I am pretty tired tonight after a day out on the Li River so hopefully this will be pretty short. It was another early morning today. We were up at 7am to get breakfast and then met the group at 8:30am. A quick 30 min drive is all it took to get to the boats and we were on the river boat around 9:30. The boat had 3 levels, two levels for dinning and a platform on the top for viewing. I imagine it is pretty standard issue for a river cruise boat these days. Once we shoved off and fired up the diesel engine we got in line and followed a train of probably 50 cruise ships up the river. Not quite the picturesque scene I was hoping my 550 RMB bought me, but the mountains were still pretty amazing. It was a 3 hour cruise up the river and we spent most of the time up on the third level snapping photos and watching guys selling souvenirs on bamboo rafts going kamikaze into our boat. Chris, joined by two other old men with SLR's, looked like Austin Powers snapping shots all over the place... sorry in advance to anyone who looks through all of them on flickr. About 2 hours in lunch was served. It wasn't too bad for boat food and we had our choice of noodles, french fries, some kind of meat, snails and a few other things I could not recognize.
Overall it was a great trip from Guilin to Yangshuo, other than we probably got a little more sun than we expected. In Yangshou we had about 40 minutes to walk around and get yelled at by people to come buy there shit. Neither of us really bought anything, but Chris did get a picture with a crazy looking Chinese guy that cost 5 RMB (that one should get up on flickr eventually). After about 30 min we went to the meeting point and waited. Once everyone was there we jumped in the van and rode an an hour and a half back to the hotel.
Back at the hotel we spent the rest of our day figuring out how we were going to actually get to Hong Kong. Instead of trying to do the border crossing by train, fearing mass chaos at the station, we finally elected to get plane tickets. Sadly getting the tickets ended up being a bit of a struggle since we can't just get them online from the Chinese airlines. Lucky for us our guide from yesterday, Ryan, was able to walk over to a travel agent and help us get the tickets. It took forever to get the tickets we wanted and the price ended up being 100 USD more than we expected. Then the travel agents credit card machine was broken (or so we were told after they swiped both our cards....) so we had to pay cash, which of course we did not have on us. So the travel agent and our guide followed us to an ATM where we got out the rest of the money we needed. Then right there on the corner outside the bank we made the deal exchanging cash for the paper with our ticket information. Let's just hope we have tickets and no rouge charges on our credit cards. Yet another valuable lesson learned... make plans more than a day in advance when you are in a foreign country and don't speak the language.
Tomorrow it is back to Shanghai for a brief stop over and then on to Hong Kong on Monday.
