Yangshuo: Day Three

Day three was actually National Day, so we went hiking, because everything else in town jumped in price. The only thing I really know about National Day is that pretty much everybody in the country gets the day off, and most of them decide to go traveling, so hotel prices and tourist activities become much, much more expensive. Even though the whole week is affected by this one day, National Day itself is the worst, so we got out of town and did something that was practically free.

However, on a few parts of the trail, the whole trail was jam-packed with other tourist/hikers. I've never been on a hike before where you have to stare at the back of someone's head for fifteen minutes straight because it's so crowded. The rest of the hike was very nice, beautiful and relaxing, but I'm not sure where most of those pictures are. Here's a few nice scenery shots of the river:

Anyway, here are some other pictures from that day!

Our friend Zach busted the shoddy plumbing in our hostel, resulting in a flood of sorts and our quick exit from the hotel. Not that we were kicked out, I just ran out of there. There's some pretty funny video of this as well:

Here's a one-armed, one-legged guy painting calligraphy onto fans. This was really quite a feat, and I kinda wanted one, but you have to haggle for absolutely all street goods, and I didn't want to haggle with such a neat guy. That's probably pretty silly, but that's how it went.

Here's Chez kelly, a tiny but tasty sandwich and milkshake shop. There were no white people in sight, so I really wonder who Kelly is/was.

We decided to try to climb up a karst, but we didn't really plan it out, so we ended up on the cliff side and unable to make it all the way up. Anyway, it was a pretty exciting hike, as you can tell from this action shot of me practically scaling the face of the karst!

I guess the karst was also some kind of cemetery, cause there were graves everywhere. These ones were particularly excellent. I think they were a husband and wife's - this picture is of the wife's, if that's correct.

And here we are, enjoying the sunset at a totally awesome bar with a totally convoluted name, something like "Amazing Monkey Jane's Fabulous Rooftop Bar."

Here's the sunset itself:

And a panorama of the whole group on the rooftop. What a bar, what a town! Some people got split in half, as you can see in the picture, but it was still a great time.