Day 15 - Guilin

At Guilin, we went on a ferry ride on Li Jiang river to look at what must be some of the most beautiful scenery on earth. Both sides of the river were filled with thousands of mountains of various shapes and sizes, check it out. PICT0232 is probably one of my best pictures of this trip.
Everyday life in this area includes waking up to an incredible view, using birds to fish, doing laundry in the river, and performing songs and dances from your floating stage. Etienne wasn't impressed. To be fair, this was over 2 weeks now of sleeping at MOST 6 hours per night. It really was starting to wear down on us. We usually had to get up at 6:30, sometimes 5, and our luggage had to always be packed and outside our hotel room by 11pm. This often made for very tired days. My motto for the trip was, uncharacteristically, "we'll sleep when we're dead!"
We then took a stroll through an ancient village where they were producing lots of art. I finally got the chance to take a picture of this very common vehicle in China; it's a motor trike! From the inside, a lot of the gears and chains are exposed and it's basically a motorcycle except it has 2 rear wheels and a canopy. Etienne was confused.
Our next stop was Elephan Trunc Hill, so named because it's supposed to resemble an elephant trunc. Not much time was spent there because, well, it's a rock formation. There were cute elephant shaped benches all around though. I found out as we were leaving that you could actually climb the rock so I ran up the stairs and took some pictures. There's an old temple on top.
Next we hit up West Street for a few minutes, it's a famous shopping destination with lots of Western-style cafes and restaurants. I ended up buying a fake Columbia jacket for 30$. There were lots of banners hanging over the street, one of which said 'Mei you wam beer, mei you lousy food, mei you rip-offs, mei you "pay FEC!" (tax), may you bad service'; there is an irony there that is probably going above my head without knowing the Chinese words that come before it. It was behind our restaurant here that there was a local market where various things were sold. Including the mythical dog meat. One of the vendors had a cage where about 10 dogs were locked up (all the same species) and on his table was displayed some dog meat and a carved skull. After all that, we hit up a pearl store. SO expensive. We were hoping for Pearl Go pieces, but alas, such extravagence was not to be found.
The evening's entertainment was songs and dances of Chinese minority people. The costumes were AMAZING and the whole show was (understandably) much, much better than what we got on the boat. I gotta say though, that this had a been a seriously long day and I was fighting really hard to not fall asleep at this point. Still, we headed out after the show to look for a massage parlour since Richard said that massages are cheapest in Guilin. After walking for about 30 minutes in the commercial district in the rain and not finding anything, we decided to give up and take a cab back to the hotel when, miraculously, we found ourselves in front of a massage parlour. It was fate. We got 60 minutes of not-great massaging for 3$(I think) from some very young girls. At the end of which they asked us if we wanted "back scrapings" (aka Gwa Sha) to which Etienne said yes, leading to the picture below. After the back scrapings they tried to sell us another form of massage, but Gwa Sha was probably more than enough.
It was raining, so I got a chance to wear the new jacket, shown here with our local guide who said "voila" in the most enchanting way. I've got good taste I'm told, but we already knew that. One our way to the massage place, and one other time when we were just wondering around, we were approached by a man on a rickshaw (same guy both times) who wanted to offer us rides and was very insistant on it, to the point of following us for several blocks. After it was clear that we didn't want to go anywhere on his rickshaw he began offering us prostitutes for ridiculously low prices using what I can only describe as a very disgusting hand guesture. Ask me to show it to you.
And as if this page already isn't long enough, a little something about hats. Josee went on the ferry without her cute hat so she immediately bought another when she found one. You can see in the third picture that a few others bought Beijing 2008 hats. And then there's Jacque and Louise who bought traditional headgear...I wonder if they'll ever wear them in public.
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