The Karst Mountains of Yangzhou

The road from Xi'an to Yangzhou is fraught with bandits and dragons. The route is dreary, rainy and otherwise unpleasant. Alright, only some of that is true. It went like this: we left our lovely hotel room in Xi'an with our packs strapped on and walked fifteen minutes to the airport bus. The bus trip was over an hour long and the seats were cramped being that Chinese people are generally shorter than Ken. We sat at our gate for two hours then on the plane for another hour as we were forty minutes late for our scheduled take-off time, par for the course in China. We touched down in Guilin after a harrowing two hour flight during which the plane was nearly struck by lightning. Another bus awaited us at the Guilin airport to take us to the train station because naturally there is no train to the train station. There we were meant to catch the bus to Yangzhuo, a ninety minute ride. However, when we discovered that the Yangzhou bus bus would not depart until eight o'clock the following morning, we were crestfallen... and wet since it had been raining all evening.

We stood in front of a hotel in downtown Guilin and weighed our options. A cab would be three hundred yuan, around forty seven USD. A hotel room would be around the same amount and we were already booked in Yangzhou for the night. Not wanting to deal with more road time in the morning, we bit the bullet and grabbed a taxi. It was worth it. Darkness and wet roads lay before us. We had no idea where we were going and no orientation as to where we were. Over an hour later we pulled up to the Riverview hotel, a quaint residence on the banks of the Li river. Our room was spartan but spacious, and the balcony overlooking the river was worth the cheap upgrade.

It was late by this point, but the rain had abated. We thought about wandering the streets of Yangzhou to get a feel for our new town, but the ten or so hours it took to go door to door, the closed shop fronts and the chill mountain air made us take refuge under the three large comforters in the room. We called it a night and hoped the beauty of the Karst mountains would reveal itself in the morning.
-Ken and Davida