Hello, Guilin!

    We had to get up early on Saturday morning, with our flight being at 7:40am, we were out the door by 5:45am to ensure that we would have no problems at the airport (it was the beginning of the Chinese New Year celebration, AKA Spring Festival). Once on the plane we all tried to sleep since we were up late the night before. We were flying 2.5hrs south of Shanghai to a big city called Guilin in the province of Guangxi. From there the plan was to catch a local bus straight to Yangshuo but since we wouldn't have any other time for walk around Guilin we put off the bus ride until late afternoon.

Here is us crammed on the airport bus into Guilin. It was about a 30 min ride

and hard to see out the windows b/c it was so steamy inside.

Left, Trisha, with her gardening eye, spotted all the mini gardens along the river.

   

   Once we got off the bus I paid one the hotels to store my big bag while we walked around the city for the next few hours. Instead of heading straight to some of the sites we first made our way to the bus station to buy our tickets to Yangshuo, we weren't sure how often the busses ran or how crowded the bus station would be so getting this out of the way would be the best thing to do.

   This picture was taken for my friend Heather. This is a picture of a Chinese baby wearing what I call "split pants". These pants have a opening up part of the front and a lot of the back of the rise of the pant. These are used for babies to easily relieve themselves w/o the use of diapers (an economical alternative). These pants are very common in rural china but still very common in the big cities. Babies can poo and pee on paper that the parents lay down on the street and even in the gutters. I have seen lots of mothers holding their son's pee-pee allowing him to relieve himself into a bush. In the warm weather you see little baby butts and genitals through this split in the pants. Now that it's cold I have seen a lot more diapers. I have felt very odd about taking pics of the bare butts but have searched the web to find a couple of examples to share (not taken by me).

 

We were able to find the bus station w/o any problems.

   Me in line at the bus station. Like a smart China traveler that doesn't speak Chinese I picked the line that had a Westerner in front of us. My theory is that if he gets through the line OK then we have a chance of success also (unless the Westerner speaks Chinese!). Apparently, I am not the only one with that theory b/c soon after getting in line we had 2 more Western girls join our line a few ppl back. Before getting to the front we were able to find the characters for Yangshuo on the time table so we new the time options that we had. We got to the front of the line and only had a little difficulty explaining what we wanted. It took me reaching through the plexiglass barrier to point on the computer screen at the time that we wanted to the bus. In the end we got out tickets for about $3USD each (so cheap!). We left the bus station very hungry so we took advantage of all the street food that was set up outside the station.

Left, T&S eating these rice flour fried dough things stuffed with spicy pickled

vegetables. Right, me eating some spicy griddle fried tofu. YUM!

Shawn, looking like a happy man eating this good street food!

I wish I took a better picture of this. It was a rice flour steamed thing with red beans inside.

This picture doesn't look exciting until you understand that the women is chopping
raw meat in a basket on the sidewalk. Just chopping away. When eating street food in
China you need to be aware that some of their prep techniques might now meet our
standards of sanitation...still doesn't scare me away from street food. It just makes
me more aware of which stalls that I am buying from.

Trisha and I along Fir Lake, in the middle of Guilin.

The twin towers (pagodas) 

Left, Trisha doing her first bargaining. Up until this point I was doing all the bargaining. She did great and only paid 10rmb then she wanted ($1.20).  Right, Trisha and I checking out the city square which had a map of the the world on it.

Creepy Chinese childrens' amusement toys.

  Ok, this was crazy...we came across this lady that was making "hot sauce" on the street in a giant basket. All she was doing was taking a crazy amount of HOT peppers and garlic and chopping away. Check out the video below. Yes, she was wearing the mask for pertection from the pepper fumes. I didn't last very long in the area b/c it was starting to irritate my eyes and throat. Luckily, I had another spicy fanatic with me, Shawn, and he purchased a jar from her.

Another picture for Heather (I take these for Heather so that she can see what she would
have to do if she was raising her son, 7 month old Cameron, in China! All the babies are tied on
 the backs of the mom's (where the dad's are I have no idea) wrapped in about a dozen blankets.
 You can't normally see any part of the actual baby, just the blankets and maybe a hat!

A fisherman using Cormorants (birds) to catch the fish.

The cormorants up close.

Below I have included a video of the Cormorant fishing (not taken by me)

to show you how this ancient method works. Enjoy!

The paid this man way to much money to take us on his sketchy
bamboo raft about 100ft down the river. I was under the impression
 that our ride would be longer but since I don't speak Chinese I couldn't
argue when we dropped us off. Grrr...

Absolutely everything was decorated for the new year celebration!

This park was full of "lovey dovy" art.

This is Elephant Trunk Hill (supposed to look like an elephant with it's
trunk in the river). We all thought that you need to squint a lot to see this
or it may help if there was more water in the river. Still very cool though.

I found a "squatter" bathroom that was not clean so 

I has to roll my pants up to guarantee that I stayed dry!

   We made it back to the bus station early so we had some waiting around to before boarding our bus. We also had a little "difficulty" once we got on our bus b/c we didn't realize that we had assigned seats. And who knew this would be the one time that the Chinese follow a rule. So our seats got taken then we took some other seats then those people showed up and demanded their seats then we didn't have any place to sit. The women that wanted her seats from us yelled at the ppl that had our seats but that didn't help to get them vacated. The bus started to drive away with the three of us standing up confused on where to sit. We eventually squeezed (litterally squeezed) into the back row. We were SO squeezed that none of could move enough to get a camera out to take a picture! After 1.5hrs we were able to get off the bus, call our hotel, get picked up and driven to the front door of our hotel/hostel.

We got the "family" room at Yangshou Village Retreat.
I recommend this place to anyone visiting the area.

Check out our bathroom, glass view into the room and out at the view!

The view of Karsts just outside our room.
After seeing these we were super excited to explore more.

   We also had an amazing first dinner, Beer Duck, YangShuo Fried Rice, Crispy Beef and Bamboo. The food at our hotel is amazing and they even have amazing white wine on the menu.