Ni hao

In my first overnight bus in China alone I met a great group of travelers, among them a guy from Finland and my fear faded away. In the end I ended up doing only one bus trip in China without having someone able to speak mandarin with me.

We arrived to Yangshuo early morning around 5 a.m. and took a 'taxi' with a Hong Kongese girl and the Finnish guy to a hostel a bit out the town centre. It was nice and peaceful in the countryside.

The first day it rained so we just wondered around the city for the day. Next days we rented bikes and made our way to the river to do some bamboo rafting. Yangshuo is really turistic and the river was full of photographers selling pictures and floating cafes offering refreshments. But it was a awesome 1,5hour rafting in beautiful sceneries among limestone hills. Then we biked to see moon hill. While the others wanted to go back earlier, I biked a bit further and ended up bargaining a good price for a ticket to some caves with mudbaths and hotsprings for the next day. I did it totally by accident by being not really interested at all in the caves at first and got a 320rmb ticket for 80rmb. So I learned that the best way to haggle is to not be interested.

In the caves next day I had really much fun. I got a own tour guide who spoke atleast some english and after a tour of seeing Buddha's and lots of different animals formed by water in the caves I met a group of Chinese students while relaxing in the hotpool. The language was a bit of a issue but sign language has proven pretty efficient in Asia. They asked me to join them for dinner that night.

Next day I went to Xingping and met an American girl Wenlu in the bus. We decided to go together to the Guilin and the Dragon's Backbone riceterraces. The terraces where amazing. It's a huge area of ricefields in the mountains. We did a 5 hour hike from Ping'an to another village. During the hike lots of local women from the longhair tribe offered to be our guides, but we managed to find our way by our own for almost all the way. In the end we agreed to have someone take us to a hotel then. The hotel was a simple wooden two storey building with only us and one Chinese couple staying there. After dinner the power went off and a thunderstorm broke out. Our room windows where banging open and leaking. Two girls being led by a unknown man to a hotel in the middle of nowhere, a storm, no power... A bit of a horrormovie scene?

Luckily we made our way back to Guilin next day and said goodbyes.

In Guilin I met a nice Chinese girl who came with me to Nanning. She took me to see her university and showed a bit of Nanning. Next day I was off to Vietnam and I met Sandra in Hanoi. So far I've loved Hanoi.