Yangshuo

Day 18 - Hoch Ping to Yangshuo

We had the morning to ourselves, as the rest of the group did not return from the other village until around noon. I skipped lunch with an unsettled stomach and the prospect of a 3 hour bus ride to Yangshuo.

The bus trip went quickly. I read most of the time and almost polished off a biography of John Kerry I had picked up for the trip.

Our hotel in Yangshuo was right off the main tourist street. After checking in, Justin and I walked through some shops meeting up with the group for dinner. I tried snake for the first time. It was pretty bland - can't even say it tasted like chicken.

Day 19 - Yangshuo

We got up at 7:00 AM for a morning bike ride. Today, we actually had multiple speed, mountain bikes. it was a good thing as the road soon became very rocky. We rode towards another village in which this was the weekly market day.

At one point during our trip, Justin's bike and a motorcycle parked along the side of the road came into contact with each other. Justin, the bicycle, and the motorcycle ended up in a heap. Justin was a bit scraped up, but in pretty good shape.

The owner of the motorcycle came running out of a nearby house to see what caused the commotion. It soon became apparent that his story was going to be that he had just parked his brand new motorcycle on the side of the rode and now returned to find a beat up clunker in its place. Apparently, no amount of money was going to be able to compensate him for the loss. Our guide, Shirley, was tough on him, though, pointing out that once you pushed the left hand mirror back into place, the side of the machine that hit the ground looked to be in the exact same condition as the side that landed unscathed.

By now, a crowd was forming - I had read that rubber-necking is something of an art form here. Shirley seemed to support the notion of involving the police rather than letting the guy just name his price (especially since their was no apparent damage to the motorcycle). The guy wasn't interested in this, perhaps sensing the possibility of losing any leverage he might have in the situation). The guy finally said he would take 50 Yuan (about $6). We immediately paid it and road off. It was easily worth the expenditure, just for the experience alone.

We eventually came to a river and took a ferry across with our bikes to the market town on the other side. In town, we toured an outdoor livestock market. Pretty standard fair for anyone from a farming background - mostly cows and pigs. In a separate town-square, we visited an open-air food and dry goods market. It was a little less standard fair to see vendors carving up raw meat and selling live fish and eel out of a bucket. There were a number of pool tables sat up at one end of the square. Some of us ended up watching Stephen playing against one of the locals. He won.

The return trip to Yangshuo was pretty uneventful. After showering, Justin and I headed out to a water painting class we had signed up for. Our teacher claimed to be the Chinese Picasso. Interestingly, he did not bring any of his works along to bear this point out. We painted three scenes - a landscape, some fish, and a close-up of bamboo (a common subject in Chinese paintings). Whereas Justin has artistic talent, I pretty clearly do not. My works inevitably ended up with some version of Jaws (adeptly depicted by a giant fin) chasing a swimmer.

In the evening, Justin and I joined Yvonne and Anna in a class on the ancient (though modernized) "science" of Feng Sue. Essentially, it is a set of rules for ordering your house and external environment (basically, arranging your furniture). Unfortunately, our teacher was not very good. Fortunately, he provided us with a written set of translated rules, the literal interpretations of which were hysterical.

Later in the evening, we went to a restaurant picked out by Kal. The food here was spectacular. Absolutely the best we had so far.

Day 20 - Yangshuo

A free day with no group activities scheduled. I got up and ran at 7:00 AM. At 9:00 Justin and I attended a ping-pong class at 9:00 and then learned how to play Mahjong at 10:00. The latter was the best of the classes we took while in Yangshuo.

For the rest of the day, Justin and I walked around town. We did a little shopping, walked through a nearby park, and climbed around on the rocks there. Along the way we ran into two separate local school teachers. The first asked us to stay & teach English. She mentioned that most of the English teachers they get are from Europe and actually speak English only as a second language. The second teacher taught English to students in the countryside and was primarily interested in acquiring English language books on China.

For dinner, Justin and I went back to the restaurant from the previous night. While they were out of the orange duck and apple crumb that was so good from before, the lemon duck was a nice substitute.

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