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Published: March 10th 2008
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Monday 3rd March So off the beeping bus and onto the streets where there were some touts trying to get us to stay in their hostels, we beat them off with our backpacks and some stern looks and marched down the street purposefully even tho we hadn't a clue where to go! After looking at the map and asking a girl in a travel agency we ended up back where we started where some woman cornered us with photos of her hotel and made us "come look", we did and a triple room which was nice and clean and en-suite for 20Y (2euro) each a night seemed like a good deal and at point id have paid anything to take the backpack off so we said we'd stay one night anyway. The hotel is called "Fawlty Towers" but the owner wasn't like Basil at all, "Cruella" we christened her due to her personality and also because for some reason the tiles in the bathroom are "101 dalmations"....! god only knows why! the very unfriendly and unhelpful boy at the front desk was christened "manuel"! But after we went exploring and called into a few hostels we soon realised we'd
gotten the cheapest beds in town and a lot nicer than some so we were happy with ourselves! Not much else was done that evening due to being pretty tired so it was off to bed with plans of a serious sleep in!
Tuesday 4th March The plan for the sleep in went ahead and we rose around lunchtime well rested and lot less cranky! We went for a yummy brekkie (banana porridge..yum!) and afterwards we wandered around the market stalls for a while where we met an English guy, Steve and his chinese class who are learning english so he asked us to answer some questions for them so they could practice their english and we did, afterwards he asked us would we mind joining the class the following evening to help them with their english speaking and understanding, there was a free beer in it but we'd have done it anyway so we agreed. Off we went then down to the river where we got a bamboo raft down the river, very nice scenery and would have been so relaxing if the engine on the boat wasn't phut phutting in our ears! Not much else
was done today, we then went for dinner and a few drinks. This plan got a little scuppered tho when we met a group of chinese students who showed us a dice game that we'd seen them all playing in pubs,like a drinking game, so suddenly it was 3.30am and we were wandering home the quiet little streets of yangshuo. oh forgot to mention that somewhere in the middle of the night we met steve again and he showed us a route to cycle if we rent bikes (the plan for wednesday), this saved us gettng a tour guide (180Y each...nice one) and so when two english guys nearby heard this they asked if they could join us so we agreed to meet for brekkie at 10.15am...it had started earlier but as the night went on the "meeting time" got later and later!
Wednesday 5th March So after many presses of the snooze button we finally got to the cafe at 10.45 to find the lads waiting for us, Zach and Joe, oops....we all were a bit shook so after a slow breakfast we rented bikes for the day at 12Y each (1.20euro!) and set off following
steve's map. of course we went wrong straight away and also somehow jacinta and I ended up crossing the middle of a roundabout going the wrong way but eventually we got ourselves out of the town and into the most piscturesque countryside ever. it was so beautiful riding around there. After a while Zach proposed we "get off the beaten track" and we said why not, we had likened ourselves to "the famous five" at this stage so adventures were not a problem! Unfortunately this adventure took us so much off the beaten track that we ended up cycling on a ridge between two fields, so narrow that both jacinta and Zach fell off into the fields ('man down man down' was the panic call) and so eventually we gave up and walked our bikes across some poor farmers fields to the 'track' we had turned our noses up at earlier! back on track we followed the path across some river on a bridge which was basically just slabs of concrete with no sides (jus a little scary!) and finally arrived at another river crossing where there was no bridge, just two old women with two bamboo rafts tied together
and a washing line type apparatus tied from one side of the river to the other which they pulled the rafts across on, so after haggling the price for all of us we paid and got on, all 5 of us, our 5 bikes and the 2 old ladies pulling us across....it was some sight to see! the water was seeping up thro the rafts around our feet but all we could do was laugh. Safely on the other side we took off again, the next stop was for some food, for those that felt well enough after the previous night to stomach it, refuelled we were back on track and continued through the nicest scenery, cycling with mountains rising on either side of us, women in the fields, carrying buckets on sticks over their shoulders, brilliant stuff, i was cycling like a lunatic woman, a smile plastered on my face! this wore off soon tho as the saddles made their presence known and we headed back to town (where jacinta and i ended up stuck in the middle of the roundabout again!). We headed for refreshening and food and then to the chinese class where we helped teach them
some english for an hour or two, we took a few students each. it was actually great to do it, i had been dreading it but i really enjoyed it and they were so genuinely interested to talk to us it was brilliant, it was also a good opportunity to ask them about some chinese stuff we'd been wondering, the presence of dog meat on menus, the staring etc! Afterwards we met the remainder of the famous five for a few drinks and we ended up in a chinese bar playing dice again, the band that were playing allowed me and Zach to take over the mikes and so we played guitar and sang a few songs each. Finally it was 3.30am again and we took ourselves home in no better state than the night before!
Thursday 6th March We woke and checked out of the hotel, leaving our luggage we met the lads for breakfast, another slow one, with no plans for the day we sat down by the river for a while in the sun and then went for some dumplings. The lads headed off then and we said our goodbyes, we went into one of
the pubs where we got teas and coffees and watched Borat in Russian with english subtitles (probably the worst translations ive ever seen, Pamela Anderson was translated to "Plum and Pull"!....shocking!). Once that was finished it was back to the hotel to collect our bags and onto the bus station for the night bus to Hong Kong. Once the bus arrived we got on and were greeted with the weirdest set up we've seen so far, the bus had 3 rows of bed, 2 beds high, all the beds were at 30deg angle so that your head was higher than your feet and your feet went under the bed of the person in front of you, overlapped like. We settled down anyway and the previous 2nights took their toll and we were all soon asleep!
Friday 7th March We woke once people started moving - we had expected to be there at 7.30am so since this was 7am we presumed we were nearly there and got ourselves ready, we then sat for nearly 2 hours while the bus stopped at several small places (places which didn't look like the train station over to Hong Kong!) Eventually i
asked a girl who told us it was the next stop and when we got off the bus she showed us the bus to the border crossing. We queued at immigration to get out of china and then queued at immigration to get into Hong Kong.....
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