Duck Billed Flappy Fish, deceased.

Girded up our loins and part-way retraced our bus journey of yesterday, back north. Left a sunny Yangshuo but found a cloudy & drab Guilin awaiting us. Whilst the countryside around here is very pleasant, the city is really is a bit of a dump. A working city - utilitarian in the extreme - nothing to recommend it aesthetically other than the Li River which has the misfortune to run through it, collecting the detritus of the large and apparently uncaring populace. I quite like the place!

Our hotel, @ £12/night is physically about the worst we have stayed in. Labyrinthine corridors, with all the charm of a morgue, led us to a serious damp problem masquerading as an hotel room. The beds are clean & dry and the loo is not the cause of the damp, so it's OK for one night.

Had a late afternoon stroll along the road from our abode to find that it is full of "fish" restaurants. There is a great variety of creatures displayed in red plastic basins outside each establishment, their water being aereated via a network of small dia. pipes. The above specimen is the weirdest, but not the saddest. That accolade must go to the beautiful fresh water turtles, trapped unsuspecting in their new temporary plastic home.

Also available here on this street, and up the mountains @ Longji, is another member of the rat clan. These I think are muskrats. Grey / brown, about 10 cm dia. x 30 cm long with a short rat tail and a rodent face that looks as though it had a recent encounter with a spade. You have the power of life or death over them. Trouble is that if you choose death, you have to eat them!

There is no Wi-Fi in this hotel (Mei Du - avoid) so I will try to upload from a cafe next door. We fly to Chongquing tomorrow morning and depart there tomorrow night on a Chinese boat, as opposed to a "Foreigners" boat, so I don't know whether we will have internet access before our next hotel, in Yichang, by the 3 Gorges Dam, on the 18th, so Ta Ta Ra Noo!

Oh, I lied in the last sentence of the first paragraph above

G&S