First day in Guilin, China

Thursday 7 June


The hostel is lovely.  We have a huge room on the 2nd floor, with a king size bed (though we are soon to find that the bottom sheet isn't quite big enough to tuck into the mattress and comes adrift in the night), and we have ensuite facilities with towels supplied (always a bonus).  The room and bed are clean, which is a relief, and there's a kettle supplied.  You never have tea and coffee supplied in hostels obviously, but twice now we've had a kettle in the room. (We have our own back-up travel kettle anyway, which we bought in Kazakhstan).

We're pleased to find that even though we're on the 2nd floor, we have wifi access in our room, which is really useful, as well as it being delightful to open up the computer in the morning and find emails from friends and family; we are 7 hours head, so if anyone's written to us after about 3 pm the previous day we'll receive it the following morning before we get up.

Before doing anything else we dump our luggage in the room and order breakfast - this time with bacon!  It's delicious!  We return to our room and I post the blog and emails I wrote in Open Office on the train, then we catch up on sleep.  It's surprising how tired we always feel after a journey.  We rest and relax in our room all afternoon, and eat Chinese food in the hostel early evening.  We get chatting to 2 lads from London who've come to China for a year as part of a course they're doing in International Management at Middlesex University,   They're going to be learning Chinese while they are here.  Their course in China doesn't start until August, but they've come to China early to get a head start on learning the language.

After our meal we venture out into night-time Guilin, taking our life into our hands as we cross roads at designated crossings that are completely ignored by all forms of traffic.  The only way to get across the busy main road is to take a deep breath and venture forth - traffic then either stop, skirt round you, slow down, or nip in front of you.

We buy yet another backpack, as the one we bought in Beijing has a broken zip and is falling apart already.  This new one is stronger and we pay more for it, though bargaining brings the price down.  The shopkeeper can't speak much English at all, but to our amusement, someone has written down several phrases in English for the shopkeeper to pass on to his customers.  He points to the different phrases on his sheet of paper:

"This bag is very good quality"

"This bag is very strong, with good zips"

"This bag will give you 10 years wear"

"Very good make"

Reg pops into a couple of shops to look at cameras (though doesn't think he'll buy one in China as they are more expensive than in England).  While he does this I watch the "cycle lane" traffic passing in front of me, which consists mainly of motor scooters, very few with any lights on, and none with helmets. Some have an adult with a young child behind, a couple have 2 adults with a child in between (in one case a mother holding a young baby).  One has an adult on the front, with a child aged about 5 on the back, and wedged in between the 2 is a young baby.  The road is wet from earlier rain, and there is a continuing stream of traffic in this "cycle lane", some scooters overtaking others as they go along; and there are cyclists too, often carrying 2 people.

Things are just different in China.

book up a boat trip for the following day,