting a few of them free. No pandas though!

On Wednesday morning we headed for a great little place called the Giggling Tree that we'd seen advertised. It is about 10 minutes taxi ride out of another larg-ish town called Yangshou, right in the middle of a kast valley, with huge steep limestone hills all around. Apart from watch The Last Emporer, ride bikes down the road a little way and go for a run (no a good idea, soooo hot even at 8am) we did very little, just chill out, soak in the scenery and read. Just finished book 2 in the second week which ain't bad. Ranulph Fienne's biog, very good! Today it's a 20 hour sleeper (1st class!) down to Hanoi, so bye bye China and hello Vietnam, country number 2. Have really enjoyed China, not as difficult as we thought, people are quite friendly if a bit pushy, and it's going through some pretty big changes. I'd recommend a visit soon.

---

---