That's traveling in China

Imagine yourself on a bus. Just crossing a lovely green flowering mountain range. You have a wonderful view of the valley below. Green with paddy fields, wheat and corn crops. Small villages are dotted between the terrace fields on the green slopes of the mountains and hills. Then suddenly you hear the lady in the seat in front of you start to make loud throat sounds.... She opens her window and lets a huge loogy fly straight into your glass window. You spend the rest of the descent into the valley staring in horror and disgust at the huge green, brown gob of spit stuck to your window in the centre of the view. That's part of traveling in China.


sniff... sniff sniff... Can you smell it? Its the end....

Nee how yall...

its either the strong smell of soy sauce and dried squid or we can smell the end of our trip coming.... and we are saddddd.... :(

We are in Yangshou (northern Gaungxi Province) at the moment taking some time off from our vacation for a bit of a vacation (does that make any sense?)...

We had a lovely time in Lijiang & trekking the Tiger Leaping gorge which was a breeze compared to Nepal but the scenery was great and we had lots of fun. Lijiang was just a beautiful picturesque city with little canals and red lanterns at night. We even moved our lazy asses and rented bicycles for a day ride around town. From there we moved on to Dali which was a bit under our expectations but we had a relaxing time (though we did climb the local mountain by cablecar ;) and walked all the loooong 2km's to the lake ;). From there we moved on to Kunming (another big city - but not as cool as Chengdu) where we took a day trip to Shilin.
Shilin is also called "Stone Forest" and indeed it feels like a forest of tall rocky limestone formations that you walk among and sometimes even crawl between, very beautiful.

From Kunming we took a wonderfully fun train ride to Guilin (the big town next to here). It was such a wonderful 20 hour ride - it was around 40c even at 2:30 am so it was so easy to sleep and relax and the chain smoking Chinese didn't even bother us at all with all our sticky sweaty selves... God it was horrible.... But we survived and are alive to tell the tale.

You have been asking about food in China. Well we can't really complain... The food is good and we are eating mostly Chinese. There isn't much similarity between the food here and what we usually consider to be Chinese food in Israel. We eat a lot of pork and here have started to also see a lot of duck... mmm yummmy (we had a gorgeous orange duck yesterday). Most of the time you can even order the same dish (usually sweet and sour pork for us) because it comes totally different at each restaurant you try it. Sometimes you can tell its straight out of a jar of instant sauce (which is usually good too) and other times you get it with tomatoes and chili (more like sour and hot pork - but delicious) we even got it with apples once... mmm yummm... There is a lot of street food especially in the cities and of course lots and lots of dumpling shops. The fat doughy ones and the wonton like thin ones all very yummmy... And so cheap you find yourself insisting to the waitress that she has forgotten to add something to the bill :)

So what we will be doing in Yangshou... Well after contacting Roy's sisters here in china we found out that they are based in Yangshou and are taking their courses here. So we decided to join them for 4-5 days and do a course. A course in what you ask ? Well.. Tai Chi and meditation !!
Yes that's true after skipping all the vipasana ashrams and yoga retreats in India we decided to get some eastern style martial arts and spirituality and will take a course here in Yangshou.

Have a look at their web site here

Besides that we will be taking in the fresh (hot humid and sticky) air here and will streach our legs some more - The scenery here is lovely:

Have a look here (though we will be uploading pics of our own soon)

that's all for now...

We will catch ya all later with maybe 1 or 2 more posts before we come back home... :(...

and of course some pics :)

bye for now,

Hila & Mr. Morphhh Sleazy