A whole lot of time and not much blogging

Seeing as it is now a very long time since I last blogged I will skip over the already covered details, like Beijing goodbye to Yiwu and Hangzhou which were all amazing,





After that we headed to Guilin, where we ended up staying in a ghost hotel for 50 kuai, honestly it was the weirdest experience ever! We were pretty much the only people staying in this hotel, and the people there were really strange, when we woke up the whle hotels electricity had been turned off and apparently that was what happened everyday, including the lifts, and you know how much we HATE climbing stairs, especially with a couple of kilo on our back!





That day was pretty cool went to some caves and stuff and up another chairlift thing maybe even bigger and scarier than the one in Kunming, and when we got to the top we got to Luge down, which was totally awesome although Charl was way too pussy to go down real fast, and I was stuck behind some dude that worked there making sure we didn't rip down to fast. Halfway through Charl was lost behind somewhere so fearing that she had broken a limb he had to hop off from infront of me and wait for her, leaving me to fly down at my leisure.





Another equally weird night in "ghosthotel" before we headed to Yangshuo to meet up with Maddie and Caroline, two of the gappers I spent xmas with. It was great we just bumped into them in Main street, then checked in had some lunch and hired bikes to go to a place we coukld bamboo raft down the river, the bike ride was a good distance, Charl and I were both convinced the girls had got us lost, but eventually we made it and through some heavy negotiation we managed to get a very reasonable price for two hours of lugging us down the river. Charlie and I were not the perfect candidates for a bamboo boat, our tiny dude was having a rough time hauling us heffalumps down the river, our feet were also almost in the water, our feller stopped the boat to get some gumboots.



The boat ride was great a couple of hours in the glorious sunshine (it is so much warmer down south). With a couple of exciting stops on the way, in the form of small waterfalls or more rocky ledges which we had to pass over. each one our punter got out lined us up and shoved us over, we had to lift up our legs and our bags as we entered the water to about half a meter or a meter! A couple of times our butties got a wee bit wet.



On the homeward stretch us hefferlumps got beached, it was quite the drama as our half a stone punter tried to dislodge us from ther rock we were caught on. Finally I decided that we just weren't budging due to the weight of us, so off came my tights and shoes and I jumped to help, but to be honest I didn't really think that through too much because as soon as I was off the boat was free and started moving swiftly away, the punter was nippy enough to jump on, I tend to move in more of a gammy way and managed to get myself undies deep before rolling back onto the boat. To the great amusement of a fair few standers-by!


Left for Guilin the nest morning and spent the day organising our train ticket etc. Train ride to Nanning in the arvo which was about 5 hours long, we made some cool friends that spoke the English very well. We organised a bus trip to vietnam and in the package a guide was to pick us up from the train station in Nanning and take us to a hotel and give us our tickets to cross the border, we thought english speaker with driver who would take us to our hotel. Turned out we were much mistaken, a portly man swaggered up to us, showing my name on a cellphone, then jumped on his motorbike gesturing for us to follow him. We waddled behind with about 50kg worth of stuff each as he cruised along stopping only to light another cig! Then when we got to the hotel he gave us a ticvket, all in chinese and I figured out we were supposed to meet him tomorrow morning, we truly had no idea if he was going to take us to Hanoi or somewhere completely in the wrong direction (Russia was rushing through my m,ind.) But next morning old Smoky-joe was there and again we waddled behind his moto to a place with a couple of other stranded looking chinese travellers. But all of a sudden everything worked out perfectly, we caught a bus all the was to the border without a glitch and now are sitting in the hostel we managed to grab! Its all great! Nam is fabulous so far, Anyway I will update about it the next installment. This was enough to keep me going til my hour was up.
Love to all, we are happy safe and fed! Xx

P.s Mama I am a devoted follower of the blog but somehow the computer wont let me comment! Kor sounds great Xx