Our bags are packed we're ready to go... Hard to believe this is our last night in Guilin. Harder to believe we have been here 5 weeks. It was great fun but we are both ready to get on the road again. We teach 2 classes tomorrow, the 2nd one finishing at 4:30 then its off to the airport for our evening flight to Bangkok. A couple of days to complete our travel arrangements to India and then on to Kerala, in the south of India for some long awaited beach time. We moved our date to fly out by one [View Full Entry]

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Here's how we celebrated our Thanksgiving weekend. We left Saturday morning to go to PingAn, a 600 year old Zhuang minority village about 2 hrs north west of Guilin. It's known for its terraced rice fields and for the women who have the longest hair. They wrap it around their head, but when unwrapped it falls literally to the ground. It is pretty amazing. The village is built on the hillsides where foundations are constructed of 'dry' (no mortar) stacked slate rock. The buildings are all wood construction, a contast to the usual concrete block construction seen everywhere else. [View Full Entry]

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Pictures of our apartment. We find it homey!! Two steps above Peace Corps! (Mainly because of the washing machine, internet and air conditioning. [View Full Entry]

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We had a great week in Yangshou, enjoying the great food, fantastic scenery, and the very slow pace of the town. Several days we rented bikes and just toured around the rural countryside, among the rice fields, seeing people working the field, fishing, and the occasional water buffalo all surrounded by the beautiful karsts. There are hundreds of them and make a beautiful backdrop for the countryside. We took a bus to Xingping along the Li River but the water is so low, we were not able to take the boat ride back to Yangshou. So the next day we biked [View Full Entry]

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Pictures from around the Yangshuo area. Well it took all that time to get the pictures downloaded. Spending the week in Yanshuo and having a great time. It is quite the oasis with beautiful scenery (this was the scenery we expected along the Yangtse), great food, and a very nice place to stay with a balcony looking over the river. We will write more later. [View Full Entry]

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This was about 2 hours East of Chongqing. It is set in a horseshoe shape canyon with massive stone walls that have been carved out. [View Full Entry]

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Ok, a recap of the past week. Chongqing, although a big city was great! We upgraded our room to stay right downtown in a Chinese business hotel that was very nice, although the breakfast included was a bit unusual, but we are getting use to noodles and dumplings for any meal. We spent 3 days there, one day just walking around the old city Citapol or something like that, I don't have our book with us. The city is amazing as the estimates are 3-8 million, and tons of destruction. Somewhat similar to Shanghai but not as far along in its [View Full Entry]

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Well, its hard to believe but today is our last day in Lhasa. We leave tomorrow morning for Chongqing which is south of Chengdu and the start of the Yangtse river cruise. The past 2 days we just roamed the streets of Lhasa enjoying all the sites. We also found out for $.70 per kilo we could ship all our cold weather gear to Shanghai, so we included a Tibetan horn and a few other misc items... 33 lbs lighter, our packs are back to where they should be @ 20lbs! We spent 2 days in Samye staying at the Samye [View Full Entry]

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On our return from EBC we spent several days in Shigatse which allowed us to tour the town and enjoy the monastery. We also spent a day in Gyantse which had a beautiful fort and chorten. [View Full Entry]

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I don't even know where to start! We have spent over an hour just reviewing our 250 photos, now narrowed down to about 50. I feel as though this should just be photos as I don't know words can do it justice. I don't know that I had an expectation, but we were at the monastery for 24 hours and it is mesmerizing to just stare at this awesome mountain! The view from the monastery shows just the mamouth size of the mountain. 5 miles further in you are at Base camp which is just a series of Army size tents, [View Full Entry]

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