My time in Yangshou has been really nice. The first day we got here it was raining so we had a quick explore and stayed in the hostel. They guys who advised us to climb the rice terraces happened to be at the hostel too so we shared our experience.

The next day I decided to chill out and research my Hong Kong and Vietnam part of the trip. Very productive day. I went for a walk down the li river found a burger place and had lunch. I was happy when a strip burger came out! Yess. But where's my cheese though?

I ended up finding a local market - not quite Leicester market I tell you. First it was "okay", fruit and veg stalls and then washing up bowls full of live fish. I stopped for a while watching the fish, snakes, crabs and all sorts wiggling around trying to escape the tubs. I went deeper into the market and the smells of meat got stronger. Stalls with what looks like super fried animal parts were hanging their meat out - yuck. I wandered thorough, past the pickle everything stall and ended up in the 2nd half of the market. This market was loud and I thought I could hear chicken. I walked to the back and I was in the fresh meat sections. There were women butchers chopping up chickens and ducks. By this point the noise was loud and I turned to see about 50 cages of chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits and all sorts of live animals. Definitely increased my fear of meat (I've had "chicken" 3 times in 2 weeks - almost vegetarian ha!). Well I left the market and went had candy floss in the park.

I went back to the market later on to show Alex and to my horror they had added dead dog and live cats to the mix. China you need some help.

The next day we went to Xing Ping, a village 40 mins away from Yangshuo. A beautiful place with karst mountains around the river. It is the scenery for the 20 yuan note. We hiked for 10 miles then decided to get a bamboo boat back down the river. We waved at the boats and they ignored us and waved their hands. Slightly confused we thought we would head to the village to see if someone would take. Eventually, a lady said she would take us for £30 and we says no way £10. After haggling we agreed on £17 for both of us. We went to her house she said some thing to her husband who looked annoyed and then we went to the boat. 15 minutes into the journey we saw the boat police and the woman did a complete u-turn pulled onto the rocks and begged us to get off. She pulled off her life jacket and we also did and she pleaded for us to go with her. We ended up running through some orchids to a road side where she was freaking out. Obviously she wasn't licensed to drive the boat!! She hailed down a random car and paid him £6 to take us to where we wanted to go. Very funny experience.

I'm just about to start my journey to Hong Kong and say goodbye to the wonderful world of China.

I will post again when I reach Hong Kong! Bye byeee.