Wednesday was our first full day in Yangshuo so we were determined to do as much as possible! We'd organised to get up early and have a tai chi (sp?) lesson with Christina and Karolina, and we soon realised that our teacher, who was scarily muscular and wearing some rather fetching cream satin trousers, was taking us to a local park - therefore to make fools of us in front of the general public! Arghhh!

In tai chi there are 24 interchangable 'steps' you can learn, which can be as long as 30 seconds in each step. To give you an idea, we learnt 5 steps in an hour, putting them all together and toning our muscles somewhat! This particular form was all about the imaginary ball you move around, you need to concentrate on 'touch the ball, hooollld the ball, move the ball, push the ball,' but we ended up dropping the ball, losing the ball, generally forgetting where the ball was.... The locals seemed to enjoy the show though, we did accumulate an audience at one point.

Next on our agenda was calligraphy!! (Not before Claire managed to find a cafe that sold porridge oh yeahh) For some reason all of the electricity in the city had been switched off - interesting for Paul who was apparently having a shower in the dark at this time! This meant we were drawing in not the best of light, but we learnt how to write numbers to 10, some simple words like dragon & wood, and our name in Chinese! We both bought a stamp each with our chinese names on, which artists use as a signature on their finished pieces.

We had a few hours to kill before the river cruise so we went for lunch in MC Blues again and spent an hour or two watching passers by play with 2 dogs - one of which was a lot like Rufus! After that we met a lady in the lobby who shoved us on a bus and told us faithfully that someone would be waiting for us at the other end for a cruise. We had no idea where we were going or how long it would take, so we relaxed and enjoyed the ride through the countryside. An hour later we got into a small village where a man on an electric car (very bumpy on the bum) was waiting to take us down to the river side. We were then ushered onto the smallest and most dangerous looking bamboo raft we had ever seen, and pushed off - with one chinese man steering.

It was so much fun! It looked a lot like something off Jurrassic Park, so Liam sang the theme tune on various occasions and probably scared the driver. We also learnt that waving frantically to other boats doesn't go down well in China - people just look at you as if to say, 'what are you doing,' and the ride was going jolly well..... until we ran out of petrol. 40 minutes down the line our driver steered us onto a tiny island to moor, tied the boat to a rock that wasn't connected to the floor (smart) and ran off. 15 minutes later he returned with what was most probably vegetable oil, as 20 minutes later, just metres from our dock, we ran out again, and started drifting downstream. Claire was getting very nervous at this point, as water was creeping over the edge and all of the other boats going past seemed to be laughing and even speeding up. Eventually, 30 minutes late, we SOMEHOW managed to get close enough to land to be pulled in by our driver back to the bus, who'd watched from afar and obviously found it very amusing that 2 scared looking white people were bobbing around helpless in the middle of a river.

Back on dry land, it was Sarah's birthday that night, so everyone was to go out and celebrate! The plan being MC Blues (we spent our lives the past few days in that place) we all met up at half 9 in the lobby for a singing birthday cake made of chocolate and tomatoes. Yangshuo has tried to be westernised - and to a certain extent has failed, as instead of glacier cherries on top like an english cake would have - it was covered in cherry tomatoes. Odd. Not too late, we both headed back to the hotel to get an earlyish night tomorrow...... the 5th attempt at a balloon ride was approaching!! Wish us luck!