Tuesday and Wednesday of Spring Festival

   We had lucked out the 2 previous days in YangShuo with cloudy and cool weather but we woke up to rain and cold on Tuesday. After sitting down to another hearty breakfast at our hostel we talked about wanting to stay warm for the first part of the day. That meant only one activity...visiting a cave. We read about quite a few caves in the area but the one that came highly recommended from the staff at the hostel was the Silver Cave about 25km out of town. This is the one that we decided to visit. So we hired the same taxi driver from the day before to drive us out to Silver Cave and wait for us so that he could also drive us back to YangShuo.

The view from the cave entrance.

   Of course all the caves are privatized by the Chinese Government and a fee needs to be paid in order to enter. Above left, the entrance to the Silver Cave. Right, The map of the cave showing the 2km walk that we were about to engage upon. We also read warnings about staying with your guide b/c the lights in the cave run on 5 minute limits controlled by the guides (making it sound like you wold be left in complete darkness if you lagged too far behind). I wasn't thrilled about being with a group of loud tourists so I just assumed that the light limit wasn't true and we were told this just so we wouldn't spend a lot of time lingering in the cave. Check out what we saw as soon as we walked in...

...colorfully light rocks.

    As soon as I stepped in I realized just how cheesy this tour was going to be. All the cool stalactites and stalagmites were lite up with multicolor lighting. The cave itself proved to be very amazing but the lights really gave it a Disney Land feel. It only took us about 5 mins to loose our tour group.

Left, using the flash helped to eliminate the colors and actually see the rock formations. Right,

some of the lighting did keep us entertained. There was wiring everywhere in the cave and signs

of electric shock in areas that were wet. Hmmm...water + tons of wiring =....

There were multiple locations were you could pay some
cave workers to take pictures of you with the rock formations.
We chose to take our own photos :)

   Left, advertisements along the cave walks for other privatized attractions in the area. Right, you can't go anywhere in China w/o someone trying to sell you something. These stalls were selling food. If you enlarge the photo you will see that both workers look really bored (I even think one was napping). Aparently, people don't go to caves to eat.

Left, I thought this rock formation was really cool. Right, the exit where more stalls

were set up selling trinkets. Again, they didn't look very busy.

Look in the middle of this photo, the karst in the background has 2 holes in it.
Trisha and I had seen it the day before and were happy to be able to get a picture.

    We returned to YangShuo and got dropped off near some food vendors. After grabbing a snack we walked over to the bus station to see if we could purchase our tickets back to Guilin for the following day. Even w/o a a station worker that could understand any English we were able to purchase out tickets pretty easily. We ended up with seats 3, 4 and 5...now that we knew that our seats were assigned we felt more confident about our second bus ride. Certainly did not want to be the last ones seated ever again :)

Bus station ticket window.

   Across the street from the bus station was YangShuo Park which housed a creepy amusement park for small children, lots of random  communist statues and a karst with steep steps carved up the backside. Trisha and I dragged Shawn up the karst in hopes of getting to the small pagoda at the top. Yes, the steps were as scary as they look in the above photo...steep, slick with mud, uneven and only a 2 foot railing on one side. We did not rush up this karst.

Views from the top

I was checking out my zoom. The left picture, the town below. The right picture,

a zoomed look of one of the homes in the left picture. Yes, she is burning trash! YIKES!

Half way down the karst

   Once back to ground level we found our way to Seven Star Teahouse. We had read about the owner, Annie, that has worked with her family tea plantation for about 25 years. We heard that she had exceptionally green tea and was the woman in town to talk to about any other tea drinking that one would want to do. We were invited to sit and drink tea with her. I don't typically drink tea other then herbal or flower teas (can't handle the caffeine) but it was pretty hard to say no to such fresh local green tea so I also partook in the tea party. We tried the Green tea, Oolong tea and Osmanthus tea, all were very tasty.

   Since the theme of our trip seemed to be "eating" we went and found more street food to enjoy. Below, Shawn and I were eating Chinese Hamburgers, they even came with a money back guarantee (no joke, the booth said "don't like, don't pay"). It would have been pretty hard to not like these little tasty sandwiches. They were mini pocket breads filled with marinated noodles, marinated greens, spicy cured beef, Spring Onions and Cilantro.

