Guilin & Yangshou


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November 11th 2009
Published: November 17th 2009
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Li River in Guilin
SO after a good nights sleeping after arriving in Guilin last Saturday (7th Nov) I still felt pretty rough, we were planning on just staying that one night and then getting the bus to Yangshou where we had some volunteer work set up, but we decided to stick around for another night till I felt better. After finally getting out of bed in the afternoon, a shower and nice walk started to make me feel better. Guilin was a beautiful city, right in the south of China, the weather was warm and its locatied right next to the Li River, although everyone says Yangshou is much more amazing, we were pretty happy with Guilin. Had some nice lunch and nice afternoon walk,although we did come very close to eating dog!! We were going to eat at this little dingy cafe, grab some cheap food, ordered by looking at the pictures and pointing at ones that looked nice, was only about 60p a dish 😊 Then the man took us out to the front where he had all the dishes on display, so that helped, most of them looked a bit weird, one looked nice though, big chunks of meat wth veggies,
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Yumyum chicken feet!!
asked him if it was beef and he started barking like a dog!!!! Cant believe we were soooo close to eating it. Didnt eat at the cheap dingy chinese place, went to an Irish bar and got a pizza! hahaha, much safer!

Back at the hostel which was located away from the centre, but conveniently next to a huge shopping mall we found a cinema 😊 Did student tickets for 2.40 each, so we got tickets to see the new Michael Jackson movie, the only English one they had showing. Back at home Ste and I went to the cinema a lot and with me feeling a bit ill this was the perfect evening for us to chill out. We grabbed some food at this pretty nice looking but cheap restaurant, went for some noodles, a pork dish and some rice...seemed like a pretty safe bet...hmmmm not quite. Well to start with the waitress brought over a plate of chicken feet!!! We tried explaining that we had not ordered these, at least we didn't think we had, but she insisted, so we figured maybe it free or something, anyway Steve bravely tried to eat them but they are impossible,
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Typical chinese woman carrying everything over a stick across her shoulder...come to think of it, we've not seen any men doing this...
just hard covered in skin disgusting....we later found out you are supposed to suck something out of the feet, gross!! Then out noodles came out....as a soup...hmmm interesting...then the rice was rice, good ok, then the pork was more like huge lumps of pork fat maybe 2 inches then 1/2 cm of actual pork...such a shame as the actual pork was sooo tasty, just couldn't stomach the fat. I knew we should have gone to maccys 😊

Anyway, film was good nice evening, back in the hostel they had an outdoor courtyard and the couple from our dorm room we had briefly spoken were sitting out with another couple so we decided to join them and have a couple of drinks (was feeling better now, just a bit of a cough). Was a nice evening, except when we went inside back to our room I noticed my feet were covered in loads of red dots, literally like someone had been drawing dots in red pen on my feet. I ignored it, since they didn't feel of anyting but guessed they were probably mozzie bites as my feet had not been covered up when we sat outside. Well the next day, my feet were covered in around 100 bites!! !huge big red itcy, unbelievably itchy bites!!! Ahhh sooo painful. We had some cream which I covered them in but it did not seem to be working so far. We left the hostel, and got our bus to Yangshou trying to ignore my itchy feet. To make matters worse, neither Ste or I had slept very well, partly due to my couch, itchy feet and the room was too hot!! Bus was only 1 and half hours and Yangshou is quite a small town so we easily found our way to the English College where we had set up some volunteering. Yanghsou was just as hot as it had been in Guilin, if not hotter!! Was starting to get really sweaty now, and the feet were still itchy, poort Ste was holiding my hands back to try and stop me itchy them which just made me more annoyed with him haha.

Anyway school was fine, we were basically participating in their English Corner where their students (all adults) come from 6.30-8.30pm to talk in a group to English speakers. They provide free beer, its all very relaxed and in exchange we get free food and accommodation. Walter, the guy from the school showed us our dorm where all the volunteers sleep, it was a bit awkward as the rooms are all twin rooms and we were going to have to stay separately, but he asked some other guy to move into another room so we could have his room to ourselves :S felt slightly awkward, we left him for an hour to pack up and let the cleaner come and change the sheets and clean. So we took our first stroll around Yangshou finally and it was stunning....soo much more beautiful than Guilin. Not sure if you can see in the pictures but this province especially Yangshou area is surrounded by karst mountains, the strange vertical peaks in the photos, got a gorgeous river and just really stunning scenery, we could see people on the bamboo rafts on the river and were soo happy we were finally here somewhere nice and warm where we could enjoy ourselves. My feet were still really sore but we took a little stroll into the river which helped to cool them down for a bit.

