Yangshou

As expected, I come back from vacation and I'm swamped with work. I'm just now getting around to uploading my photos to Flickr [about 1/3 are up as of now]. The basic jist of what we did was take a night bus [fine] to Yangshou for May Holiday, stayed in the town for three nights but prices kept rising because of the massive influx of Chinese tourist, then moved into a village for the last three days. Most of our time was spent relaxing, hiking, and biking around the countryside of the YuLong River valley. I got my groove back with photography :-)


Before I went, I asked a friend who had been whether or not it's "China beautiful or World-class beautiful." My own answer is that nobody who makes a trip out there will be disappointed. It's a stunning and charming land with friendly locals and laid-back visitors.Some memorable points, in no order, as jotted down sitting down in a tea shop before the [worst] night bus [ever] left for Shenzhen:

• Finding our own valley (behind the mountains in the first picture)
  
  
• A strange bird who's ghostly noise was a long, steady single note that rose gradually before breaking into in short birst of chirps. Found higher up in the mountains, I first discovered it...
  
  
• Finding a Taiping Rebellion-era fort built into the side of karst. No maps mentioned it and I only happened to find it while climbing a bit and having...
  
  
• A little girl offering Hera and I unripe pears as she and her friends played on a trail we were hiking up
  
  
• Trying, unsuccessfully, to befriend a peasant's cow.
  
  
• Riding in a (tethered) hot air balloon for ten minutes.
  
  
• "Bamb - oooooo" The other English word, after "hello," that every villager within 100 miles knew. It was lucrative business of sending tourist down the river on bamboo rafts.
  
  
• "Hello, beer?" The business-pitch of a small restaurant owner every time I walked past.
  
  
• Having a local de-mud our bikes the last day. The mud was everywhere and created a significant problem of getting the wheels to, ya know, spin. He cleaned it in a rice patty water-hole with patches of weed and grass he grabbed.
  
  
• Five possible dishes to choose in the village. Five.
  
  
• Noting the almost total absence of people between the ages of 20 to 50 in the villages, mainly skewed towards men. They've all gone to the cities to work in the factories leaving grandparents to do the farming.
  
  
• A foreign kleptomaniac snatching Hera's phone and camera out of her bag
  
  
• Wondering whether caribou have the right-of-way.
  
  
• A cool peasant-dude who wanted to chill and chat by the river with us after I fell into his rice patty
  
  
• Not thinking about work for a week.
  
  
• Meeting a Danish fellow who was towards the end of his
  Denmark-Russia-Kazakhstan-China bicycle journey.