Left, one guy making the mini pocket breads. Each bread took about 4 minutes to roll out.

Right, the woman filling the pocket breads to order. There were 2 guys in the back cooking

the little pocket breads. A 4 man operation!

Trisha the bandit, protecting her lungs from the firecracker smoke.

   We obviously did not suffer from a lack of good food and drinks. Below, is the last meal that we were going to have at the hostel so we ordered all the best dishes that we had tried from previous nights. This included YangShuo style fried rice, Beer Duck, Sichuan style beef ribs and dragon eggplant. We stayed up drinking and celebrating our amazing trip.

   On Wednesday we weren't getting picked up to go into town until 1pm (we had a 2pm bus ride to Guilin) so we walked down to the Li River from our hostel. It was a nice calm morning with good views of the river.

Left, a motorized bamboo raft. Right, you could see YangShuo from this spot of the riverbank.

Along our walk we spotted this cool path that
someone was building on the side of their home.

I don't think that I have mentioned yet that there was a lot
of citrus growing in this part of China. Here is an orange grove.

Also. Pomelos are popular in this area. You will see
in a picture below along out bus ride to Guilin.

Left, our bus on the wrong side of the rode passing all sorts of cars. Right,

enlarge this photo so you can see just how popular the large citrus fruit, pomelo,

is in this area of China.

Please take note in the above video that we are on the wrong side of the yellow line

and heading directly into oncoming traffic. This is just how driving in China happens.

   Can you tell from the above picture that the is a bus traffic jam heading into the Guilin bus station? There is a funny story to this. Trisha and I were sitting in the front row seats together and Shawn was one row back all by himself. Once the bus arrived near the Guilin bus station we had to wait awhile before the bus would be able to enter in and drop us off. One of the other passengers got impatient and asked the driver if he would let her out there instead (or at least this is what I assume since I couldn't understand the conversation in Chinese). Trisha and I saw this as our window of opportunity to also exit the bus so we grabbed out bags, hollered at Shawn to follow and got off the bus. We turned around to see that the bus had closed it's door and was driving away and into the station before Shawn had gotten off. We ran after the bus b/c we didn't want to loose Shawn in the crowded bus station. Luckily, we were able to get in and find him w/o any issue but Shawn said that we was frantically trying to explain to the bus driver that he needed to get off with us but apparently the driver completely ignored him. We had some time to kill before our 8:30 flight so we walked around Guilin for a few hours.

One stop was the Longchuanping Marina.

Another stop was the South Stream Hill Park where we got charged 10rmb

 each to enter while all the other Chinese people entering didn't get charged.

Luckily, we saw wildlife which made us feel better about paying the entrance fee ;)

We also snuck into a tour of a really cheesy Buddhist cave.
Now we really felt better about paying the entrance fee.

   Now for the grand finale to our amazing trip. At the beginning of January (about 2 weeks before this trip) I received notification that the original flight that I have booked back to Shanghai had been canceled so the agency that I booked the tickets through sent me notification and they had rebooked us on an earlier flight. So instead of flying out of Guilin at 11:30pm and getting in to Shanghai at 1:20am we were now leaving at 8:30pm and getting in to Shanghai at 11:20pm...a much better schedule or at least I thought. It turns out that the ticket agency failed to point out and I failed to take note that the actual DATE of the flight had also changed. I didn't realize this until we were at the check-in counter and the guy was pointing to the date of our flight saying "that was yesterday". OH SH*T! I was pissed and scared that we would be stuck in Guilin or paying a lot of $$ to get home. I think that the guy at the counter could tell with was a genuine misunderstanding so he hopped on the phone and pushed us off to the side. We waited anxiously for about 20 minutes while he was waiting for a call back. The call arrived, then a women showed up at the counter and started typing away. We saw one boarding pass print, then a second one and finally a third one...she never spoke to us but just handed us our boarding passes for the 8:30pm fight that night. How lucky we were!! And why the heck had the agency not originally just put us on the 8:30pm flight of the same day that I originally booked?! I will never know and at this point don't care b/c we made it home safe and sound.

Our nerves were still getting the best of us (or at least me) so once we were through
security we all took some vodka shots in hopes of relaxation on the plane ride!

It never felt so good to arrive back to Shanghai!