Yangshuo

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Day 30

We awoke to the usual crazy Chinese music you find about half an hour before arrival and Joe examined the fresh set of bites around his ankles. Then before you know it the train arrives and your back in China where no one can speak English and everything was cheap again!!! At Guilin train station we exited and started looking at how to get to Yangshuo and after walking around we found a bus that was going there. We payed the money and got on board, now these Chinese buses don't have set departure times no matter what they tell you. This bus just fills up with people until they're full then they'll take everyone while dropping people off in the middle of oncoming traffic and picking people up in the same situation.

The first thing you notice about Yangshuo is the limestone cliffs that just jump out of the earth which go on seemingly for ever. Each one is decorated with green trees and bushes while still showing the jagged edges of the limestone. In the middle of all these is Yangshuo, a small tourist town filled with Chinese tourists and a never ending flow of people trying to sell you anything from shoe cleaning, plastic nick-nacs and chinese flutes. Despite all the tourists, there is a reason they are there, yangshuo is a beautiful place on the banks of the Li river and with dramatic limestone cliffs surrounding the town.

After getting there and looking completely lost with Chinese people trying to help but inadvertently not, just speaking Chinese to us, we found a couple of western girls who turned out to be English and because of the terrible rain guided us to our hostel.

After checking into our hostel called monkey Jane's guesthouse we decided to book a cooking school because of the bad rain. We were whisked off to a market in Yangshuo with four Americans who were also on the school and the smells in the market were amazing, although the sights were a little more stomach churning with half a dog hanging from a meat stall. The woman who was going to cook for us collected all the food we needed to cook and then we jumped into a van and headed to a farmhouse in the country and we started to cook five dishes. They were beer fish (local specialty), chicken and cashew nuts, meat stuffed tofu, fried spinach and aubergine fried with garlic. It was amazing to cook all the dishes, surprisingly they tasted amazing!! Its something we'll definitely be doing when we get back to the UK.

After the cooking school we headed back to the hostel which had an amazing rooftop bar which looked over all the hills surrounding the town.

Day 31

We awoke to amazing rain which was pretty rubbish. We decided to sit it out and catch up on some admin like where to go in Vietnam, how to get there and money. We pretty much just chilled in the rooftop bar for the start of the day avoiding the rain.

In the afternoon we decided to head out to Yangshuo to get some food and have some coffee. We just went to a local restaurant and picked up some food before heading back for some DVDs and an early night.

Day 32

The weather was looking better today and after being refreshed from the early night we decided to hire some bikes and head off to moon hill which was a tourist spot 8km outside of Yangshuo. Hiring bikes for the day costs around £2 and there are loads of people trying to sell you bikes.

Once we cycled to moon hill we could see that the 'moon' (a circular shape in a limestone cliff) was quite high and we prepared ourselves for quite a walk. It was lucky that we brought appropriate footwear and a whole bottle of water because it was very humid as well. The climb to the 'moon' took about 30 mins and we were followed the whole way by a little old lady trying to sell us drinks from her cool bag, we did buy drinks from her at the top but 40p wasn't a great profit for her for an hours hard work following us on the round trip climb! Once you reached the top of the path there was a further mud path that you could follow right up to the top of the hill. It was slippy and muddy due to the recent rain but well worth the climb for the views; hundreds of lime stone cliffs dotting the countryside for as far as the eye can see.

We rewarded ourselves for the hard work with pizzas when we arrived back in yangshuo and chilled out around the hostel for the remainder of the day.

Day 33

We woke up to a beautiful & clear sunny day which was perfect for the kyaking trip that we had planned. We were picked up by a minibus and a group of about 10 of us were driven to a little village about 30 mins south of the town. We all got our own kyaks and spent the next 3 hours floating down the river taking in the stunning scenery. We were still among the karst hills but were also in the middle of the countryside with no roads or buildings to be seen. We could just watch the water buffalo bathing in the river and grazing on the banks and would see the odd local tending to their fishing boats. We then

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