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Up early and went to breakfast in a central courtyard café within the hotel. It was quite a nice atmosphere and obviously designed to be a cool area in the hot season. The temperature was comfortable here at around 17C most of the time and a little cooler at night. The breakfast was a buffet as usual but dad and I just had toast as we are both starting to find it a bit hard to have a full cooked meal every morning! After brekkie we went outside and took a couple of photos before boarding the bus for the trip back to Guilin. We were very sorry to be leaing Yangshuo as it would be easy to spend a lot of time here: it is just so spectacular and obviously a popular place for tourists as there are many, many small hotels and hostels.
A little way down the road we stopped briefly for a look at some rice paddies which still had some rice growing. I was amazed at how many on the bus had never seen it growing! Continued on our way back to Guilin and went straight to the Reed Flute caves. Dad decided to stay with the bus along with Barry and Sue as we were warned there would be a lot of steps, and ups and downs. The caves were lovely but nothing that you wouldn't see in King Solomons or Marakoopa other than the interesting fact that they were almost totally dry and quite warm (around 22C)! The lighting effects were very good but a bit slapdash as you could plainly see fluorescent tubes in many places. All in all, I wouldn't recommend it if you have already seen similar elsewhere!
Arrived back at the bus and dad had only bought a couple of things, and went to lunch which was quite good, and then went to the South Sea Pearl Factory. This was interesting in so far as we were given a talk by a lady about pearl production and related issues, and then treated to a number of models parading on a catwalk wearing long evening gowns with splits up the sides (and the front in one case!) wearing pearls of all descriptions. After that we were shown to the sales room which was huge and had pearls of all kinds and on all kinds of jewellery. The dearest I saw were a string of gold pearls for $4000 and a string of black pearls for $8000!
After we finished there we went back to the hotel and dad and I went for a walk around the city. It is a really interesting city, much less crowded than many that we have been in (pop. 700,000) and we enjoyed that. We then had dinner and boarded the bus and went to see the cormorant fishing. This consisted of being taken on a ferry at low speed up the river whilst the cormorant fishers and their birds poled along side on their rafts and the birds dived in and fished. Periodically a bird would pop up with a fish that was too big to swallow (because of the ring that they have around their necks) and they would then jump onto the raft and the man would grab the bird by the neck and tip it up and drop the fish into a basket! This was great fun to watch and I tried to get a few photos but it was dark so they aren't fantastic.
After that we returned to the hotel and had a few drinks in the bar area again with a few others before retiring to bed around 10pm.
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Steve and Julie-Ann Hi Chris, love blog and pics. Where is snap of you astride Great Wall with sign it built by Nasi Goreng to keep da wabitts out. Thanks to locals, it raining lobsters here on docks re China not taking crays re tariff problems. Don't forget Terracotta Warrior it should look great on your workstation. Happy chopsticks @ may your Fortune cookie bring you great luck.