We headed back to our room and luckily the guy had now gone, all would have been fine except the room was a bit dirty, even though the women had just supposedly cleaned it. We didn't have time to worry about it much as it was dinner time at school and we were starving so we just dumped our bags and rushed back to the school. Food was ok, the tables were all full so a few of us just stood to one side and helped ourselves to the food from the kitchen, was nice but not very filling. The the English corner started which was good, I had a group of 5 girls and another volunteer, a guy from Israel (the one whose room we had stolen :S) bit awkward. I had a reall nice group and we talked loads, unfortunately Ste got asked to do some a bit different, where he had to talk to people over the internet for a little bit, He said it was awful as the connection was really bad, they could hardly hear him let alone understand him and obviously you don't get the same kind of intereaction as you do face to face, he didn't enjoy it at all but thankfully only had to do it a couple of times then got to join another group. The other volunteers all seemed really nice, went for a drink after with this french guy before heading back to our dorm rooms, oh not before getting some more food as we weren't very full after our dinner.

When we arrived back in our room it was awful, it had stated to smell damp, the sheets felt damp, didn't look clean, the full was dirty full of old bit of foods, there was dust and dirt everywhere and there were loads of ants!!!! Coming from the bathroom into our room crawling around on the bed, ahhh it was horrible and was certainly not going to help with the itching. We were soo annoyed as neither of us felt like we could stay here, we spent the one night, sleeping in our sleeping liners, hallucinating ants crawling all over me all night, another poor nights sleep with me itching my feet 😞

The next day (tuesday 10th) we attempted a shower before leaving only to find there was no hot water, so that was it, we packed up went straight back to the
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Weather begins to change...
school to tell Walter we still wanted to do it but that we didn't want to stay there anymore and were going to find a hostel. He was such a strange guy he didn't seem to even care. We said we weren't coming that night as my feet were pretty bad at this point and were constantly itchy, Ste had started to feel a bit unwell, cold and cough etc. We decided to give ourselves a nice chilled out night in our hostel we had moved to which had loads of dvds you could watch for free and was prefectly clean!! Oh my feet were really hurting now, hadn't cleared up with our cream and had me in tears so we finally went to the pharmacy who seemed in complete shock when I showed him my feet and said "I think I have a few mosquito bites" he was saying no no not mosquito, something else, or infection, or allergy...great didn't have a clue which of those was the problem, but he seemed to know just the cure and prescribed me some more cream, and two types of tablets, all for around 4 pound so nice and cheap, just hope they were ok!!

Wednesday morning after another restless nights sleep, poor Ste waking me up and sitting me in the shower pouring cold water over my feet!! We both felt a bit ill, so decided to give ourselves another day off. The weather had completely changed now and was raining, so though it probably wasnt a good idea to head off out in the rain with our colds. So we spent the whole day in the hostel with the dvd player!! Great day!!

Thursday we decided we had to get up and do something productive today as we had been in Yangshou for 4 days and not seen anything. My feet were beginning to improve so we head off around the town a little. We took a visit to the famous farmers markets (WARNING DOG LOVERS AND VEGGIES DONT READ THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH!!!)) it started off, a few ducks and chickens hanging over benches with their throats slit all ready and waiting to be bought. The hygiene was awful, it was just an old hall, everyone sitting on the floor, wooden benches covered in bloody and meat just sitting out everywhere with flies all around. Then we came to the doggies....awww the poor doggies. On the plus side we have since heard they in China they only eat one type of dog and the dog is bread to be eaten, but still. They basically have little open shops, well just walls really, with loads of dogs in a cage, then hanging over the cage are the dogs that have just had their throats slit, they are left their hanging upside down off the cage for their bloody to drain out. The someone else skins them, that wasn't too bad, jsut a like a giant razor, shaving all their hair off, but the worst part was when they boil them!! Literally once their hair has gone, they throw them into these huge pots of absolutely boiling water and stir them around then get them out and hang them on display!!! This visit was defintely enough to put me off meat for a while!!

