The last two days have been amazing, by far the best two days so far. Yesterday, 10 of us got up, had breakfast and rented bikes for a ride in the countryside. We opted out of a getting a guide, wanting instead to be on our own, out of the tourist loop. Anyway, they were selling maps of bike routes so that's all we really needed anyway...right? The maps turned out to have a major gap in them. They showed a large map of all the bike routes around Yangshuo, and an ...

I love Yangshuo. If you can't tell from the photos, this place is gorgeous. It is surrounded by stunning mountains, alongside the CLEAR and CLEAN Li river, and filled with narrow streets with cafes and market stands. Here we are staying at a hotel called the Fawlty Towers, and despite its slightly crumbling appearance, it has some of the softest beds we've encountered so far (and that means a lot to a traveler in China). Getting here required taking a 24 hour t...