Blogs from Guilin, Hunan, China, Asia - page 2

Let's do the math on this one. Really nice hostel = $4 a night. Lunch of dumplings and noodles in the most beautiful park I've ever seen = $1.50. One-hour massages by highly skilled therapists = $3.50. The temperature outside = 79 degrees. They have mountains, palm trees, and wild monkeys. We may never leave this town! Ah, Guilin. This is the spot I was most looking forward to, and it does not disappoint. After another hearty breakfast at our hostel, we hitched the bus down to the river and were immediately at home in the humidity, the palm trees, and the ambiance of, funnily enough, a small southern city like Savannah or Charleston. Aside from the crazy karst mountain formations everywhere and the Chinese signs, we could almost be home... Unfortunately the gray and overcast ... read more

Went out to the airport to fly standby into the southwestern part of China. They began by asking for full fare - fair enough - but I asked for the discount price. They dropped the price by 40 percent, but this is China and you negotiate everything here, so I offered less than half. The stern woman behind the counter replied with a harsh No. I prodded gently a little, but she wouldn’t move, so I finally agreed to her price. She barked Passport! at me, then Luggage! One-word orders from a small-time tyrant in a company uniform. Maybe I should have adopted her style when she turned sharp and responded in kind. It may just have been a tactic on her part, one born from experience of dealing with foreigners not adept at negotiating. Offense ... read more

In china we discovered a new game, its called the bus lottery and and works like this. You pay some guy at a desk a load of money to get a bus from one city to the other and he shows you a load of photos of a brand new, up to date, top of the range with all mod cons bus that can do everything short of fly and assures you that its VIP. Then you go to the bus station and wait. and wait, and wait and pray that thats not your bus. but it usually is. The morning we got the bus after the yanzee river we did shit at the bus lottery, you could say that between the 5 of us not one of our numbers turned up. This bus was shit, ... read more