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| Yangshao - Dragon Bridge |
From the Maldives, we take a 9 hour flight to Hong Kong via Kuala Lumpur where we spend a busy 4 days catching up with family and friends (quick shout out to Phil for surrendering his bed for 3 nights, thank you so much! To Uncle Steven, Ross, Eva, Ulric, DD, Bet, Jack, Jeff, Anita, Ken, Glor – it was great to see all of you and thank you again for all of your generosity. And Gin, I am sure I will see you soon!).
And then on our last night in Hong Kong, we commence Part 2 of our excellent adventure which I will deem the “tour” portion of our trip. During this tour portion, we are taking a 17 day tour from Hong Kong to Beijing, staying in Beijing for a few days and then taking an 18 day tour from Beijing to St. Petersburg.
We meet up with our tour group and it’s a great bunch – 8 Aussies, 5 people from the U.K. and us 2 Canadians. We are all around the same age and surprisingly enough, 4 out of the 5 couples are newlyweds like Vic and I. Our Chinese born guide is English speaking, and also happens to be named Victor as well.
It feels strange being on a tour. After nearly 2 months of planning all the logistics of where to go, how to get there, finding accommodations and then planning out what we’re going to do each day, it’s a big change to sit back, relax and follow a set itinerary. Gone are the days of pouring over our travel books, trying to figure out how to get from point A to B and running around to different guest houses once we get to our destination in order to find the best place to stay. I ask Vic, what is the best part about being on a tour and his response is “we don’t have to plan anything”, and when I ask him what’s the worst part, his response is again, “we don’t get to plan anything”. I have to agree.
From Hong Kong, we board a 3 hour hydrofoil (big boat) to Guangzhou, and then after a quick lunch and a little bit of exploring, we board an overnight train to Guilin. What is our first impression of China? First off, it is a lot cleaner than what we expected. Many of the streets in the towns and cities are lined with trees and there are a lot of pretty Asian inspired gardens scattered all over the country. Secondly, the country is a lot more developed than we expected. And lastly, English is not hardly used or spoken at all in China except in very touristy areas.
When we get to Guilin, we take a 1 ½ hour bus ride to Yangshao, a small little town where we will be staying for the next 2 nights. The scenery in this area is spectacular. Hundreds of green hills forming a beautiful backdrop against the town we are staying in with a sort of romantic haze forever looming in the background. In between the hills are hundreds of rice paddies and little villages and the occasional temple set high on one of the hills. We spend the next two days exploring the beautiful countryside by bicycle, taking a sunset ride on a bamboo raft along the Wulong River on one night and watching locals catch fish with cormorants on the other.
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| Bamboo Rafting |
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| Cormorant Fishing |
