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Other entries in Yangshuo

Pan Tao and the painful journey begins

I was woken at 8am by the very funny sight of Daz stumbling in a tad worse for wear accompanied by Waj.  It turns out that Daz coudnt remember where he was staying and kept walking in to random hotels and asking for his room key!  Waj showed us all a video of Daz trying to walk down the street the night before and in the process weaving into sa parked car and setting the alarm off.  In the end Waj just took him back to his dorm, where he proceeded to puke all over his bed!!!  Gutted.  This story practically got rid of any hang over I had.

After packing, I checked out of the hotel and said my goodbyes to Benny and bleary eyed Daz and made my way out to meet Waj to go for a short walk.  While I was waiting, a wedding car drove past with hard house pounding out of the windows much to my amusement, and I also chated a lot of shit to some random street stall women who didnt understand one word I said.  Maybe I was still a bit drunk.

I met Waj and we decided to climb up to Pan Tao hill to get some good views over the town of Yangshuo, and it didnt dissapoint.  he views were well worth the effort, even though I was sweating out bucketloads of JD from the night before and the climb was pretty steep and hard going.  By the time we got down, it was abotu lunch time, so we again went for a cheap stir fry and then said our goodbyes...hopefully we will meet in Laos anyway.

I still had a few hours to burn ahead of my bus trip to Guilin, so I whittled it away on the Internet and getting a whopper of a baguette on 'Western Street', where I joined Al's ranks in being told by a Chinese man that I was very handsome....like I didn't know that already!

I left Yangshou for Guilin on a local bus without air-con which wasn't too bad, although the wooden seat wasnt up to much, and the journey only lasted one and a quarter hours.  When I arrived in Guilin, I didnt recognise it as the saem bus station I had been to before (because it wasnt), but some bloke met me off the bus and ushered me to a motorbike driver who would take me to another bus stop for my bus to Nanning, driving most of the way on he pavement for some reason!

When I arrived at my sleeper bus, it was a shit hole and it didnt leave for another two hours.  Each sleeper bed was about five foot long, which, as you may imagine wasnt very comfortable since I am a shade over six foot.  One tip for anyone planning to travel to China, use the trains rather than the buses as they are reliable and the buses are complete and utter shite.  I tried to get some sleep in the two hours before we left, but this was impossible as they refused to turn down the constant stream of trance music baring out oof the speaker right above my head!  I was starting to get pissed off and I still had a good 20 hours of this trip to go.  As soon as we set off, all of the ignorant Chinese men in the sleepers around me didnt stop smoking, spitting, shouting or snoring for the entire journey to Nanning.  One of these men also had the most annoyng voice in the world that went straight through me.  Then the thought occured to me as to why Nanning is such a shit city.....maybe the Chinese govrnment were shipping all of these natural born losers off to one city so they dont pllute the rest of the country?!?!  As you can imagine I wasnt best pleased and I didnt get one wink of sleep.

Summary of China

• No-one can eat with their mouths closed r without slurping every five seconds.
• Everyoner spits constantly all over the place.....even fit women!
• Only 2 CD's are in circulation in China.....one is of movie soundtracks, one is techno music, and the other is made up of crap Chinese pop that they play constantly on every train journey.
• They love their bikes.
• When they are not staring at you, most people were generally quite friendly.
• They view staring at foreigners as some kind of competition.
• The country is packed with interesting things to see and they have a very intersting history.
• They will eat anything that moves.
• Nearly all men smoke.
• People dont talk, they shout.....and through you if needs be.
• There seem to be no road rules, as people dont stop at pedestrian crossings, sometimes traffic lights, they overtake round blind corners and some people drive on the pavements.  Basically, wherever you walk, you are in danger of being mowed down.

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