asia-ash

From Kunming we took a soft sleeper train to Gulin. The trip was pretty uneventful except the man across from me snored so loudly. We decided to head straight to Yungshuo from Gulin instead of sticking around. We had booked our accommodation outside of town, like we did in Dali so we would have more countryside around us. The guesthouse was nice and only a year old. Our first afternoon/night we had a quiet one and just ate at our accommodation and watched a dvd. The next morning we hired mountain bikes and decided to go off in search for the most famous sight in the area "moon hill'. It was a fun ride out there and for once a fairly easy place to find. We walked the 1000+ stairs (apparently someone has counted them) and got to the main area. This is where we got pretty much mobbed by young chinese tourists asking for a photo with us. It happens quite a bit and is just plain strange. But we obliged. We got told about a track that took you to the absolute peak of the hill. We made our way up this fairly steep and slippery track but the views were definately worth it. We rode into town after we finished there and had a massive lunch and a couple of beers. The next day we thought we should purchase our train ticket to Vietnam so we could have that sorted out. We took the local bus to Guilin to do just that. We arrived at the train station to see that the ticket area was absolutely packed. We jumped into a line and waited... And waited and waited. After many people pushed in we finally got to the counter 45 minutes later. We started to tell the lady what ticket we wanted and she simply wrote on a piece of paper counter 7 at 3pm. We weren't sure why but thought it must be because it was an international ticket. We were a little annoyed but went and got some lunch until 3pm. We got there at 2:45 and already the line was huge. After another 30 minutes we got to the front of the counter to be told that they could only sell those tickets 3 days in advance. So by this stage we were pretty pissed off. Particularly when we found out that the other lady didn't serve us because we were foriegners and that only line 7 did. But she could have at least told us we wouldn't be able to purchase that ticket anyway... Our next day in Yungshuo we were back into the mountain biking. We decided to explore the area and try and find a few more sights. After about 1 hour into our riding we were approached by a lady offering to show us to the dragon bridge. We tried to decline but in the end had no choice really. We were quite lucky we did follow her because there were so many little tracks in every direction we would never have found our way. We had a really enjoyable ride through little villages and around rice paddies in a very scenic area near the river. Around another hour later we got to the dragon bridge which was built in the 1400's. From there we took a bamboo raft downstream to about 10k's outside Yungshuo town. We rode into town and had another big lunch there. We decided to spend a couple of nights in Yungshuo town to experience more of the town life. We got a nice place to stay that had internet access in the room! It was located on the main street which was blocked off to traffic. It was a nice area but rained most of the time so we didn't do very much. The last good thing we did in yungshuo was went to a show on the water. It was held at night and directed by a famous chinese director. It was show with 600 performers and was mainly a visual performance of colours lights and dance. It was called Impressions and was awesome. We had great seats and really really enjoyed it.