First Day in Yangshuo

Andrew and I both managed to get out of bed yesterday and after a breakfast-at-lunch-time, decided to take advantage of the lack of rain (despite the forecast) and explore the area.  Our hotel is really close to the Yulong river, and we rented a bamboo raft and poleman to take us down the river.  We sat on the raft for an idyllic 1.5 hours, slowly poling down the calm shallow river, with the famous mountains of this area protruding majestically on either side.  I am having trouble describing the 'mountains'  because they are not really mountains as I normally think of them, with huge gradual ascents and really  high peaks with snow on them, or whole communities tucked away on the moutainsides.  The ' mountains' here are much smaller, and more sudden, like some gigantic hand dropped a huge pointy boulder down on a flat landscape...multiple times, in close succession.  They are clearly rock, with sheer limestone faces, but much of them is covered with green vegetation, because they are not really that high.  They provide a really beautiful scenery, especially floating down a river in between them, and with the mist here due to the rainy weather it is quite atmospheric.

This is not the best photo I have but you get the idea...expect more photos soon!

After our bamboo rafting trip, we biked back to the hotel along the river.  We passed tiny villages with farmyards and threshing platforms abutting the road, and peasants  working in the fields or at machinery.  There were HUGE fenced in chicken coops, with hundreds of chickens...clothes hanging out to dry blowing in the wind...dirty exhaust-producing trucks blowing by us with stacked bamboo rafts...running children...water buffalo and cows grazing... in short, very rural scenes which look peaceful but are in fact anything but.

In the evening, we went to a famous light show on the Li River in town.  It was choreographed by the same man as designed the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics, and everyone here seems very proud of the fact.  It was quite impressive, we don't seem to have the same skills with choreography on a massive scale using hundreds of people as the Chinese do.  It would have been better if we'd understood the Chinese in the speeches and songs, but there were still dazzling ethnic minority costumes, bright spotlights and dancers, and a really neat sequence where men in bamboo rafts pulled themselves along the lake in big rows with huge red sheets, all in tandem to make patterns.  All-in-all it was a good first day in Yangshuo!