Guro and Caroline Blog

will get to vietnam soon....

Happy birthday Guros lille snille bror!! (excuse the poor norwegian accent) will have some special rice wine in your honour tonight!
still in hanoi so sketchy memory back to lijiang but will try to continue this epic. much more fun now we can add photos!!
Back in lijiang for a post hike wind-down couple of days.. don't think much happened?! apart from a lot of eating of course. do remember one particularly special local meal at 'mama naxis' a crazy hostel place with all you can eat food for about 60p served personally by mama - a lady i would never cross!
we get the bus back to kunming (8 hrs of amazing scenery) but get dropped at a random bus station out of town... again. however a chap that had been hassling us to give us a lift to his hostel for 15 mins (usually really shifty rip-off merchants) turns out to be a free pick up from the place we want to stay.. which also turns out to be comfy, clean and cheap. must be good karma in return for letting all the mosquitoes feed on me. we don't explore kunming further than the huge wallmart and cash machine before getting on a 19hr hard sleeper train to Guilin the following day :( about done with the overnight train journeys by this point. i stay in a seperate carriage to the other 3 this time so i got to know some locals and practice my 3 words of manadrin... not much of a conversation i suppose but they still seem just as intrigued in this giant ( i mean tall..) blonde female carrying her life on her back as they were on day 1.
Guilin is also only a stopover in a lovely hostel flowers. the bus and train stations are just opposite but we still manage to end up out of town on arrival! our train seems only to let passengers off at guilin north, a 20 min taxi away. we bartered a taxi but then felt so bad when it was really cheap for a long ride we paid him some more anyway! we're not good at this. suckers for old folk selling things too. next day we head to yangshou, but only after cinvincing m+m that we can't possibly travel through se asia alone. i think they took pity on us as they left their pasports with some trustworthy looking stranger (from cits so not really dodgy) who promised them vietnamese visas and passports would be awaiting them in nanning days later. so i'll pick this up again in yangshou - the whole purpose of our trek from lijiang with the promise of li river scenery, bikes, rafts and a bit of climbing! and we arrive on halloween...

posted by Caroline @ 15:10