Walking around the farming area by Yangshuo, everything seemed so familiar. The sights, the smells, the quiet, the slow pace of the people, the water buffalo. At first I thought my mind was making it feel familiar so I would feel safe, then I realized I've been walking through these areas for 45 years – ever since Korea in 1964.

But China is very different. In other countries I been to the children would come up and ask for pens or candy, in China, the children take pictures of us with their cell phones. We bought water at a small store and the sales girl (and the sales people are almost always young girls – that hasn't  changed) scanned the bottles!  We chatted with a South African women on the trail (which in China, is a paved road!) and she said It's like China skipped a stage.

After a very late breakfast of bacon and eggs, we spent the day wandering around the area by Yangshou.

We started with an overcast day but the sun came out by mid-afternoon. It was the first time we have seen blue sky since leaving California a week ago.

At the end of the day, we ended up back in the tourist bazaar where Osama T-shirts out number Obama 2-1.

For dinner, we went to a vegetarian restaurant that was excellent. It is the only vegetarian place we have seen – the Chinese are real omnivores. At the place where we ate in Guangzhou, they had such delicacies as pig lung in sauce and fried pig hand.   

-S

It is raining and has been since we got off the plane – alternating between very light drizzle and drenching downpour. Yangshou seems to be a classic tourist town with busloads of people during the day and quiet after 5.

The town is very beautiful and full of contradictions.

We caught the 9:20 flight from Guangzhou to Guilin. The airport at Guangzhou is surreal: huge, gorgeous, clean, busy; all under one huge s, vaulted space. The flight was about an hour of takeoff, level off long enough to pass out somesort of nut thing, and, then, landing. The Guilin airport was back to another, older China. Sort of like what I imagine the Bakersfield airport to be like. Our hotel had arranged to pick us up at the airport and we had an hour drive on the new toll road to Yangshou. The views on the drive were classic Chinese water color.