After a breakfast of noodle soup and eggs for Michele and bacon and eggs for me, we spent the day bike riding in the country. This sounds easier and more idyllic than it was for me: the bike was too little and I hadn't counted on the special anal probe seat. We would ride down a narrow road thinking we were going to be in the boondocks, and come across some tourist facility.

Everywhere we go there are tourists – most of them Chinese. In Yangshuo, there are big, expensive looking hotels with BMW X5s and Mercedes in front, the handsomest store in town is a wedding arranger. It occurred to us that this has been a tourist destination for a thousand years – think of all the Chinese watercolors of this landscape. Years ago the local cormorant fisherman was fishing for a living, now he is putting on a show for tourist for a living (we think, what ever was happening was around the bend in the river).

The landscape here is staggering. It has the same quality as southeastern Utah; they don't look even remotely similar, but every turn in the road bring a new jaw dropping view.

As we rode through the countryside, the farm road turned into a trail

and then dead-ended at a river where we hired a ferry to get across.

And, shockingly enough, this river was full of tourists,

running the rapids, Chinese style.

After the river, we stopped for a late lunch of braised ginger pumpkin and chicken soup with a Li Quan beer. Then a short ride back to the guest house at Moon Hill where we could read about Bo, the Obama's new dog.    -S

Michele spent the morning working. That in itself amazes me. We are in China and Michele is working in California.

Then we moved to a small village near Yangshuo. (Where I am sitting, drinking a cappuccino, and typing this [hunt and peck method] while chickens are foraging [also hunt and peck method] in the front of our guest house.)

In the late afternoon, we took a balloon ride.

This landscape is astounding, delightful, unbelievable and the balloon ride was one of those rare treats that was as good as we had hoped it would be. Right up there with David or the Taj Mahal.

At the end the day, we had dinner on a rooftop Italian restaurant with a view of Moon Hill, listening to Frank Sinatra.

This is not my idea and I don't want to take credit for it, but I do believe it is insightful and true. It takes about fifty years for a new invention to bring about real change. To use the printing press and steam engine as examples:

When the printing press was first invented in Europe (it was invented in China earlier), it was primarily used to print Bibles. The same work monks had been doing for years by hand. It took about fifty years for people to start writing novels and plays to be published. In other words, for about fifty years, the printing press was just used to do the same thing faster. Then the printing press started to change the world: regular people became literate, people started to read to entertain themselves, to learn, to make the world a smaller place.

When the steam engine was first invented, it was used to run looms. It did the same work, faster, that had been done by hand for thousands of years. But that is all – the same work faster. It took about 50 years for people to put the steam engine and tracks (used much earlier in coal mines) together to form trains. When Ulysses S Grant was born, it was unusual for anybody to go further than they could ride a horse in a day. When he was a young man; he took his first train ride, hundreds of miles to Cincinnati. The first person in his family to do so. The north could not have won the Civil War without trains, the United States could not have become a continental empire in less than a generation without trains.

 When the computer was first invented, all it did was crunch numbers faster. And, now, fifty years later, I am sitting in a small village in China and I can read the New York Times or a neat article about graffiti on the Berlin wall. This has changed the world as powerfully and completely as the printing press or the train.

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