More YangShuo

   I started my second full day in YangShuo with a nice walk around the quiet countryside around the hostel. It was a beautiful morning, there were lots of locals out tending to vegetables, watching their children play and on motorcycles heading into town, a nice relief after a very loud night of fireworks for the new year.

A view of the hostel from the other side of the valley.

Left, this was a HUGE noisy pig in the neighborhood. Right, vegetable garden

(one of SO many we saw in every open patch of land).

   Once I got back to the hostel Trisha and Shawn had finished breakfast and we decided on what we were going to do for the day...bamboo rafting on the Yulong River (a tributary to the famous Li River)! We arranged a taxi to pick us up and take us to the river...we would have biked but none of us were able to sit on a bike due to the long bike ride and uncomfortable bikes seats from the day before.

Trisha and Shawn checking out all the bamboo rafts.

OMG, these old ladies really wanted to sell us squirt guns and
plastic bags for our feet (1 RMB for 2 plastic bags). Why are there
always these tacky things at every turn in China? We didn't buy
any guns, sadly.

Left, Trisha and Shawn purchased the bags for their feet. I, on the other-hand, had my

handy waterproof Danner boots on (boots courtesy of Donald). Right, our raft "captain".

   Each raft only held 2 people so Shawn stepped up and said he would ride by himself. He got on the first raft and off he went. Check out the video below:

   So squirt guns were not the only thing that was tacky on this boat ride. In the picture above on the left, there is a women selling beer from a cooler. It seemed that she sits here all day to sell cheap beer at a 400% mark up. She wanted 20rmb for a beer...since it was past noon and offered to him Shawn try to buy a beer for 10rmb (all the $ he had on him) but the women wouldn't sell. If you zoom in on the above picture on the right you can see Shawn trying to haggle with the beer vendor.

What you can't see is that I have a death grip on Trisha's knee so that I
don't fall off the bamboo raft.

Even on the river you could get cell reception, as
our raft guys is showing in this picture.

   At 5 different points along the river there were these mini man-made waterfalls (for a lack of a better term). They were not meant to be pretty but to slow the river down (or so I assume). Above is a video of Trisha and I going down one of the small ones. There were bigger ones but I had to put away my camera in fear of getting it wet. While going down each one of these we had to hang on tight and lift our feet so they wouldn't get wet. On a later one our raft dove deep enough in the water that it almost went up to the seats that we were sitting on, luckily only my one pant leg got wet.

Water buffalo along the way.

This picture is for Donald. Check out the water
proof Danner boots that I have on.

The below video is just kinda funny, worth watching!

Locals washing clothes down at the river. Do you now feel lucky for modern conveniences?

There was a camel and pony to ride at the end of our trip but
I didn't feel inclined to go for another animal ride.

   We had paid our same taxi driver to wait for us at the end point of our raft ride. We had no problems finding him so that we could have him drop us off in town. We were all itching to eat and do some supporting of the local merchants.

I'm including this for Shawn. He's a big music buff and really thought
this guy was talented on his guitar. We gave him a little cash in support.

Shopping in YangShuo...

These fried stuffed dough things were AMAZING!

There were a few shops selling these beautiful hand-woven cotton pieces.
I got a really cool one to use as a throw in our McLellan home.

Some fresh tofu, served spicy with pickled beans.

Check out all the amazing karsts in the background.

   Once the sun started getting going down the temperature had started to drop very quickly. We started to head back on foot towards the hostel. Since were all getting chilled to the bone a conversation started about whether we were prepared to head to our second destination, Longsheng. The elevation there would be a lot higher making the temperature a lot colder and we were just not sure that we would stay warm enough to have fun. It was decided pretty quickly that staying another day in YangShuo would be a better choice, especially since our hostel turned out to be SO great. All we had to do was confirm that the hostel still had room for us to stay an extra night.

   There was still a lot of celebrating happening everywhere for the New Year, celebrating using tons of firecrackers. It was so smoky on our walk home that Trisha had to use a mask to block out some of the particulate in the air. She looks a little scary in the picture b/c of the mask but there were plenty of locals that looked the same way. Since it was getting darker we were able to see that the karsts around the city were lit up. They looked pretty cool...

   The below video is a little dark but shows the bus ride we took up a pretty big hill. The "bus" was a little open sided truck with 3 rows of seats. It moved at a pretty good clip and was a great local experience.

The "bus" that we caught up the big hill for 1rmb each.

We were able to secure another night at the hostel. Good news at the end of a good day!