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 inset of Yangshuo, but neglected to tell you how to get from inner Yangshuo to the bike routes. I was holding the map, so automatically became the ask-for-directions person. Eventually we got on what we believed to be the right road and started enjoying the gorgeous scenery. We were on a large paved road that wound through different villages and farms. I was asking for directions at most places we went through, especially when seeing people became rarer and rarer. After about 14km we started going down this MASSIVE hill and landed up in a small town at the bottom. When I asked them to point out where we were on the map...turned out we were 14km away from I thought we were(and from where locals kept telling me we where..im guessing the language barrier was to blame). This is where the real adventure started.

Some of the locals were downright scared to talk to us, while others gabbed away in chinese to us. There was no way we were going to bike back up that massive hill (it was huge) so we decided to go continue on another suggested bike route out of the northern side of the villlage...but we didnt know how to get there. We tried going down the main road of the town, but ended up in a dead end by the river so we decided to stop for lunch instead. There were some old men near by, so one of the guys got nominated to ask for directions...again. After some miming and lots of pointing on the map, it seemed as though one man was offering Ed (the guy who asked for directions) a ride on the back of his motorbike to show him the right way to go...after a lot more miming and pointing it turned out he wanted 100 Yuan to do it. We weren't willing to pay so we got our bikes and left to find our own way. Seeing as the town was made up of one paved road, and then some back dirt alleyways, we decided to try one of the dirt tracks (definitely couldnt call it a road). We ended up outside someone's house...so i walked along their path and came upon an old chinese woman pulling leaves off a massive branch. I pointed on the map to where we wanted to go and she pointed for me to continue in the direction I was going..so I rallied up the others and we continued on. We ended up biking through places where I would guess people had never seen a westerner before. We were going down gravel paths, dirt tracks, through the woods on grass tracks, and then finally on a semi decent hard dirt road (almost wide enough for two people to ride comfortably next to each other, but not three). We saw such amazing things off the normal bike path. We need we had to bike along the river and that would bring us back to yangshuo eventually, so we were never really scared. When we eventually found the river, it was hidden behind some trees so we hopped off our bikes and hiked a bit to see it. It was absolutely gorgeous, see my photos! Eventually, we were led to the paved road again and 25 miles after we started we were back at the bike shop and taking victory photos.

my internet will cut out soon and then i must go get dinner and snacks for the next few days as we will be hiking through the rice terraces in Longji so I will have to write about my great day today later!