Not at good nights sleep for me, actually I don’t think I slept very much at all. Some of the problem (in addition to the usual with heat, noise, etc.) was that my watch went on strike. It didn’t stop, without me realising it it just started showing the wrong time. So when I got  up around 8 a.m. in the morning there was hardly another person to see, which I thought was kind of odd. Time went by, and a few Chinese started to get up, but none in the group showed. When the time got closer to noon, they still weren’t up, which was strange since we were getting off the train at 12.40, and I was getting ready to wake people up when someone suddenly showed. It turned out that the clock was not yet 8 a.m. I don’t even want to think about what the time actually was when I got up. So I ended up having to be patient for even more hours. Quite a while before we arrived in Liuzhou we started seeing the famous limestone karst peaks through the train window. When we arrived we didn’t get to see much of the station or the town, we just went straight out to our minibus to start the four hour busride to Yangshuo. It was tiring. We caught a few glimpses of Guilin driving through the city. Guilin is supposed to be more upmarket, and are frequented by Chinese tourists (didn’t look so special from what we saw, but it is supposed to be one of China’s most aesthetically pleasing cities). Yangshuo lies in the Guangxi province and is known as ”backpacker heaven”. The city is famous for its gorgeous scenery and laid-back rural atmosphere. The minibus let us off 5 minutes walk from the hotel, cars aren’t allowed to drive through the tourist mainstreet. Here the shops and western-style cafes are lying all along the street. Unlike almost all the other places we have been, western tourists are everywhere, and you hear western music from the cafes. The hotel – Hotel Explorer - is simple but OK, and very central. This city is not the “real China”, but like LP says; “who cares”. 

We arrived around 5 p.m., and then it was time for the much longed for shower. The plan was to go and watch the cormorant fishing later and then eat afterwards, but I was so hungry that I went to eat right after the shower with Alison, John and Donna. We ate on the 2. floor on a veranda with a view over the pedestrian street and a limestone karst peak lying in the middle of the town. It was nice.

Cormorant fishing takes place with the help of trained birds. We went out just after dark, and it started raining as we left the hotel. We all sat warm and dry inside a boat with roof and windows. Through the open windows or up front on the deck we could watch what was happening. The fisherman was a small man with a pointed straw hat. He had a long narrow wooden boat with a low roof in the middle. At first the birds – 4 or 5 of them – was sitting on top of this. At the front of the boat there was a lamp hanging giving light. In the light from the lamp you could see the rain, the mosquitoes, and the green glow of the water. All the birds had a ring around their necks, stopping them from swallowing. So the fisherman was driving along slowly in his boat, and the birds were swimming in front of or alongside the boat, ducking down in the water to catch fish. On the deck the fisherman had a light green plastic basket. When he saw that a birds’ neck was filling up with fish, he used a long stake to pull the bird onto deck by a noose hanging in the ring around their necks, and forced the bird to gulp the fish into the green basket. Then he would throw the bird back into the water. It was interesting to watch, but it seems a bit cruel. At least it got way too much for my taste when the fisherman drove his boat up on a bank and went ashore with one of the birds, making the birds eat the fish and then force it back up repeatedly, just so that us tourists could take photographs. I certainly didn’t take any. Then the others went to eat, but since I had already eaten I was happy to go straight home to bed.