The train was a hard sleeper this time, similar to the trains in India but a bit more modern and you get bedding and free hot water for your pot noodle (everyone's favourite dinner for travelling) and there were 6 people to a section. I was on the top bunk which was very high and also very teeny, the other Chinese girls in our bit giggled a lot when I tried to climb up there! The train took much longer than I thought - 24hrs and I was all packed up and ready for the train to arrive after 18hrs - bloody Lonely planet, Id forgotten how wrong it was! I arrived in Guilin and manged to get a bus straight to the small town of Yangshau. I arrived after dark but luckily manged to find my hostel quite easily and some people to have dinner and a beer with. I had a local speciality called 'clay pot' wasn't too impressed just a pot with some rice with a bit of strange bean curd and a couple of vegis on top, the bean curd is really strange it looks a bit like skin in texture and is very chewy but at least it was a meal.
Yangshuo
Yangshuo is on the Li river, which is one of the most picturesque places in China its also very touristy for the chinese, lots of people go here for weekend trips and weeks away. It also has the scene from the 20y note of two hills. Its pretty amazing countryside lots of massive hills and lakes with farm land inbetween.
On Wednesday we headed out to climb the hill again but it was shut due to 'slippery steps' so we decided to bus it out to the Li river, get a bamboo (plastic) raft up the river and hike back down again. Although our guide was a strange man and kept driving very slowly and then tried to stop and push us out at the first crossing point and not the one we wanted, eventually after lots of gesturing we got him to drive further but he wouldn't take us as far as we had paid to go and eventually we had to give up and just get out of the boat and walk back. The walk back was good, it took us through lots of farm land and little villages. Most of the Men were sitting around playing cards while the women were out tending to the fields!
Thursday I met up with an Irish couple and we hired some mountain bikes to cycle up one of the rivers, as it had been raining a few days before the tracks were pretty muddy but it was good fun. We got followed a lot by locals and as soon as we tried to ask them the way they would just say 'bamboo raft?' and that was it, they kept re-directing us back to the river to get on a raft which was a bit annoying after a while. We went through lots of little villages that were cut off apart from small tracks with motorbikes going up them, there was a lot of building work going on too, they use bamboo as scaffolding which looks pretty crazy and very unstable!
Friday the Irish couple talked me into going rock climbing, I was a bit aprehensive when we got to the climibng area and got set up int our harnesses & shoes as the chinese guy just told me to start climbing the wall with no directions etc to how you should do it! I kept falling of the first bit I tried and couldn't get very far, then it turned out he had started me on one of the hard parts! After convincing him that I would rather do the easier climbs I got to go up 2 different ropes which was great fun although really really tiring! and i kept having to not look down! I decided to just wander around the town in the afternoon. The next day I was leaving for Kumning but just had time to head up to Moon rock, a strange rock formation which you walk up very steep steps to get to, not sure how people manage it in the middle of the day as I climbed it at 9am and it was sweltering! On my cycle back to the hostel I passed all the Chinese tourists out on their bikes for the weekend. They love tandems and are quite happy cycling along with the back person taking pictures or holding an umbrella! Not sure all the westerners on tandems enjoyed it quite so much. I got on a bus and headed back to Guilin to get another night train 18hrs this time to Kunming and then on to Dali.
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