Him and Her still on the road.: Guilin China

Day one in Guilin, we have realised we are in real trouble, no one speaks any English and our Mandarin is non existant. All the signs and roads are in Chinese characters so simple navigation is proving to be hard... what have we let ourselves in for ?

It takes a few hours before we realise that we need to copy any Chinese text from the Lonely Planet onto a scrap of paper and hand this to people if we are going to be able to go where we hope to.. A plan is starting to come together. The first night we ended up in a restaurant and have to go for pot luck.. as it happens the gods are with us and we don't get plates of Chickens beaks or pigs noses for lunch. Just a load of hot vegetables and a dish that could have been chicken had it not consisted of about 85% bones and fat.. the rice was nice though, we got this by pointing at some on another table !!

Next day we set about some local sight seeing, the next shock is that everything with an attraction is mega expensive. After a walk around the Town which is really a bloody great big city we realise this is not at all like the place we had pictured from all the glossy magazines, in fact we need to be about 70km further South in Yangshuo and much further down the Li River, so we get ourselves on the domestic boat to do just that ( tourist boats are too expensive ) .Before we do, we decide to pay a visit to the famous Dragons Backbone terraces and the amazing rice terraces of Tiantouzhai and Longshen . As it turned out this was a bit of a waste of time as it rained all day and visibility was almost Zero.. hey ho.

Our Trip down to Yangshuo doesn't start well we are not picked up to meet the boat so we hijack a taxi and catch up with what we think is our group ( all Chinese ) at a museum. Eventually we are loaded onto a bus and after an hour ???? we arrive at the jetty to pick up the boat...

We now start our day of sailing !! the weather is pretty grim, it's wet and there is a lot of low cloud and mist so we are not seeing the limestone Karsts at their best but it's still pretty awesome. After about 3 hours of spectacular scenery we reach a point where the boat can go no further so we disembark into more confusion, we had hoped to be in Yangshuo by now but we appear to be on an extended bus ride which takes in 3 local tourist sights before we are offloaded at a cross roads in the middle of nowhere. We are now well lost and have no idea how to get to our Guest house, a local girl calls them for us on her mobile phone and a taxi is sent to collect us.

We arrive dazed and confused at an amazing old Chinese barn converted by a Dutch couple into a guest house, "The Giggling Tree " 5 km from Yangsuo and set in a landscape of paddy's and Karsts.. Fantastic. The next part of our blog continues with a section entirely to this marvelous environ.