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Day 10 Guilin
After descending from the Rice Terraces, we commandeer a minivan with a Scottish couple who are the first people we have really spoken to since being away, to take us the two hours to Guilin. The guy looks like Billy Connelly and is wearing a Scottish football top just in case anyone mistakes him for being English I suppose. We are being approached quite regularly by Chinese people who want their photo taken with a westerner and some kids at our hotel in Guilin (our next stop) want to know where we are from; what our favourite sport is etc. Apparently all children start learning English at school from the age of 5 now, so whenever we are stuck, we look for the youngest person around us to help us explain what we want. We spend the rest of the afternoon lounging by the pool before booking our trip down the Li River for the next day.
Day 11/12 Li River Trip and Yangshuo
You will have to take our word for how beautiful the Li River is as we managed to lose the photos that we took. The Li River scenery is used in many Chinese paintings and on one of their banknotes. The boat trip takes about 4 hours to arrive in Yangshuo which is a more like a back packer centre than anywhere else we have seen so far - lots of cheap restaurants and people just hanging out. The weather is tropical here and we are staying out of town in a retreat by a small river with amazing views of the many limestone karsts that dominate the scenery. There is a constant flow of small bamboo rafts being punted down the river and over a small weir just where we are staying. Mahjong is banned here as it is too loud!!! The following day we rent bikes to cycle around the countryside and climb a small mountain called Moon Hill for panoramic views. In the evening we take a trip to watch local fishermen who use cormorants to swim along side their boats and catch fish for them by forcing the birds to regurgitate the fish.
Day 13 Guilin to Hanoi, Vietnam
We have to get back to Guilin today to catch the train to Hanoi and need to get up early to take a hot air balloon ride which really has to be the highlight of the trip so far. It is the first time either of us has been ballooning and something on my list of things to do before I die (although choosing to do it in China it might actually be the last thing I do before I die). There is no safety briefing, we just hop in and take off. The flames burn your head but the pilot seems to know what he is doing and is able to sail between the karsts and hover just above the vegetation before taking us high into the sky. We are airborne for about 45 minutes before landing on a soon to be opened motorway. Our train leaves at 1430 and will arrive the next morning in Hanoi at eight. We don't really know what to expect as we have not been able to find too much info on the internet. We end up sharing a 4 berth cabin with 2 Aussies who have just retired and are off travelling as they had done 40 years previously. They are great company and the time flies swapping stories and drinking green tea and eating pot noodles, before heading to the dining car for a few beers.
After about 6 hours we have to leave the train at Nanning for an hour while some of the carriages are split off, and then we settle down to sleep once we get back on and head towards the China/Vietnam border. At midnight the lights come on and the Chinese immigration officers want to see our passports and are trying to work out why Lil does not speak Mandarin. It really is a rude shock to be woken up (blind without our contact lenses) with all the commotion. But the lights go off again and we sleep until 2 hours later when they return to give our passports back and the train sets off again. An hour later (0300) we have to get off the train with all our belongings to clear Vietnamese immigration and change trains. It is only when we reach the immigration office that I realise that I have left my passport under my pillow on the Chinese train and panic sets in as the train is already locked up and I have visions of it setting off back to Beijing leaving me stranded in no mans land. Lil is now looking after my passport as I cannot be trusted!! We are a motley collection as we clear immigration which takes about an hour - Mongolian students and two middle aged guys from Birmingham who looked like they popped out to get a paper but were actually travelling all the way to Singapore by train having set off from Moscow a few weeks earlier. We spend the last few hours of the train journey watching the green and fertile Vietnamese countryside pass by.
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