Where's John?

Well, the blogging has really broken down now that we're off on our own. It's too hard to put up pictures without reliable wireless internet access. But I thought I'd update everyone on my travels.

Right now I'm in Yongshuo in Jiangxi Province, which you can get to by bus from Hong Kong, so it can't be too far from there. Yongshuo is famous for its karst peaks, huge limestone monoliths riddled with caves. They are really really cool. This is definitely one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. Today, we went on a bike ride/raft ride/caving expedition. We started at our hotel and biked to a river, then put our bikes on a bamboo raft and rafted down the river. Then we picked up the bikes and rode to the "water cave". KP and I were in Guilin yesterday and the day before, which is the major city in the area. Guilin also has the peaks, and they have a beautiful river walk which is lit up with all sorts of different colored lights. Yesterday we took a river boat down the river to Yongshuo with a Chinese tour group, and then they took us to four places with admission fees--a temple, a park, a rock museum, and a cave called the "Dragon Meeting Cave". That cave was just like a cave in America would be. It had nice steps and everything was lit in different colors. In two places you had to get on a raft and pole through the cave. The "Water Cave" was very different. They had left it pretty much in its natural state, so you had to clamber through all sorts of slippery rocks and crawl through spaces that were only about half a meter high (they said you could make it if you were less than 240 kilograms in weight, "really fat"). Unlike the dragon cave they didn't have fanciful names for there rocks. The tour guide only pointed out four rocks that looked like boobs. It was funny because in very broken English she said "The two small ones are Chinese, the big ones Euro".

After that we rode home in a torrential downpour and got completely soaking wet (and muddy because I kept splashing through every puddle I saw). It was a lot of fun. I had bought ponchos which I had bargained down to yi kwai wu (18 cents), but they ripped and didn't keep me very dry so I took mine off.

After that we took a nap and then went to dinner at the night market. Yongshuo has one of the best ones that I've experienced in China, with tons of stir fry tents set up, and some muslim food (good shish-kabobs, or the much better chinese term, chuanr). We got fresh watermelon juice and chuanr, but unfortunately the chuanr was too spicy and we drank all our watermelon juice and had to go back and get mango juice. Then we had barbequed shellfish: two were mussels, I don't know what the other four were, but they were all delicious, and very very tender (which is unusual with shellfish). Then we got a huge plate of enormous crawdads and chow fen (fried noodles). After that we got waxberries and sugar cane juice for dessert. All the food is very fresh. Today I saw a restaurant where the lady ordered and the waiter walked around the corner to the garden and pulled out her vegetables. Plus all the meat is still alive. I fell sorry for the poor chickens, fish, crawdads,and frogs sitting there next to the woks awaiting their doom. You can see in the chickens' eyes they know what's up.

On a related note, today during our bike ride I saw a chicken eating tarot ice cream. Tarot is a purple sweet potato.

I spent the last almost two weeks in Chengdu with Jon. Actually, we stayed behind in Dali after the girls left for Thailand. We were very depressed so we climbed the mountain, Cang Shan. Climbing a mountain is a favorite pastime in China. We only got about halfway up though, because we got lost and Jon started to get sick. He ended up getting very very sick when we got back to the hotel. The next day, we were sufficiently recovered to take a bus to Kunming, which proved to be a wonderful city. Unfortunately, for dinner we followed Lonely Planet's recommendation and went to Happy Fish restaurant. It was disgusting, and since, generally speaking, every restaurant in China is a good restaurant, it was pretty disappointing. But Lonely Planet's food recs aren't usually all that great. Maybe it's because they're British, and the British have bad food, or so I hear.

Anyway, climbing the mountain was fun, and it got my good humor back. But pretty soon I was down in the dumps again, so we went off to climb another mountain, Emei Shan. Now, Cang Shan is a big mountain, it's 4000 meters high, but Dali is already at 3000 meters, so it's more like the mountain in Tehachapi. Emei Shan is 3099 meters and it starts I think pretty close to sea level, so it's a looooong way up. Furthermore, you have to walk up stairs along about 30 km worth of trails. We got there late on the first day, so we only got 3 hours of climbing in. That got us up to the lower monastery. We stayed in a hotel near there. We made some friends on the bus that only spoke Chinese, so Jon had to try to interpret everything. They were hell bent on not spending money, and the girl was a stubborn enough bargainer to get the hotel owner down from 120 kwai to 60 kwai for a double with private bathroom. We were impressed.

The next day, we climbed for 14 and a half hours all the way to the summit. We started at dawn and didn't get up the hill until the last glow of sunset was fading away. I was totally, completely exhausted. We slept deeply with nice electric blankets (another 60 kwai room, thanks to vicious bargaining), and then got up at dawn for an amazingly great sunrise. We walked down the hill for a couple hours, but I was too tired to try to get down on foot, so we took a bus the rest of the way back to Chengdu.

We hung out there for a few days, and went to a teahouse in the afternoons to while away the time. Then the other day we went to a nearby rural village and walked around in the farm fields for several hours which was very scenic and pleasant.

Tomorrow, KP and I are going to see the rice terraces in Longsheng, and the next day we're going to fly to Hangzhou, which is famous for it's beautiful West Lake. We'll make further plans from there, but eventually we'll get to Shanghai.