This morning we got up to find the weather was holding out for us... It was cloudy and cooler and looked like it was about to rain, but hey, it wasn't raining *yet*. So we rented bikes once again.
We headed out on a route drawn out by our hotel, which was on a backroad through the country alongside the yulong river, a tributary of the li river. The yulong was really scenic, with motorless bamboo rafts and men using long poles to navigate them down the river. We reached a bridge and crossed the river, and biked a little bit more to a well known sight, the moonhill. The ride took about 45 minutes. Add more time for us getting lost.
The moonhill is one of the kart peaks, but it's unique because it forms a hollow arch at the top, and the hollow looks like a half moon. We hiked up the 800 steps to the moonhill hollow, and you could see across the city and countryside both ways. It was a good hike. We walked back down and meandered our way back to the farmhouse by bike.
You see such unreal things on these bike rides; elderly women with two huge baskets of produce, each on one end of a pole strung across her shoulders. Men herding groups of 10+ cattle down the road. Tiny shacks with families cooking lunch over a fire. Women plucking and gutting chickens into nearby streams. Young children doing laundry outside in buckets, then hanging it to dry. Families young and old caring for their fields. Chickens running in the way of your bike. And the people, on the whole, are very nice! Yesterday evening we went for a walk through the village our farmhouse is located in, and the people were pretty friendly. Just watching them live their lives, I can't imagine it. It's pretty unreal, having grown up in Vancouver.
We got back to the farmhouse after lunch and lay on the couches by the fire for several hours, just chilling out and catching up on some food after all the exercise this morning. Yangshuo is just such a perfect place to relax and enjoy. The staff ordered a taxi for us at 5:45 and we had a quick shuttle over to the yangshuo bus station. Then we hopped on a bus that stopped at the main Guilin train station, taking around an hour and a half. We found our waiting bay after a run in with a very unhelpful worker lady, and sat near the ticket checking station. We saw what we thought was another train boarding, an kept waiting. At about 8:50, the sign lit up announcing that ticket check for our train was open and to then board platform 2. We waited for the lady to come to the ticket check window, but she didn't. So we kept waiting. It was 9:05, our train scheduled to leave at 9:18, and I finally decided to ask a group of older Chinese friends also waiting in our bay what was going on. I showed our tickets to them and they jumped up and started yelling with panic. They called over the unhelpful worker lady from before and after a quick exchange in Chinese the worker lady took off running with us in tow. She ran us onto our train, and we got on minutes before it left. I'm still shocked we're on this train.
This train is a different company from the first one we were on, and it's not quite up to the same standard. By this I mean questionably stained bedding and rice caked into my blanket. Its also much louder as it runs along the tracks, and its movements are much more jerky. But hey, the train wasn't full so we got a compartment to ourselves, despite the 4 beds per compartment. Hopefully we get some sleep!