On Monday morning (13th) the four of us set off with Alice, along with a young French couple, at 9.30am on bikes and headed out of the city and up along the side of the Yulang River where we ended up going up the Yulong river on a bamboo raft - each couple on a separate raft with a local guy poling us along the river for nearly two hours - just lovely and very relaxing. However every hundred metres or so there were rafts set up on the river with gazebos set up on them with chillers and women trying to sell us bottles of beer, water, coke etc. We had a little bit of drizzly rain so then a sun umbrella was put up to cover us, although our one had quite a few holes in it! We had quite a few over falls to go over and was interesting how the rafts went down over them, with just our feet getting wet. When we got to the finish Alice met us there with our bikes which were taken down river by truck. The rafts were then loaded on trucks to take them back upstream.
We then carried on cycling and stopped at a place called Moon Hill Cafe for a lovely lunch. Jim and the French couple climbed up the steep hill as far as the moon crescent while the rest of us waited at the cafe for lunch.
It was a good chance to have a chat with Alice. She is married with a son aged 5 and it costs her 700 CNY a month to send him to school. She works long hours at Trippers Carpe Diem but her mother in law lives with them and looks after the son when he is not at home and she is working. Her husband is a driver who takes tourists around. It is very common seeing the grandmothers or grandfathers looking after the children, including babies. To have sons is more important than having girls so if the first born is a girl couples are allowed to have another baby in the hope of the next one being a boy. However, if a son is the first born and a couple wish to have another baby they have to pay the Government 25,000CNY which of course most cannot afford. However if a Chinese girl marries an expatriate she can have as many children as she likes. There are certainly some beautiful looking Chinese girls around and all the Chinese we have seen are all well dressed.
So far the cities we have seen are all very clean and tidy and recycling is encouraged. You see the obvious poor people raiding the recycling bins, obviously to earn a few extra from bottles etc. It amazes us how the old people who look as though they are in their eighties and nineties out there trying to sell trinkets, flowers etc. to the tourists.
Monday night Joy, Dave and I went to see the most amazing light show with 600 performers in Yangshuo virtually all done on water. It is all done on the Li River with 12 karst peaks in the background. It was choreographed by the guy who did the lighting show for the Beijing Olympics. We were all seated and there were no spare seats and we think it would have held approximately 7000 people. They generally have two shows a night, but we went to the earlier show and did not get back to our guest house until just before 10pm. The taxi driver organised our tickets for us through 3 or 4 different people and it was amazing how it all happened as we did not decide to go until about 6pm.
Yesterday at mid day we had a taxi pick us up and take us to the bus station where we caught a bus back to Guilin. Had time to pick up our train tickets from the Manager of the hostel we stayed at in Guilin, leave our luggage there while we went and had a late lunch and get a bit of food to take on the train. We had to be at the train station an hour before so got there at 3.40pm and the train left right on time - 4.56pm - an 18 hour trip to Kunming. They have what they call hard sleepers and soft sleepers. A hard sleeper is an open cabin with 6 bunks - 3 each side with a 65mm mattress with duvet and pillow. A soft sleeper is considerably dearer and you have a private cabin for four. We have opted for the hard sleepers and on this trip we specified that we wanted to be in the same cabin with the bottom and middle bunks. Fortunately on this trip we had no one on the top bunks and we all had a reasonable night's sleep.
We arrived in Kunming at exactly 11am, caught a bus to "The Hump" which is the hostel we are staying at - quite a neat place and virtually in the centre of Kunming. Had lunch here at the Hump and then did a bit of a walk around the city. It is certainly cooler here as it is 1890 m above sea level so is very pleasant. As there isn't a lot of things to see here we will take a sleeper train to Dali tomorrow night which is an eight hour trip.