yangshuo

a couple of weeks ago, jon and i took advantage of the deadfest holiday to visit yangshuo. yangshuo sits about an hour away from guilin amongst some ridiculous karst scenery. limestone hills rise out of flat green fields. groves of orange and pomelo trees.

saturday, it drizzled, spreading a mist over the mountains--made me feel like a monkey king, somersaulting in the clouds. we took a bus to a village famed for its pickpockets (they've stolen all the way to india),
where we rode a
to the green lotus caves. Spelunking goes hand-in-hand with the holey mtns.

For lunch, we had the local delicacy, beerfish, but jon couldn't handle the bones.




And then we rode a "bamboo" raft down the Li river (the raft was actually made out of pvc pipes painted various shades of green). the scenary was beautiful, but i was FREEZING the entire time, and jon had to pee. as soon as we got off, jon sprinted for a bathroom, leaving me to pay...i didn't have enough RMB, so i tried to pay in HKD, but some stupid chinese tourist with a fake LV wallet told the guy that my HKDs were fake..."are you sure those are HKD? i've seen hkd, and they didn't look like that"--and then he proceeded to pull a $20 out of his stupid fake wallet. yeah, duh, of course a 20 doesn't look like a 100, but the damage was done. we had to wait till jon came back to pay in rmb.








atop some rooftop in a village that bill clinton visited. fang gui (our guide) grew up here.



saturday, we rented 3 bikes and went riding in the countryside, stopping at various parks along the way. this one has a 1000+ yr old banyan tree...and monkeys.



speaking of monkeying around...we spent RMB40 to roll around the river in a human hamster ball. standing was impossibly hard--knees and elbows flying all over the place.

after eating a home cooked meal and a ton of fresh pomelos from fang gui's yard, we went to a cave near moon mountain that the villagers used as a hiding place during the japanese invasion. we had to enter by boat, but eventually, the path rose above the underground stream for 3kms of pretty amazing tunnels. the whole thing was lit by naked bulbs...it felt like a scene from macguyver. in the middle of the cave is a huge mud pit with a mud slide. the mud was freezing, but if you stayed still, you could trap pockets of warm air around your body (like a frog). we wallowed for a bit before tramping the rest of the way covered in the stuff.

that night, we decided to spend the rest of our RMB food hopping. the rules: 1 restaurant, 1 dish, 1 drink, 1 postcard written. turns out, we didn't actually write that many postcards...a 1:1 food to drink ratio is bad news for me.





this was our last stop, mc blues. they had some pretty good snickers milkshakes. b/c it was sunday night, the whole top floor was deserted. as soon as jon asked me to play a word game, i knew. the first word game was a warmup, spelling some sentence about subway sandwiches. i played along. the second game popped the question. and then he got down on a knee and started talking, and i didn't hear a single word he said b/c 1) i was drunk and 2) HOLY SHIT! i was so overwhelmed that i accidentally said yes, altho the original plan was to say no the first 2 times so that he'd have to do it thrice, like in all the good old fairytales. i did still have enough of my wits about me to say that he better ask me again tomorrow morning to see if i remember any of it. it's really not fair getting a girl drunk before you ask her to marry you. it's not. anyways, by this point, i figured he didn't have a ring, but then he pulled out the my little pony box. it was a unicorn with the ring taped around its horn. ah fairytales.

the next day, we signed up for a half day climbing course. yangshuo is supposed to have the best climbing in all of china (self-proclaimed by yangshuo-ians). thru a combination of pulling and tugging and hanging on for dear life, i managed to get to the top of some of these routes. the guy belaying (sp?) me must've been exhausted. like hauling a piano up the stairs. jon liked it enough to want to find some walls in hk.

and here is the other regional delicacy: field snails. the shells are stuffed with ground pork, so you have to really suck to get the snail meat out. it's a noisy, juicy mess, but also quite satisfying to hear that POP when the snail shoots into the back of your throat.

west street, where the backpackers come.