(writen oct 13th, sorry took so long to post!)
Alrighty, so we just finished our first week back after our vacation, thought it would be great and we would be full of energy again but that was not the case. Our vacation was not exactly relaxing, but we did have a lot of fun. So we left almost right after school ended on Friday and drove the hour to get to the airport. It was only an hour and fifteen minute flight to Guilin. We were with a group of nine other maple leaf teachers traveling together. We had a great group, it was one of the main reasons we had so much fun.
Guilin was great, it is nestled in between all these neat mountains. The city is much cleaner that Wuhan and the air is much nicer. On the first day we went on a tour to this town with terraced rice fields. It was really neat, we climbed all the way to the top, amazing views. The little village was really cool as well. Danny drank snake wine (cobras in a bottle of 60% alcohol)
On the way to the rice fields we stopped and bought a chicken. Yes, a live chicken and yes it was Danny’s idea and no I did not endorse buying the chicken. So for 100 yuan we bought some lady’s chicken which she told us was not diseased but we could buy one of those if we wanted. Somehow he ended up with the name Rufio and he pooped all over the guys van we were in and then he spent a couple hours in a box until we got home that night. We were faced with the dilemma of what to do with Rufio so Danny and our friend Adam ended up taking him to a nearby restaurant and for 35 yuan they had a delicious chicken dinner, head, feet and gizzard included.
The next day we made our journey to Yangshuo. Yangshuo is a smaller town down the Li river from Guilin. Its even nicer than Guilin and has lots of shopping and touristy things to do. To get there we got on this tour bus which took us on a romantic river cruise, which was very cool, the scenery was amazing. After we went to the place were they do the cormorant fishing, where the cormorants are trained to catch the fish and bring it back. Its quite sad actually because they only do it now for the tourists really it is a dying profession I guess. Danny really enjoyed the birds though. After we watched him fish we went to see a water buffalo and a few people payed to sit on top of him. Danny was pretty pumped to be a guy on a buffalo, he was looking forward to it all day.
In the same little village there is a bridge that is known for tourists jumping off of it, so of course most of the guys (minus Danny) wanted to jump off of it. My friend Steph and I were standing there watching them jump and we looked at each other and decided to do it. We just couldn’t leave with the guys having such a great story and we knew if we did it, it would be pretty cool. I was absolutely terrified, but it was awesome. The river was super refreshing.
That evening we made it to Yangshuo which was packed with tourists! It was really difficult for us to get anywhere the entire time we were there because of how many people were there. The town itself is quite small, you could potentially walk around the whole thing, but there were so many people because of the national holiday. Our hostel was amazing, right in the middle of town near the shopping and the food and we had to go down this skinny alleyway to get there. The place had a rooftop bar, with free pool, and we spent a lot of time up there. It was great because we met a bunch of other travelers including two guys from Vancouver who are teaching in Shanghai. We will most likely try to visit them in a few weeks.
Our time in Yangshuo was spent mostly relaxing, drinking and shopping. We attempted one major touristy excursion on scooters. It didn’t go so well at first. Our friends Tommy and Steph were on the scooter behind Danny and I and we hear this awful sound and turn around and all we see is Steph standing on the sidewalk and the scooter on top of Tommy. There were also three tour buses stopped, staring and taking pictures of them. It was scary at the time, but its pretty funny now because 1. Steph jumped off as it was going down then stood there and watched in shock as Tommy fell and then got himself up and 2. that they were still within sight of the scooter rental place. Oh ya and while we were waiting for Tommy to get fixed up an old chinese man ran into Danny’s parked scooter and knocked it over. We all just turned and looked at him. He came to say sorry I think but he just kind of laughed and said thank you in Chinese and then left, we were all very confused. Now, its just a great story we laugh about.
We finally did make it to where we were going. It was this mud cave, that was all lit up and at the end of it there is a mud pit you can get in. The mud is like swimming in pudding! You can’t sink, you just float around and get really dirty haha. There are also hot springs in the cave. It was a fun day, with the exception of the intense traffic to get there and Tommy getting hurt.
Well this blog entry is long enough I think, hopefully I’ll write again soon with what we have been up to since then!