SAFE TO READ NOW!! So after that nice experience we wondered off back to town through the park, both still in a bit of a funny mood. Had another chilled out night, still recovering. Friday we decided to change to another hostel as our one went up slightly at the weekends and the one just down the road from us had private rooms for less than what we were paying for our dorm room, so we swapped around. Room wasn't as nice, but still nicer than the school! Oh speaking of which we had since given up, after that first night of missing it, we had got a bit stuck into doing nothing in the evenings, the weather was crappy and we just didn't feel much enthusiasm for it now. The weather still wasn't great enough to do a bike ride or bamboo raft so we just decided to go for a long walk to the next village, about 6km away. Was quite a nice walk and the village was gorgeous when we arrived, found a nice little restaurant overlooking the river to have lunch. Got the bus back though, it was far too long to walk back again!

Friday night, our new hostel we had moved to had a bit of a legendary roof top bar that was full of backpackers getting drunk!! Bit too crazy to be honest, but we decided to nip up for a drink and glad we did as we bumped into Caroline and Frank, a couple we spent a few days with before we left for our trip in Mongolia, got on with them really well so was reall glad to see them. We spent the rest of the evening with them catching up and playing drinking games and probably drinking a bit too much as we found out the next day...felt rough again!! We ended up moving rooms again as this room had no hot water, luckily the new one did and was a bit nicer. The hostel we had moved to rented out dvd players, so since we were feeling a wee bit hungover, still a bit ill and tired, plus the weather was rubbish, we spent another day watching dvds!! This is a bad habit we have got in to!! We could of course left Yangshou and gone somewhere else, but there wasn't really much left to do in this area and we can't enter vietnam till 20th Nov because of our visa, so we just decided since the weather was bad in the whole area we would just stick where we were comfortable and have a few more rest days 😊

Sunday...rained all day so....another dvd day 😊

Monday finally got up again 😊 Took a local bus to another village about 20km away called Xingping, weather was still pretty cold so no bamboo rafts, but we did find a little trail that we hiked along for an hour or two, it followed the Li River and went all though the Karst Mountains, really nice day, just a shame it was soooo cold. Back In Yangshou we bumped into Caroline and Frank who had also been having a few dvd days and were ready to have a drink again, so we headed for some dinner with them and returned back to our hostels roof top bar...once again too many drinks, well more Ste than me, finally managed to persuade him to go to bed about 1am, much better than last time, although it didn't work as he still had a hangover the next day!! Bad times!! We slept in till 2ish 😞 well Ste was awake, but I just couldn't wake up, then we found a cockcroach in our room and decided to get out of bed and for various reasons, moved back to that first hostel we were in.
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Caroline and Frank on the left, and Sarah and Al next to me on the right
It was much cleaner, had free laundry and breakfast and the rooms were cheap again on weekdays. Spent the rest of the day watching their free dvds 😊

Which brings to me now, think we might go for a bike ride tomorrow if its not raining as tomorrow will be our last day in Yangshou (after too many days 😊 We are getting a bus on Thurs to Nanning, the majoy city in this province, spending the night, then getting the bus into Hanoi, Vietnam on Friday...can't wait. And the weather is supposed to improved in this area from Friday onwards, so hopefully Vietnam will be hot!!

Although we have not done much here, it has been nice to stop and chill out for a week or so. We have met lots of great people and just relaxed for a bit. Looking forward to getting up and going again once we hit Vietnam 😊

Hope you are all well and ok, lots of love
Layla & Ste xxx

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17th November 2009

YO!
So glad you guys are enjoying it still - even with your weird little foot infections! China sounds amazing... a little bit disgusting but amazing! Much love X
18th November 2009

Hey you two, it is weds here sitting with Mum who is giving Lyla a cuddle, just read Mum your last two blogs! No wonder you have both been poorly sounds like it has been non stop since you have left! At least once you hit asia hopefully you can start to have a bit of a holiday! Hope you both feel better and your feet have cleared up. Love to you both! Mum thinks you are both drinking too much lol, but you both seem to be having a good time, miss you love mumsy xxx
19th November 2009

Wow, Yangshuo looks really cold! And that Dutch couple looks really cool! ;) Enjoy Vietnam.... Love Monkey Jane 104

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