Yangshuo

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Ah, what a way to round off our trip to China! Yangshuo has to be my favourite town in China, small, fantastic scenery, loads of activities, plenty of good restaurants, and really geared towards backpackers.

Xi Jie (West Street), is the main street with loads of shops, stalls, tourist agencies and restaurants. We stayed with a local family in the town, where we had 3 meals a day fed to us,with a selection of dishes at each sitting. We were spoiled rotten.

One of the main things to do here is renting bicycles and heading off into the limestone hills on dodgy dirt tracks. So we duly headed off the first day along the Yulong river where we kept losing the (poorly signposted!) trail and ended up lost in paddy fields and up to our knees in muck! All along the river you can pick up a bamboo raft and float downriver if the heat gets too much (as it did for us - 35 degrees cycling, crazy!).

Spent the evening playing table-tennis on the tables down by the Li River. I even managed to end up playing against the local Ping Pong hustler who just hangs around waiting to pick up naive players and make fools of them!

Went on a boat tour of the Li River, which was very relaxing, although the crazy names they have on the hills just make no sense, like "8 Immortals Crossing the River".... eh WHAT??

Decided that the heat was very draining, and thought that a relaxing Chinese "medicine" massage would be just the way to wind down an afternoon...how wrong we were. I think something was lost in the translation of the word "massage" because for a full hour, we paid for the privilege of being subjected to knuckles and elbows, having our limbs cracked. I honestly thought at one stage she was trying to somehow remove my kidneys with her thumbs with all the grinding!

Headed off cormorant fishing in a boat at dusk, closely following a tiny bamboo raft from which a group of cormorants fish for their owner. The owners raise young birds to dive into the water and swim back to the boat with full beaks, and are prevented from swallowing by ties around their necks.

Next stop Hong Kong!

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Photos

Beer Fish
Tasted as awful as it looks!

Olympic dreams..
..have changed from ice skating to Ping Pong.

Silk Worms
Hard to see, but these women are removing silk worms from the silk cocoons they have spun and drying it out.

Li River I
This scene is depicted on the 20Yuan note.

9 Horses Hill
Easy enough to make out top horse, but more difficult to find other 8!

MotoTaxi
James Dean can rest easy..check out the "Bob the Builder" helmets they have over here!

Retrieving the fish..
..this greedy beggar had 3 fish stuck in his neck