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 train journey from Shanghai, which was...long. We entertained ourselves by reading, eating, talking and sleeping as much as possible. It didn't help that after the train ride we had a 1.5 hour bus ride, but we did survive!

In my day of Shanghai I actually got to hang out with a friend from Weston! Charles Gertler has been living in China for the past 5 and a half months, so obviously we HAD to meet up, us both being in CHINA and all. For a few precious hours I got to experience what it's like to travel with someone who actually speaks the language of the country...believe me it was really useful. We went to the Shanghai museum and saw the calligraphy and jade exhibits and then found a foreign book store where I bought the largest Stephen King book I could find (and got half way through it on the train!). Its kind of a bad thing now though since I'm a bit hooked on it so half of me just wants to read while the other half wants to explore this awesome place I'm in.

We had a group dinner in Yangshuo last night (since it was our first night here) at a restaurant called Lucy's Place. Turns out Lucy is an Intrepid leader herself! The meal was pretty good, but I don't think the restaurant was used to having so many orders at once since they did not come out together at all and some orders were forgotten. It ended up getting pretty bad so we all got free dessert...which was reallly really good fried banana with ice cream and chocolate sauce...mmmmm.

This morning we headed back to Lucy's Place for a western style breakfast (it was pretty good) and then walked around a bit before going bamboo rafting down the Li river. The river rafting was gorgeous! Tonight we are all going to check out the night scene in Yangshuo, which should be pretty good.

Tomorrow we leave Yangshuo to go to a home stay in a village about 15 minutes away. In the next couple days we will be teaching english to local kids, going for a 4 hour bike ride, taking a cooking class, and just soaking in the area! This trip has gone by really fast, and it's actually the longest of the three Intrepid tours i am doing. We are on day 13 of 20 days in total...over half way!

P.S Dad- where the group photo was taken in front of the mountain is where I was when you called me!