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Published: January 26th 2011
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Views from our room!
im afraid, all of the rest of the photos are on clares camera...poops Now Guilin is a big city, and we spent a grand total of about 15 minutes there before getting another bus to Yangshuo (about 1 1/2 hours down the road). I originally hadn't thought wed have time to come here...but I did have a few ideas of things we should do. The first of them was to do a cooking course with Cloud Nine restaurant. Our teacher took us to the farmers Market, where we saw all sorts of pretty dodgy looking things, dogs hanging by big spikes through their heads, all sorts of other meat...and a ridiculous amount of fish and vegetables. We bought a couple of ingredients for the dishes we had chosen to make (chinese dumplings, gongbao jiding, and a famous Yunnan dish, beer fish.) and headed back to the restaurant, and the kitchen!
Now, those who know me will understand that cooking is not my strongest point...in fact its no really one of those things I do at all... My idea of making a meal is adding milk to cereal, and I can't do much better than that unless instructed and pushed and watched over, lest I make some oh so obvious mistake. Anyway, thought I
again...night time in Yangshuo did quite well...I nearly suffocated everyone in the room by burning my gongbao jiding, but hey, it tasted alright to me!
After the whole cooking thing, we wandered down the street and found a place renting tandem bicycles...what could have been better!!! We procured a map...turned down the endless offers if a tour guide, and cycled off, confident in the knowledge that I knew exactly where to go to get to the lovely scenic area of the Yalong river. I was, as we Clare probably suspected, completely wrong. We had just cycled up and down a hunormous hill, when I realised that we most definitely should have arrived at the turning by now... After some consulting with a local man we found on the side of the road, all we knew for certain was that we were in Yangshuo county...a relief I suppose...and that the river was back the way we had come.... all the way we had come...and more...
Now here I must commend Clare for not killing me...as Tandems really aren't the easiest to cycle, and I admit that for some of the journey I may or may no have been getting a little bit of a free ride...and just letting her do all of the hard work. We finally did find the right turn, and before we knew I we were cycling through fields with orange trees all around us, amazing mountains flanking us one side, and the river on the other. We stopped to grab a few oranges, and cycled alongside the river...until we came to a ferry platform. Now...these were no ordinary ferries... They were bamboo rafts, that one poor woman had to pole along, in the fast flowing river. We managed to bargain her down, and then go both of us, and this surprisingly heavy bicycle onto the raft... The woman bravely started to paddle to the other side, with the raft half underwater, and the two foreigners sat in the middle holding the bike, and waiting to sink...
As it turns out, we did make it across, though had there no been some handy other boats sticking out, I'm pretty sure we would have ended up quite a ways downstream, as it was there was some quite entertaining hopping from boat to boat before we actually made it to dry land. After that, we again went scenic route (unwittingly I might add) and eventually got back into Yangshuo in time to check out of our hostel and head back to Guilin and attempt to get to Guangzhou.
We arrived in Guilin only to find the train station packed with students who had just broken up and were going back home. Pretty safe in the knowledge that there was no way we were going to make it onto the trains, we managed to find a sleeper bus going... Not only was this extremely cheap, it was also just about to leave!!! Things couldn't be better!
About an hour later we were following a man through he streets while he angrily discussed where exactly the bus was with the person on the other end of the line...but soon after that we were on the bus...at the back, with hardly anybody else on! Thankfully there were loads of spare blankets, as the bus was absolutely freezing, and we piled 7 or 8 blankets on ourselves and proceeded to sleep to Guangzhou.
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