Had a leisurely morning as we didn't have to leave the hotel until 11:00am. Had breakfast (found an omelette cook!) and then dad and I went down the street to a shopping area and bought dad a couple of t-shirts (Y120 ea) and a new jacket with lots of pockets, which he needed badly (Y280). The weather was a little clearer today but still very smoggy. There was at least a bit of sun and the views from our breakfast eyrie were quite good! The stud on dad's new jacket sleeve promptly broke when we got back to the hotel! Oh well. We boarded the bus and went to visit a flower market, flowers being something that Kunming is famous for. The market was quite lovely with millions of flowers and arrangements but other than taking photos there wasn't much else we could do. They had seeds for sale, and of course bulbs etc but they weren't much use to us with our quarantine laws. After that we went to lunch which was very nice and then drove to the airport for the flight to Guilin. The airport is right in the middle of the city which was handy and it was all very mundane for us now! We just followed Grace and our local guide Edward and their little blue flag and it was all very smooth. The plane flight was with China East and was very good. The stewardess who greeted us was gorgeous and said in good english "very please to meet you" but the remainder had the usual very business-like Chinese style. We were served a choice of juices, Pepsi or water twice which, for a 1h 20m flight wasn't a bad effort!

Landing in Guilin was interesting as we didn't really see the ground until about 10 seconds before we hit it! It was lightly raining and with very low misty cloud virtually down to ground level. We retrieved our baggage and boarded the bus for the 40 min drive to our hotel. It was obviously a shame that the visibility was so poor as through the mist we could see the amazing limestone, kaste hillocks/mounts surrounding the place. It really looked quite bizarre when we could actually see anything. We arrived at our hotel and found our room which was quite nice but not outstanding. We had a leisurely time until dinner which was not too bad and then quite a number of us had a great time in the lounge on the second floor telling jokes and downing a few ales! There are a number of comedians in the group and they really entertained everyone with their repertoire of jokes. On going to bed, dad mumbled and cackled and fell into bed and went promptly to sleep. I had to wake him up to get him to take his glasses off! I then went out for a little walk down the street and found a little convenience store and bought some water as we had been given none in the room in this hotel. I went to sleep around 11pm.