Guangxi and Guangdong

---

From Guilin we rode down to Yangshou via Xingping a lovely little town set between the river and some massive karst hills. Most people visit Xingping in a day, Katherine and I thought that we would stay here for 3 as the hostel was cheap and there were some pretty cheap noddle places next door, plus the scenery was amazing. We did this lovely walk to a fishing village, where we didn't actually see any fisherman (i think we got lost) but walked through lots of orchards in which Katherine was pretty keen to steal some fruit but the imprisonment signs put her off. Got a bamboo boat (when a local walks past you the just say "bamboo" to you, which means would you like a ride on a bamboo boat) but a massive rip off, they weren't even made of bamboo, cheap plastic painted!! After this we thought that we would walk up the river and then since it was a nice day, float down on our tire tubes (arrow river all over again) the only problem was there were lots off massive boats, so it was pretty funny, we also bought tire tubes that were way to small so practically sunk which meant we got laughed at most of the way down.

From Xingping we rode to Yangshou and if we thought the last two towns where touristy we were sadly mistaken, Yangshou is nuts. But on the upside there is lots of western food, yummy chocolate milkshakes and pies thanks to all the Aussie pubs around town. But we spent about 10 days in Yangshou mainly chilling out. We rode around lots of the surrounding villages and up the Yulong river, went swimming, did some more intrepid cave exploring (although it wasn't all that intrepid as there was concrete everywhere, but we did manage to lose our group), went hiking, did a spot of climbing (well actually Katherine went climbing and i sort of crawled up the rocks - you should have seen the bruises) and even went to cooking school - I make a mean beer fish and Katherine wasn't bad with cooking green veges (i know how boring!!).

But it was a very enjoyable time, managed to get out bikes very grubby in the mud (there was alot of rain) so had to clean them in the river with all the locals which they loved. The only downer was the yangshou "mafia" didn't really like us climbing on "their" rocks - its a communist country the government owns all the land. But apparently since their is a massive difference between the wealth of the farmers and the townies the government doesn't make the farmers pay rent so they just assume its theirs and don't want people climbing their. They would write notes on the wall saying you weren't allowed to climb and we even heard a story about them undoing some of the bolts (poor french chick broke her arm). But it was the one time we were both pleased that we can't speak chinese, we just climbed and ignored them all, not fun but the climbing was good.

At this point Katherine and I both were over riding our bikes, plus we had less than a week on out visas so thought we should make the most of it so we caught the night but to Guangzhou where we dumped our bikes and went exploring for a few days. This night bus was an experience, most people said it was pretty normal, but since we have been mainly riding we had not experienced it before. The nice lady booking our ticket said to get the bottom bunk, big mistake (always go for the top ones), because they full the bus up so that people sleep down the isles which means that you are practically sleeping with the randoms in the isle. So for the width of the bus it was Katherine and me and these three random old dudes (a space no wider than a queen sided bed - its a good thing that Katherine and I have very little clothes and hadn't bothered washing in a while, they were trying to get as far away from us a possible.

From Guangzhou we went exploring Zhaoging and DingShau. Zhoaging is a lovely small town (4 million people - thats the size of NZ if anyone forgot) which had a lake on one side and a river on the other. But again we stayed in this dodgy place, it was actually pretty cheap and clean and surprisingly the beds were relatively comfortable but it the morning we woke up to half a dozen or so hooker business cards under our door, thats whats happens when you can't read the language, you end up in the dodgy part of town without realising. DingShau is a cool as national park thing that we went exploring, the only issue was that it was pouring with rain, we put our rain jackets on, and laughed at everyone else who was using unbrellas, a couple of hours later we were being laughed at by everyone, we were soaked. But the park was nice and green so Katherine loved it and I whinged that it was cold (actually it was very warm i was just wet).

From here we caught the train back to Guangzhou, which was another interesting public transport experience, when we got on the train everyone was sharing seats and the isles were full so Katherine and I stood like everyone else, concerned it was going to be a very long two hours, but then some nice dudes wanted to go for a smoke so we snaked their seats (they said we could - really we understand Cantonese) but anyway we got seats but then felt bad that we were the only two people on the train with a whole seat each so we let a nice girl share our seat and consequently practice her english.

From here we got the bus to Hong Kong but that the next blog.

---

Photos

Mafia dudes hard at work
The sign finally said "Prohibit Climbing"