The Final Leg

Tonight I'm leaving Yangshuo on a sleeper bus to Shenzen, which is the border crossing into Hong Kong. To me, Hong Kong represents the end of my epic overland journey even though it will be another week before I return to the US. I'm a little apprehensive about taking a sleeper bus since I didn't even know they existed before this trip, and from what I hear, the beds are really short (1.6 meters). We'll see if I actually sleep at all...

Things here are living up to their tropical climate - its been between 95 and 100 since I've been here with practically 100% humidity. It's raining right now which is helping to cool things down a bit, but I'd still rather have some good AC. I've heard that Hong Kong is a little more bearable since it's on the water and you can get a good breeze - the air here is completely stagnant.

Yesterday I took it pretty easy after the huge bicycle ride I described in the last post. In the morning I went into town and explored a bit and had a bite to eat at one of the many touristy cafes. Yangshuo is a hugely popular tourist stop for both independant and group travellers. While this doesn't appeal to some people, I think it's a fun place and theres certainly no lack of tourist trap experiences.

On that note, a bunch of us from the hostel went to go on a river cruise last night to see the Cormorant Fisherman. Pretty much these guys have trained birds that normally dive for food to instead dive for food, and then cough it up into the boat. I'm not sure why the birds go along with it, but it was really neat to see and I have a great picture of me holding a cormorant (they're pretty big!).

On the way back to our hostel we passed through a large outdoor market area where there are numerous stalls set up to cook all varieties of foods - the ingredients tend to be alive and in front of the wok where they inevitably meet their demise. My favorites stalls turned out to be the ones where they grill meet on a stick. I had been sticking to things like lamb, and beef but I decided to take the plung and try chicken feet! There's not a lot of meet on a chicken foot, but its fun (and tasty) to gnaw on it and try to eat the skin and little bit of meat on the bones.

Today I mostly spent bumming around Yangshuo and doing some souvenir shopping. This evening I'm going to help make dinner for everyone at 5:30, and hopefully pick up a few good authentic chinese recipes.

I would appreciate if people would leave some comments so that I know these pages are being posted - since the Chinese government censors web content, I can't view the blog homepage myself!

Take care, and I'll see you all soon,
Andrew