Yesterday and today we rented bikes to go around in the neighborhood of Yongshuo. We rented the biggest possible (but still far too small) mountain bike for me and drove off to Fuli, an old town nearby.

In Fuli there was a large marked where almost everything is for sale. Perhaps you like Nike NBA basketball slippers, well they have them… Sort of… Spelling English is not the best quality of the Chinese locals (check out the picture). 

The food section was amazing and appalling. I won’t put all the gruesome detailes here on the website otherwise my friend and colleague Evgeniya would not be able to sleep for the coming weeks. For the people who checked out her website, know that she is fond of dogs… as pets… Let’s just say that some of the Chineese like dogs for their other qualities. The only thing I will say is that a big pot of boiling water, a blow-torch and a couple of bald dogs really gave a different meaning to the old Dutch proverb “de hond in de pot vinden“.

After the market we went on to bike around in the country side. The strange landscape and the rural people with their water buffalo’s really made this a great experience.

We were in Guilin the last two days together with Arjen. Today we took a boat from Guilin to Yangshuo where Adrienne and I will stay until the 7th (Arjen went back to Shanghai today). Strangly shaped mountains with even stranger names such as “Camel Mountain”, “Solitary Beauty Peak”, “Nine Horses Painting Hill”, form a very nice landscape.

The Chinese are very creative when it comes to making up names for things. Tourist information brochures would for example talk about “beautiful little bright pearls from heaven, like galaxies, dancing in the sky”, where in Holland we would just call them damn rain drops…

The weather isn’t that great, it is a bit foggy and we even had some bright pearls from heavon today. I hope it will get better in the following days because we will rent bikes and go around in the landscape.

The Chinese treat their animals differently than what we are used to in Holland. Perhaps this scales with the living conditions of the people in each country, who knows.

We were quite shocked when we visited a Zoo in Guilin (it was part of the Seven Star Park we visited). The animals were kept in small concrete cells without anything to play with. They even had two great panda’s! These panda’s had a small walking area outside and a concrete cell inside. In other places in the park you could have a picture taken with monkeys or pay 5 RMB to have your picture taken on a swing with two live peacocks on it.

This evening we went to see the Cormorant fishermen here in Yangshou. These fishermen have Cormorant birds fish for them by tying a rope around their necks and having them catch fish like they normally would. When they catch a fish they can’t swallow it because of the rope so it gets stuck in their neck. The fisherman then gets the bird out of the water and gets the fish out of its throat.

The strangest thing however we found in the reet flute cave. For a fee of 10 RMB you could enter a “turtle cave” in which turtles lived which were over one thousand years old. The oldest turtle was supposedly over 1300 years old (yeah right). These turtles were put on small wooden tables, the Chinese would touch them for good luck and would rub coins and other things on them so that these coins would bring luck. Some also put money on the back of the turtles. Very very strange people…

In Guilin we visited two different caves, the “Reed Fulte Cave” and the “Seven Star Cave”. Both were quite nice, with colorful (and unrealistic) lights, but they were also very crowded and touristic. I can’t wait until the golden week is over (this should be tomorrow) and all the Chinese people have to go back to work!