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That afternoon, we had organised to go on motorised bamboo rafts down the river to look at what the Chinese think is the most beautiful part of their country. It was spectacular - the rock formations and the greenery were brilliant. Although I've hardly seen any of China, I can see why they would make comments about this place.
Dad and I had bought books from a little old lady in town for 20 Yuan each (two quid) - considering the prices of most tourist books in other countries, I thought she meant 20 USD.
It was lucky that we bought the books, because the weather we had for the boat trip was astounding. I had the pleasure of sitting at the front and the rain was cutting in horizontally into the raft, so with just the protection of a raincoat and an umbrella, after a half hour I was soaked through to the bone. Luckily for me, my parents offered to swap places for the second half of the trip - oh actually that's right, they didn't because they didn't want to get wet - nice eh? So I continued to get pelted on by the rain and was a truly drowned rat by the end of the two hours.
Still the view was amazing and the wet sacrifice was worth views.
Dinner was a Chinese banquet of sorts. Afterwards, we went for a wander around the night markets.
Friday morning, we were up early-ish to get ready for our bike ride round the country side. Having learnt my lesson from the previous day, a raincoat and waterproof pants were the order of the day.
We cycled out of town down a couple of muddy countryside paths. It seemed to be a race for some, but I figured that I wasn't here every day so I was stopping for photos as and when required. Apparently this wasn't what was supposed to be happening and the bike guide was complaining that nobody had mentioned that they were unfit - choosing to stop and actually having to stop because of exhaustion are two totally different things.
It was very pretty in the country side and although it was pelting down with rain, it was a lovely day.
Some of the peoples on the bikes were obviously not adapted to ride and had no concept of safe distances or how trying to cut through a gap that wasn't actually there was a pretty silly idea - a few expletives did leave my mouth that day - apparently swearing isn't too common in China and I got a few surprised looks.
We stopped at a school but it was Moon Festival so there weren't any kids around. The rooms had a picture of Chairman Mao, the Chinese flag and a picture of another dude on them. Blackboards were still being used and they also had the old rickety wooden chairs and tables that we had when we were six years old.
Afterwards, we cycled to our guide's house for lunch. I decided to opt out of the lunch, but the others seemed to enjoy themselves.
The house was quite spacious - the village was quite small, but you could still tell that this family were fairly well off.
The ride was supposed to last most of the day, but the weather was s***e, so we hulled arse back to town.
Later in the afternoon, after some McDs and a snooze, I headed off for a massage. I'm not sure if this was a good idea or a bad idea - I'd had a bad back from lugging my monstrosity of a bag around. I asked the guy to massage hard and hard he did it. At a couple of points, I thought that my organs may pop through my front from the pressure. But in the end it was all worth it - no pain no gain eh?
It was a quiet night, well as quiet as it could be with me laughing loudly at Eddie Murphy's stand up.
We were leaving the next day, but not until late at night, so I mucked around in the room till check out and then toddled down to Dr Lily Li's again to have some reflexology. I was also convinced to have a herbal facial to help with my spotty spot spot face.
That killed a couple of hours, then it was pizza for a late lunch and we then headed for the bus terminal at 5pm.
The bus took us back to Guilin, where we were supposed to catch the train at 7.49pm - it was delayed until after 8.30
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