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Trains, Thai Chi & Chinese Officials
So I've promised never to fill out Dom's custom's forms for him again. After kindly filling out both our forms on the ferry from Hong Kong to mainland China, upon disembarkment our tour group were kept waiting over 15 minutes - whilst Dom was interrogated in a small room by very serious and scary looking officials for an inconsistency in his name on the paper work. Oh dear!!
In my defense however, I have to say that I have never been the best of spellers and when you have 4 names with confusing Italian spelling, I can't blame the Chinese officals for giving Mr Domenico Giuseppe John Salomoni a once-over... 😉
Following a one night stop off at Guangzhou, we boarded what would be the first of 6 sleeper trains over the next 25 days. Luckily, the quality of our second class sleeper carriages were better than I expected, and we were able to spend some time over a few games of cards and warm cans of beer, getting to know our new travel companions.
Yangshou Well, what can I say about Yangshou.. For our first stop, I was truely
delighted..Our hotel was a 3 story refurbished wooden Chinese building from the 19th century, with rooms facing onto an open courtyard (think New College, but add chinese lanterns, bonzai and sculputered wooden balconies), a funky bar/restauarant downstairs and misty limestone cliffs towering over our street.
Following check in, whilst Dom had a quick Salomoni Kip, I ventured out into the streets to see what the town had to offer. And guess what girls... it became clear that highlight number one for Yangshou would be it's shopping! Yay! (Yes, I know this is merely week 3 into our 40 weeks of travels.) The cobblestone streets housed more beautiful Chinese buildings either sellling souvenirs or delicious chinese food.
Dom and I spent most of our first evening taking in our new surrounds and loving the fact that we were in China! Later in the evening we stumbled into a local bar, where a C grade band was cranking out Chinese Pop and settled down to a few cold ales and even a boogie on the dance floor.
Our next day in Yangshou I woke up early and joined a few of the girls in our travel group for a
Dom and Little Derek
Couldn't have propped it better - check out the flags!morning's Thai Chi class. Not really sure what to expect, I was blown away by the setting and actually really enjoyed loosening up and moving... slowly. It was so peaceful and absolutely beautiful learning the moves in the crisp morning air under the misty southern mountains.
I then continued to be awestruck by this picturesque place, as our next activity was a 30km bicycle ride amid ride paddy fields and even more spectactular mountain scenery.
You may all start to think of me as some kind of 'action wonder-woman', as before the sun had set, I then also managed to fit in a 2 hour chinese calligraphy and language class! Goodness!
However, on the most part, we spent our days and evenings browsing the shops, trying delicious chinese food and of course, chilling out with beers, enjoying the buzz of the town and watching the world go by.
On our last evening, we enjoyed a great Chinese meal with our tour group, before settling in to our favourite bar below our hotel. Here, Dom made a new friend - Little Derek. No more than about 10 years old, he came up to our table selling roses
and struck up chat with Dom. Clearly very bright and intelligent, with excellent English, we hoped life and education would give this little guy opportunities growing up...
With a start in China like this, we were excited by our next destination - A 2 day cruise down the Yangtse River....
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Cool... looks great. Yangshou is beautiful, although a little polluted?? We went on a yangtse river cruise as well and the most spectacular parts went passed at 1:00am. So i am interested to see if it will be the same for you... have fun