GUILIN: SAWTOOTH MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

Monday, January 26th, 2009
Arrival at Guilin.

We boarded this plane in Shenzhen for a 60 minute flight to Guilin. The weather was overcast with scattered showers, and when we arrived in Guilin it was cold. We went straight to our hotel and got settled in a cold room. We didn't feel like unpacking, which was strange because that is the first thing we usually do. We went for a walk and caught a number of buses around town, to see where to go in Guilin. We had this really good map that showed all the buses to take to the places we would want to see. When we finished exploring the city on the bus we went back to the hotel to unpack.

That night when we went down to eat Chinese, but the chef and staff were celebrating the New Year and so they didn't want to serve us. I think they were closed. It was really a good thing because we went for another walk and went just one block away to another hotel. It was quite nice and after we ate their buffet, we asked to look at their rooms. They showed us one and we said we would be back tomorrow to stay for the week.

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

This is us pulling our bags over to the new hotel. They let us check in at 10:00 am. After checking in we talked to the Assistant Manager, who speaks great English, and he spent the time telling us all the things we should go and see and helping us arrange our tour plans. He also suggested that we would enjoy spending some time in Sanya, a place like Hawaii - only Chinese style. We decided we didn't want to go back to the freezing cold of Jinan quite yet, and we were having such a great time being Gypsies, that we made plane reservations to stay there from February 2nd through the February 11th.

The first thing that Fun, (the assistant manager) thought we should see was the Red Flute Caves. We could get their by taking bus #11 right in front of our hotel. So with his reassurance that we could find it easily and having gone all over the city the day before on buses we set off that afternoon... This is Mr. Fun.

......while on the bus I asked, "Does anyone here speak English, and where on this map do we need to get off." A young couple (they were just good friends who had met and worked in Yellowstone last summer) said that they were going to the same place and we could follow them.

This was Bryan and Natasha and we would spend the whole day and evening with them. We went into this wonderful cave. There seems to be caves in every mountain in Guilin. I didn't know this, but Jay really loves to go into caves and any adventure really. You can never do justice in pictures of caves. The Mountians of Guilin really do look like this. After our cave experience we were talking about what they were going to do on Wednesday and the next thing we knew we were buying tickets for a tour on to Yangshuo and the Li River. After that we all went to a Buddha temple. I think it was at the temple that we somehow lost our video camera out of our bag, the camera that had the video tape of Jay dancing at the China Cultural Center Show. OUR FIRST BIG LOSS. A SET BACK. We think that Gypsies have these all the time. At least it was not out passports or wallets...

We went through these red doors and into another cave with lots of Buddha gods. I found out that I was born in the year of the monkey and Jay in the year of chicken. Now we worship them.

Along the way we sat and wrote our name in Chinese characters.

Afterwards we went to this wonderful American Food Restaurant (also, where I might have dropped or lost the video camera) and Jay had his first steak (really great) in 4 months and I had a stuffed chicken breast. On the way home we discovered that we didn't have the video camera and we went back to see if we could find it, but we couldn't.

We went home tired and ready to go to sleep. The next day tour was one that I had been looking forward to since I first found out we were going to China.

It follows below. The Mountains of Guilin.