Shanghai ---------> Guilin!!

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Having had a good go at the North Eastern side of China, it was time to throw ourselves into the hidden treasures of China's Southern cities: Guilin and Yangshuo!!

Now, China is big. Beijing in itself is the same size as Belgium... and that's just one of it's cities. Pretty bloody huge! So when planning our trip we thought, yeah let's just hop onto this train to Guilin.. Hopping on actually means giving away 24 hours of your life to lying between an ironing board and the roof of a train. Luckily we relish such challenges anyway so we made friends with a Mexican and played many word games to keep us going, feasting on instant noodles! (It sounds like sacrilege eating instant noodles here but it's their equivalent to sandwiches! Everywhere you go they provide free hot water, sadly no PG tips to take advantage of it).

Finally we arrived on pastures green and ooohh how green they were! Guilin is a city surrounded by emerald green Limestone karst peaks. You just wander around with your head facing upwards mouth dropping to the floor staring away in incredulity. I narrowly missed many a car because of it. We only spent one night in Guilin as it is Yangshuo that holds nature's real treasures. Guilin itself has little to offer in terms of sights, other than the peaks, so we concentrated on visiting smaller towns around it. Our first stop: the Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces. Now this I was truly looking forward to.

It comprises of three different mountainous regions full of terraced rice paddies. We chose to visit Da Zhai. Words just cannot describe the views we saw, even our photos dont do it justice!!It was breath-taking! Definitely one of my favourite things we've seen in China. We luckily had a native as our guide who showed us around. She was a machine! She literally ran up that mountain in 40 degrees heat while we all puffed away behind her leaving pools of sweat along the way. The natives that tend to the crops all have traditional dress and the women all have the longest hair I've ever seen. From the age of 8 that's it they no longer cut their hair. I'm not going to lie, there was a rather musty smell that wafted around them! Our guide was a babe though, she even sang for us on the way round. Amazing!

Sorry this is rather long! It was just simply the best thing I have ever seen!! I never ever thought that at the age of 23 I would be standing there walking around China's magnificent rice terraces.

Fact for the day: it takes them a whole year to grow all the rice in this one area, and then it is all harvested in one month!! Crazy!!

Next stop: YANGSHUO!!!

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Photos

Just incredible views!!
I can't believe we were actually there!!