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Published: September 9th 2007
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Hello again my faithful readers 😊
So I left off in the beautiful (yet touristy) town of Yangshou. The ride down the Li River was quite lovely - quiet and peaceful. The mountains (or limestone Karsts for any geologists reading) are 1000's of little peaks surrounding the town and river - and they are quite stunning. Everything is green and lush and the river was quite clean. We did get to see a group of 3 Karsts that are found on the $20 bill. We've dubbed this trip the "Currency tour". After a dinner we headed on what I like to call the "Crazy Bird Show" - a trip down the river following a fisherman and his comorant birds. He's got about 8 of the them and they swim at the front of his simple boat where there are 2 laterns hanging - to see the way or to attract the fish, I don't know. The birds continually dive into the water where if you are lucky they catch 2 small fish in 45 minutes. But the trick is they don't get to eat the fish b/c they have strings tied around their necks so they can't swallow. The fisherman
uses a hook to bring them in (probably using the same string - yikes) and then pulls the bird out of their mouth. They don't seem to learn though, as we pulled over later and he showed us how you can let the bird put 5 fish in his mouth, pull them out and have him go back into the basket to get 5 more....CRAZY
Wed morning we headed out for a 4 hour bike excursion. We covered about 20km on some one-gear old mountain bikes (with comfortable seats!). It was a beautiful ride through the country to the Moon Hill, a small mountain with a hole in the middle - basically a cave that had eroded on both sides. The way back was on on the highway... a touch bit scary, but managable 😊 The evening show was a real treat actually. What had been sold to us as a "light show" was more like a Chinese Opera on a lake surrounded by 12 mountain peaks - that were lite up at certain times. It was a love story where a girl falls for a man she can not marry and is taken 1000's miles away to live
so that they will not be together - its her struggle to get back to him. (that's from our guide, not from understanding what was going on). It was a fantastic show though - amazing singing and lights and 100's of people - 600 actors plus local fisherman and young girls. At one point 100's of girls walked out along a platform crossing the lake (at least 300 meter wide) wearing dresses covered with lights. They looked like tin soliders in the distance until you realized what they were wearing. They were able to turn the lights on the dresses off and on as well to make it look like one person running along the platform ect. They also had these fisherman pull red banners across the lake and move them up and down so that it looked like a wave of red - very cool!
Our last morning in Yangshou I spent doing a couple of classes - Taichi to energize and a cooking class to eat 😊 The cooking class was great. We first went to a local market selling everything from veggies, tofu, and herbs to full ducks (plucked and waiting), fish (still swimming and killed while you wait), to dog... (sorry Grandma) luckily I asked not to see that aisle and was able to avoid the worst of it. We took our purchases back to a roof top kitchen set up for 6 students. We made pork dumplings and beer fish (quite good... one of the steps in the recipe is "kill fish"... ohhhh that cracked me up 😊 ). We also made sweet and sour veggies, which I've decided is the only type of food I really haven't been enjoying... so saucy! It's funny b/c Andrew snapped today about eating Chinese food for 2 or 3 meals a day. It does some wrong to eat so much saucy, oily food... I think we may leave the group tomorrow and go find a sandwich or a fresh salad - that would be lovely 😊
From Yangshou we took another overnight train (still 6 to a compartment but this time there was on wall to the hillway and it was a bit of a noisy party train) and 4 hour bus ride to Yichang - a 'small' city of 6million.
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