After spending a month as a vegetable in Hong Kong, I was a bit worried that my travel instincts might be a bit dull. Unfortunately, I was right. Heading out of HK, I was catching a ferry into the mainland, supposedly to a city named Zhaoqing. When the ferry arrived, I bustled out of the terminal to try and find the bus station and continue further to the town of Wuzhou. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line I'd missed the announcement that the ferry was stopping further downriver and a free bus would be provided to take people on to Zhaoqing. Oops. Gaoming (the town I was wandering around aimlessly) proved to be pretty sterile and uninteresting, so I hopped the next bus out to Zhaoqing. I arrived too late to push on to Wuzhou, but I was lucky to meet a local girl who was attending university in Zhaoqing. We chatted about the area and she offered to check on the status of buses the following day to Yangshou (my ultimate destination). Our conversation drifted to the topic of travel and she admitted that she'd never left her province, but wanted to head to Hong Kong soon to see the new Disneyland. Her ultimate goal was to make it to Canada some day but first to stop in America...to go to Disneyland. Well, at least she was of a single mindset.

Thanks to her help, I found out that there was a bus first thing in the morning direct to Yangshou. My next goal was to find a place to sleep. Zhaoqing has a nice park in the city which is a mountainous island in the middle of a lake. In the center of this park is a cheap hostel for grungy backpacker types. I started to make my way across the land bridge to the island but was stopped by the entrance to the park, or more specifically the 50 yuan entrance fee. The guard pointed out that to get to the hostel was a much longer way around. By this stage it was dark and I was frustrated so I sprung for a cab. Arriving at the hostel, I was turned away (full) and spent the next three hours or so wandering around looking for cheap accomodation. At about 10:00 I relented and shelled out far too much money for a room and collapsed in bed, frustrated by a pretty bad first day back on the road.

I awoke the following morning an hour late after turning off my alarm. Because I'd spent so much on the hotel room, I needed to get money before hopping the bus and naturally, couldn't find an ATM until about 5 minutes after the bus for Yangshou left. Have I really been doing this for nine months? Instead, I fell back on my original plan and hopped a bus to Wuzhou, and from there directly north to Yangshou. The countryside here in the south of the country is fantastic. Tremendous fields of rice paddies spread out around the tiny towns scattered throughout the area. As the bus approached Yangshou, the view began to be punctuated by karst peaks poking up from the fields in the distance.

Most likely due to pollution, these distant peaks were shrouded in a haze and appeared all the more mystical. This feature of the landscape is the source of the tourism industry around Yangshou, and rightly so. It gives the feeling that you are travelling through a chinese painting. The town itself is wound around four of these peaks rising up from the backdoors of hotels and restaurants on the outskirts of town.

I managed to get an overpriced room in a hotel far away from the center and set out the next day to see the area. One of the main attractions south of town is an eroded peak known as moon hill, which has a great view from the top. It is a 7 kilometer walk south through the rice paddies and hills of the area. Aside from the streams of trucks, tractors, motorcycles and buses zooming by, belching out noxious fumes, and honking thier impossibly loud horns, it was a great walk. As I arrived at the base of the hill, a woman approached me trying to sell me water. I foolishly told her I would buy some later (not true) and she followed me up the hill. My training in the hills of Hong Kong came in handy and I was able to leave her behind. Okay, she was an old lady carrying a cooler full of beverages, but it was still a victory in my book. She still found me at the top and continued her sales pitch. After a brief break beneath the stalactite laden "moon" formation in the hill, I started up to the actual peak where I soaked up a great view of the countryside, ate some lunch and traded travel tales with some German girls out enjoying the day as well.

On leaving the peak, I was determined to drop my water lady (she was waiting below to follow me down) and took a very small trail off to the side, which I hoped led somewhere productive. Following this trail, I realized it had not been used for quite a while. This was evidenced by the proliferation of bamboo, weeds, and rose bushes currently choking the trail. Wild rose is among the worst things to find blocking your trail (up there with angered grizzly bears, bengal tigers, and rabid water sellers), but I wasn't going to be dissuaded and made my way forward with a minimum of swearing. In one of my true feats of foresight, I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but thankfully had on shoes as opposed to sandals. It was very slow going and painful, but the views were good, there was no crowd, and it appeared to be headed the right way. Sure enough, after a couple hours of picking my way along, I plopped out dirty, bloody, and smiling on a road just down from the entrance to the hill. I showed that water lady.

The second major attraction of Yangshou, after the scenery, is that it is a full-on backpacker town, complete with bars and western restaurants. Normally, this wouldn't be a good thing, but in this instance, it meant I could track down a nice happy hour to salve my wounds and watch a free English movie while scarfing down pizza. It was a nice way to finish a couple of rocky days.

I set about the next stage of my trip the following day. It was time to head to the far southwest of China, Yunnan Province, where I could enter the foothills of the Himalayas, and get a taste of Tibet without having to shell out the exorbitant fees necessary to actually enter Tibet. Next stop, Nanning.