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Hi all.
We have had a bit more of a relaxing week since our last blog. The pandas were great fun. In the nursery we saw the babies in incubators, the youngsters wrestling and the adults sitting and eating bamboo! We took lots of photos and we will try our best to get them on the site when we get to Hong Kong - hope that's okay Dan and Soo! Thanks for sorting out the Dunkley's senior but we have not heard anything from them yet!
The boat cruise was enjoyable but not quite as good as the fjords in Norway but we did see some wild monkeys and ancient coffins in caves half way up the cliffs. It was nice to get away from the big cities for a few days. The cities here, as you can imagine, are massive and extremely chaotic as most have a population well in to the millions. Rush hour is fun with cars, buses, motorcyles, rickshaws and bicycles paying no attention to the rules of the road!
We took our final overnight train journey (third class) and spent most of the sixteen hours playing cards and drinking beer - anything to put off going to sleep in the hot, noisy and grubby compartment!
We are currently in Yangshuo surrounded by stunning and unusual karst mountains (see above photo). We have been lucky enough to see this amazing scenery both from above in a fantastic sunrise hotair balloon ride and from below on a bamboo (plastic pipe!) boat ride down the Li River - both highly recommended! The sun is finally out. It must be in the mid 30s and extremely humid.
We are both about to try the local speciality of beer fish for lunch, just one of the many tasty local dishes we have tried. The more local the restaurant we have been to, the tastier the food is - although our guide keeps telling us that we need to have a strong stomach to try it! Our chopstick skills have improved greatly and we can now pick up peanuts easily, although the mash potato was not so easy - yes I did say mash potato! The Chinese have recently discovered potatoes and we have had it as part of a banquet in several forms, most memorably little roasties covered in caramel!!!
Flying to Shanghai tomorrow for our last few days in China.
Bye for now, K & D.
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