The combination of not having good wifi and traveling around, made it difficult to find time to post this! (I typed it up not long after returning home from Guilin so some time reference words might be wrong but I'm too lazy to retype it)
Last week we went to Guilin and it was absolutely amazing. First of all we took a bullet train and honestly I thought it was going to go way faster but it was the smoothest train ride I've ever been on so that was nice. That night we took a bus up to the Dragon's Backbone and we stayed in a hotel in the mountains. Our rooms definitely looked and felt like a cabin, from the wooden bed frames to the cockroach that we found crawling around in our room. Also the beds were rock hard. After a long day I plopped myself down on my bed and nearly broke my butt...not pleasant. But it was an adventure so you already know that I loved every minute of it.
The next day we woke up and hiked around the Dragon's Backbone, which is rice terraced fields and it was absolutely beautiful. We were literally walking up the rice fields to get to a super cool viewpoint. For the first part of the hike it was raining pretty badly. We all had umbrellas but we were getting pounded by these rain drops. We had to stop under a little shack and wait for it to pass before we went on. I love rain so I didn't really mind and we also got to meet these very nice photographers. They had this super huge Nikon camera and they totally made fun of my smaller Nikon. But don't worry guys I wasn't offended because I know I still take amazing pictures (I'm super humble haven't you noticed?) The rain stopped just long enough for us to hike to the top, take a lot of shamelessly touristy pictures, and hike back down the rice terraces to the bus at the bottom of the mountain. When I say "just long enough" I mean that it started raining as the bus was in our line of sight so we all booked it so we wouldn't get wet. It was seriously perfect though. I would love to take my parents there because they would totally love it there.
After we got back down, we saw a show by the Yao women, an indigenous people from Guilin. The women never cut their hair and they wash their hair with the water left over from cooking rice. Those are just what I remember the tour guide telling us haha. During their performance all of the women had their hair tied up so we didn't see their magnificent locks until later. BUT something wild happened before that. They took 4 guys from our study abroad on stage to be part of the performance. They had no idea what was coming. Apparently they got married to some of the single ladies and drank this super nasty drink a couple times. It was pretty weird and none of us knew exactly knew what was happening and by the end we were all just so confused. Then I went up on stage and started dancing with them, I had a grand time. I also had no idea how to dance in sync with them but that's why I didn't do dance when I was little.
The dinners in Guilin were so good. They cook out of bamboo a lot there so we had fried rice and chicken out of a bamboo stick a couple times while we were there and it was divine. I just really like food, no shame.
The next day we went on a ferry tour on the river through the mountains and I definitely took some model pictures of some friends (I am having so much fun with my camera wow). This ferry tour was honestly so cool, the scenery was what I expected to see when I heard we were coming to Guilin. Oh my lanta at one point we saw a corpse drifting down the river, I mean it could have been a mannequin but it was an ultra fat mannequin if it was, I don't think there are many mannequins in Guilin, let alone fat ones. Either way that was wild. After the ferry we went on bamboo rafts and floated a different river. That was so rad. Since there's an odd number of girls, I went on the raft with my friend Jason and our friends Eli and Nick teased our guide saying that we were going to get married and we totally just went with it, it was so fun. (Don't worry mom and dad it was a joke, I'm not getting married). Anyways, the bamboo raft was amazing and very peaceful. I loved it so much. Also I wore a lifejacket this time!! So I didn't almost die! (Referring to my kayaking story if you know it)
I'm not super great at writing so this may have sounded lame but it was honestly one of the coolest things I've ever done. I hope the pictures do this place justice because it was gorgeous.
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