A Journey to Well Known Places

I managed to cut my finger operating a bottle opener. Not a gash mind you, but a little cut. I saw blood, but it did not drip to any extent. Generally I wouldn’t think anything of it. In fact I didn’t until Erica and I were swimming in the river in Yangshou. As I was floating on my back my mind drifted back to something the nurse at the travel clinic said about swimming in fresh water. I don’t remember exactly but it involved flesh eating bacteria and parasitic worms. That was almost a week ago though and we both seem OK. Well, Erica is a little under the weather, but the main thing is that we did not get any unpleasant parasitic worms. We were on a bamboo rafting trip. It is one of the major tourist ‘things’ in Yangshou. You sit under an umbrella on a raft made of big pieces of bamboo and a Chinese person stands on the back of the raft with a big pole and pushes you down the river. It felt decadent and luxurious. Mao would not have approved. We were drinking beer and, to be nice, we bought our boatman a few beers as well. Like a tip. After an hour and a half of floating, drinking, and swimming we saw a cave in one of the many karst formations. We pointed and our boatman, with whom we now had a repore, poled us to shore and led us to the cave. It was OK. Just a cave really. Then, to our surprise, the boatman indicated in very unambigious hand gestures that if we wanted to go to the back of the gave and get frisky he would go walk around for a while. Perhaps he thought we were being coy because he was not satisfied with our first three refusals. This brought up a number of questions for me. Do other couples stop in the middle of a rafting trip to ‘do it’ in a cave? How many I wonder? What is the standard tip for showing us to the cave? On our way back from the cave he used his limited English and more hand gestures to indicate he wanted a tip for taking us to the ‘romantic cave.’ Our shyness was not his fault and he should be compensated for giving us the opportunity. We pretended we didn’t understand. The next day we left hot and humid Yangshao. We had an afternoon to spend in Guilin and stopped into a little restaurant for lunch. Erica is a vegatarian. When we sat down I said in my best Chinese, ‘I don’t eat meat’ and I would like some rice. The waitress pointed to several dishes on the all Chinese menu and we nodded. Sure. We got a beef plate and chicken noodles. Erica has taken to ordering her own food; although she is being a good sport. She seems happy enough to eat around the meat.

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