Everybody was Kung Fu fighting.... - Yangshuo, China
Yangshuo, China
After the bullet train we got a couple of local buses to our hostel and ventured out to snack street for some food. Snack Street had loads of stalls that sold different types of the usual street food, you know, such as bugs, cocoons, live frogs, oysters, squid and crabs. We had a good wander up and down before finding somewhere to eat, we opted for a squid kebab (Ange wasn't a big fan of the tentacles), a Korean pancake type dish, some chicken wings, lamb kebabs and noodles, all cooked fresh for us. The food was delicious and was made even better by the bottle of beer that cost 30p. The next day we made our own way on local buses to the Longmen Caves. These were pretty cool and had we not already seen the Yungang Caves in Datong we would've liked them even more but we ended up comparing them and the ones at Yungang were much better. Again we went to snack street for dinner, nothing too extravagant this time though, we couldn't pluck up the courage to try the bugs. After dinner we went back to the hostel for some beers and Jimmy met some new friends; a kitten and a puppy... Jimmy hates cats and dogs... now he wants one of each... both of them curled up on Jimmy's lap and fell asleep and were really cute (see photo). We then went to the Shaolin Temple (again by public transport but about 1.5 hours away). The Temple itself was really cool, we had a walk around the pagoda forest, but the best part was the Kung Fu show, lots of cool tricks, demonstrations with members of the audience, which was hilarious, and a guy smashing a metal bar over his head. There's also a really nice walk that you can do there but unfortunately we didn't have time as we had to get back for our train journey to Chengdu. The train journey was the longest we would have in China (18 hours), so when you get on the train the last thing you want to see is an old Chinese woman sat on your bed. But there she was, sat on Jimmy's bed, didn't speak a word of English and had the top bunk, as much as Jimmy wanted to kick her out and send her up to the top, it was either cuddle up with her or be the gentleman and take the top bunk, she wasn't his type so Jimmy went up to the top bunk. We arrived in Chengdu and decided to have a bit of a relax and had a wander around the city where we came across another of the BBQ do-it-yourself restaurants, this time we had beef, chicken and ox-tongue. The ox-tongue was lovely. The next night we joined a dumpling party at the hostel, there were only 4 people at the party (including us) but the dumplings were really tasty and went down well with some beers whilst watching some films. The next morning we got up early and went on a tour with the hostel to the Panda breeding centre (£12 each). We were the first ones there and got a quiet walk around, we saw 2 month old pandas, 1 year old pandas, 2 year old pandas and lots of adult pandas, there were also lots of red pandas. It's really amazing to see how small they are when they are born compared with how big they grow as an adult, you could fit the newborn in the palm of your hand. After the trip we had our flight to Guilin, it was either fly or a 25 hour train journey which we didn't really fancy. We then got picked up from the airport by our hostel and taken to Yangshou where we were to spend the next 4 days. Yangshou has amazing scenery, lots of karst limestone peaks everywhere you look, however it is very touristy in the centre of town (West Street). The first day we rented some mountain bikes from the hostel and headed to Moon Hill via Dragon Bridge. Unfortunately we didn't make it to Dragon Bridge but had a nice cycle through fish farms, villages and rice paddies - we weren't lost just took a different route to the map. When we eventually found out where we were we had to cross the river on a bamboo raft with our bikes, still not lost. We eventually found our way to Moon Hill and managed to get some food after 5 hours non-stop cycling (about 50km covered). We had a really nice sizzling duck dish, we'd had big cravings for duck since Beijing. We didn't fancy the snake wine though, which was basically a big jar of snakes with some kind of liquid soaking up the flavour of the snakes, we'll leave that to next time. So after 5 hours of cycling the last thing you need is to have to walk up a hill to the Moon Hill viewpoint... more steps, more walking = sore legs, but a nice view from the top. The following day we rented bikes again and went to the Mud Caves and Hot Springs, this was really relaxing and we really enjoyed it. The entrance also included a guided tour around some caves where there were some shapes on the ceiling that, according to the guide "they rook rike a breast" (Chinese accent), obviously we wouldn't notice such a thing but after she told us it had us in stitches. The next day we had booked on to a cooking class, thankfully no bikes this day. We'd definitely recommend doing this, it was an amazing experience, we had a tour around the local market then were taken to a lovely farmhouse for the class. This was much better than the India cooking class as we had our own work surface and actually cooked the food ourselves. Obviously the food was amazing and we learnt some good recipes including the local specialty, beer fish, who wants an invite to Chinese night when we get back??? For a change the next day we decided to hire some bikes and set off on a tour to XingPing, the scenery here is on the back of the 20 Yuan note. This turned out to be a lot further than we had expected and we managed to rack up around 65km this time... a long way for a 2 minute stop at a viewpoint and half a pizza. When we got back we got the bus back up to Guilin where we had a train down to Guangzhou and on to Hong Kong. All blogs have now been updated with photos, have a look. The tiger ones are pretty cool. We have some other good photo's of China that we would've put on here but Jimmy's memory card is on the blink so can't get the photos off yet.