Day Fourteen – Yangshou

We are definitely in the south of China now! The heat and humidity slap us in the face as we walk outside the Yangshuo Jasper International Hotel this morning. With 600,000 residents and 1.8 million visitors per year, mostly from northern China, Yangshou is the main vacation destination for China. A quiet, slow paced lifestyle draws people to this area, renowned for the beautiful scenery highlighted by the Karst mountains. The entire area was under the ocean a long, long time ago and as the water receded we are left with the harder oddly shaped mountains, many of which have deep caves within them.

Life flourishes along the Li river near Yangshou as we drifted lazily through this Sunday morning for our river boat excursion.

Sadly, the residents of the Li river village were in preparations for a funeral as we passed through. The men were preparing the village meal and making posters with calligraphy.

The more we visited the stranger the vehicles got...

 Take a close look in the cab of this truck...

After the excursion and lunch we were awarded some free time to shop along the Yangshou street markets.

These are genuine-real-fake Louis Vitton handbags. This section of the store was in a back room behind a sliding mirror.

Hot peppers and garlic anyone?

Even Communists need to shop sometimes...

A Chinese card game.

By the time we reached Yangshou we had a case of a nasty stomach bug going around the bus. Unfortunately, I was one of about a dozen of us on the bus that caught it. As we finished our shopping through the Yangshou plaza I started to feel queasy and within an hour I was completely out of it for the next 2 and a half days. As a result, there isn't much to share with you for the next few days until we get home and I get a chance to collect some shots from the people that were still functioning.
The below shots are from the Internet of a show that the group saw that night.

Tomorrow we head for Guilin.