Guilin & Yangshuo: 10-15 May.

So, back into China. It's only 250 miles northeast from Hanoi to Nanning but it takes 12 hours on the daily overnight train which is cunningly timed so that you hit the border at 2am. After an hour sat in a waiting room on the Vietnamese side while everybody gets stamped out of the country, it's a short trip down the line to experience a Chinese waiting room for another hour while you get stamped in and your luggage x-rayed. We did manage to get some sleep again though before pulling into Nanning later in the morning.

We weren't stopping in Nanning and only had a short lay-over until the next train further north to Guilin, a mere 7-hour jaunt on thinly padded, bolt upright seats. The time actually passed quite quickly and we were checking into our hotel in Guilin before dark, nicely situated on the banks of the Li River, but feeling like we had lost a day.

First impressions of a Chinese city (other than Beijing and Hong Kong of course) are that they are markedly more developed/advanced than the Vietnamese cities we'd just left behind. There are more cars on the road (including European makes, though still lots of bikes); traffic seems less crazy with less honking and more law-abiding and there are actual shops as we would know them with recognisable brands rather than the market-stall type that were common in Vietnam. Much like home really.

Guilin is situated in one of the most naturally beautiful parts of China (“the finest scenery under heaven”), surrounded by limestone hills, similar to those dotted throughout Halong Bay. We spent a day checking out some of the sights in Guilin including a big, 800m long cave inside one of the peaks (handy because it was raining), with colourful lighting illuminating the various rock formations and even an underground market to try and coax a few more yuan out of you. We also arranged a cruise down river to the town of Yangshou the following day and our onward rail tickets (the railways are over-subscribed, so booking ahead is recommended).

Our guide for the cruise to Yangshou picked us up at 8am and we joined the bus heading to the quay (we weren't first on for a change so didn't have to stop at too many other hotels!). Our guide was called Yang Yang, though said his 'western name' was Daniel. Does that make my Chinese name Yang Yang too? I didn't ask as he was quite an excitable fellow already! This was touring Chinese-style and our bus was designated Team Panda. We put on our panda stickers and dutifully followed Yang Yang's panda flag through the ticket queues and onto the right boat and ventured onto the upper deck to admire the view. In the rain. After boasting to Chris halfway up Vietnam that we could count rainy days on our trip on one hand, it seems to have been raining at least every other day since. The wet season's on the way and seems to be racing us northwards.

It's 80km downstream from Guilin to Yangshou, taking about 4-5 hours on the fast-flowing river. Despite the weather, the scenery was great and Yang Yang was working hard making sure that we all saw the best views and (with vast amounts of imagination) the formations/patterns forming '9-Horse Fresco Hill' and 'Celestial Being' and the like. Lunch was included on the boat – a filling buffet of rice, noodles and meats before we pulled into Yangshou.

Yangshou itself is a relatively small town surrounded by farmland amongst the limestone peaks. Tourism is big business and more than 15 million tourists come through here a year; the vast majority of which are Chinese, but there's more than enough westerners so that virtually all of the many restaurants have English menus. We were here for three nights, but with more rain forecast we had signed up for an additional tour with Yang Yang on the afternoon we arrived. We'd signed up in an optimistically dry patch in the weather, but when it came to meeting time, it was bucketing it down again. Yang Yang's spirits were not dampened though and Team Panda rode again.

We stopped at the village of Yulong, just outside Yangshou, where we sheltered from the rain while Yang Yang talked us through village life, recent developments in living standards and the caste system that still seems to apply in certain walks of life. A bit of bamboo rafting followed – we huddled under our borrowed umbrellas while some poor soul punted us along, stopping to feed water buffalo and to see a demonstration of Cormorant Fishing, before returning to Yangshou. Cormorant fishing has been practiced in these parts for hundreds of years; the fisherman sets out on his raft with a couple of trained birds who dive for fish before returning to the raft where the fisherman removes the fish from the bird's throat before throwing the bird back into the water to go fishing again. Ties around the bird's neck prevent them from swallowing the fish, try as they might. The fisherman lets them eat every 8th fish or something. It was fascinating to watch and the birds catch fish so rapidly – apparently one bird can catch up to 50 kilos a day.

We spent the next day exploring the town and then a day getting wet and muddy on bikes exploring the countryside. We visited Moon Hill which was about 10km outside of town and on one of the main roads. Fortunately there were bike lanes keeping us from getting squashed by the multitude of tour buses heading back and forth. The hill itself was a steep climb up to the summit where you pass through a massive arch where the weather has eaten a whole through the top of the hill which resembles a rising moon.

To avoid the main roads back into town, we took off on the side roads along one of the rivers, passing through remarkable scenery and small villages before getting properly lost when the road we thought would lead us back to town kept narrowing before petering out in a bunch of pig-sties. We'd come too far to double back so used the force instead, negotiating some muddy, pot-holed lanes before hitting a road again.

We had time for a hot shower before heading out again to see the open-air show “Impression of Sanjie Liu” that evening. Set on the river, we'd actually had tickets for the previous day but the show had been cancelled due to the rising water levels and our tickets carried forward. After a tiring damp day on bikes, we walked to the meeting place in the rain expecting (and partially hoping!) that it would be cancelled again and we could get a refund and an early night. No such luck though, the show must go on, so we caught a bus 2km out of town to the permanent show venue.

The majority of seats are uncovered and free ponchos are given out with each ticket, so virtually the whole crowd was covered head to toe in the same coloured plastic, looking like some kind of condom-people convention.

The show itself features a cast of more than 600 people set on land and water to song, music and lights. It's directed by a renowned film director and is very impressive, but neither of us have any clue as to what the story was and it was a bit slow and arty in places when more dramatic light-shows would have been a bit more entertaining. It's only an hour long, but the number of people who arrived late, got up and wandered around in the middle and/or left early was amazing. Not sure if the Chinese are renowned for short attention spans but a lot of them seemed to have somewhere better to be despite it being an expensive show (£25 for the cheapest tickets)! We got back into town quite late and ate in a restaurant with a balcony overlooking the hordes of people walking up and down one of the main market streets.

The following day we were catching an overnight train out of Guilin, so it was a short bus ride of about an hour or so back to Guilin where we found a restaurant near the station to shelter from the rain until it was time for our train. It's about 750 miles west to our next stop, Kunming, barely a dent in a country this size. Hopefully it'll be drier there!

Nutts: Thanks for your message. You'll be pleased to know that we have added some new entries to the International Sign-Language Handbook, both courtesy of Sue - “Do you have any deodorant in this shop?” (think of the actions from the Superman song) and “Can you take us to the train station?” (think Locomotion by Kylie with train sound effects).

Take care all,
Dan & Sue