The sun is finally shining!!! We are back in thongs and shorts and i even got a little sun burn the other day.

From Guilin we took a boat cruise down the Lijian River to the quite farming town of Yangshou. Being backpackers we decided to take the 'Chinese' boat that was almost half the price of the 'Western' boat. Lucky we did as we found out later that everything is the same except for the on-board commentary which wasn't that good anyway. So for 4 hours we cruised down the river with beautiful amongst the chinese tourists. Other than us there was 2 other foreigners. We became friends with Celine and Nadine, mother and daughter from France. We were fortunate to meet them as they took us to the hotel they were staying at and it was the same price as the hostel we had book but it was much better. For $11 a night we are staying in a queen bed room with aircon, TV and DVD, wester toilet, bath and shower with hot water and a balcony with river views. We bought some DVD's on the street for $1.20 and have watched a few already.

Yangshou is much more touristy than Guilin but in a good way. There are loads of markets with the usually fake stuff. We bought some north face jackets today for $25 each. The other good thing is that all the menus are in english so we have had no trouble ordering food. We did get adventurous though and took a motorbike to the 'local' food markets. Here we found toads, water snakes, dog and all sorts of other weird delicacies which off course we were not game to try. In the end we mumble jumbled our way into ordering some noodle with beef and pork, not that we could find the meat as they put such small amounts of it in their dishes.

With our new friends from France we hired a guide to take us through the mountains to explore the farming life of Yangshou. Lucky we hired a guide because you can easily get lost in the maze of farms amoungst the millions of mountains surrounding us. Life on the farms here is very primitive but the farms do look very rich in produce. Here they farm rice, potatoe, lotus, lettuce and a heap of other stuff i had never heard of. There was also fish farms along the river bed that winds through the farms.

Today we meet some local college students who asked us to come and see their school and chat with them to help them with their conversational english. We went along and had a chat for a couple of hours.

Till next time.

Gis and Trent