Actually, the raining and packedness of the park played right into our plans: now we could stay inside and watch the Chinese F1 race without guilt.

After the race, the rains started to clear and we wandered out to the park . Where we were given a few tantalizing glimpses of what we could expect tomorrow.

We are staying at the Xiangdian International Hotel which is a short walk from one of the entrances to Wulingyuan National Park. Wulingyuan is China's first National Park and a UNESCO protected site. By all accounts, it is one of the most beatiful places in the world.

We got a great deal on our hotel room which is huge and has a view of the park, but this is not really an "International" hotel, it is a Chinese hotel. And the differance is critical. From what we can tell, 99% of Chinese tourists travel in groups and the hotel is geared to handling groups. They are not sure what to do with two westerners traveling alone although the brochure in the room says "Our hotel is equiped with the alone type guestroom". There are two diningrooms, the Chinese Diningroom in which you can only dine if you have a group of ten or more, and the Western Diningroom, which is in the eastern part of the hotel and serves Chinese food.

We arrived at about 9AM and our room wasn't ready so they suggested we have breakfast in the Western Diningroom. I had noodles with pork and green onions and Michele had noodles soup and we both had cooked to order (in front of our very eyes on the buffet line) fried eggs. Eating a fried egg with chopsticks is a new expearance but, by putting it on top of the noodles or in the soup, it can be done.

Meanwhile, at the park, it was raining and packed.

After falling asleep on the train to Zhangjiajie, we woke the next morning (OK, I woke several times during the night when we stopped at various towns. The first time, I wandered down the hall to use the squat toilet only to be stopped by the warning not to use in the station.) to the end of the ride in a mountainous area.

By then it was starting to rain and by the time we got to Zhangjiajie, it was really pouring. Unfortunately, from the station (which was magnificent)

to the taxi stand was a about a 1/4 mile in the rain, so we were pretty wet by the time we got in the cab. The trip to the National Park at Wulingyuan was about 45 minutes in the rain and we got to our hotel damp but unscathed for our first real travel with no English speakers to help. (At Moon Hill, we had somebody write the name of our new hotel in Chinese so all we had to do was show the name to the taxi driver and argue price using sign language.

In the mini-series, Shogun, about half way through, after the hero has been living like a Japanese for a couple of years (maybe five one hour episodes in our time), the hero runs into a group of Dutch traders. They are shockingly gross: pinkish-red, fat, loutish Europeans. That's how I felt when we checked in to our hotel: we had been on train all night, hadn't bathed, walked through the rain, and the girls behind the counter were impeccable in their purple silk.

When we left the Yangshuo area, we felt like we had really entered China. No internet, no English signs, nobody who spoke English to help us. First we took a three hour taxi ride to Liuzhou. We rode through miles and miles of farming country under a heavy sky that got darker with each mile.

We thought that we had no idea what to expect when we got to Liuzhou, but, when we got there we realized that we had expected some signs in English. There were none. The train station was big and looked great from the outside but the inside was sort of sterile and dirty at the same time.

We got there at 7PM expecting to  eat before our 9:15 "soft sleeper" to Zhangjiajie and we sort of fantazied that we would have an internet connection, but there was no restuarant, no snack shop; so Michele wandered out into the city and got some food in strafoam boxes that we ate in the waitingroom.

We were the only westerners in the train station and everybody watched us as we ate. The schedule sign did have our train number, 2012, so we felt fairly confident that we would get on the right train.

The train ride turned out to be completely painless bordering on comfortable.

Because we are trying to stay loose, we are spending alot of time on logistics – and everything doesn't always work out. We had expected to leave Yangshuo a day earlier but we couldn't get train tickets from Liuzhou to Zhangjiajie on the day we wanted to leave. So we spent a day hanging out, taking portraits of some of the women working at the hotel and watching the locals staring into space.

In the late afternoon, we climbed the local star attraction – the moon palace at Moon Hill – which is an arch in the mountain overlooking the valley.

Climbing a to a star attraction in China is really walking up a paved path. But, in this case a paved path that does go on for a good bit and one that gets steep at the end.

At the end, we got above the arch

and had an impressive view.

-S