Another short note from Yangshuo

Meryl seems to have covered our stay here in Yangshuo exhaustively. I'll keep my own comments short.

One of my goals at the outset of this trip was to learn to bargain. I've never been terribly good at it, largely because I dislike the ordeal of taking time to haggle just to save a few dollars on a hat or pair of gloves, but it is time that I learn - looming law school negotiation classes provide some impetus. Southeast Asia struck me as an ideal place to study.

As Meryl mentioned in her post, we have to haggle for almost everything, from tours to hotel rooms to clothes to trinkets. The only fixed prices appear to be in restaurants, where they are printed on the menus, and for communications - cell phones, internet use and the like. We're getting lots of practice buying clothing and souvenirs for less than half the initial offer.

After five days here, I understand why Lonely Planet writes that many visitors to Yangshuo end up extending their stays by weeks: Except for the cold at this time of year, I could easily imagine myself spending weeks exploring the karst peaks on a bicycle, lazily floating down the Li river on a bamboo raft, and taking days to catch up on my fiction reading in front of the city's many cafes. And with lodging and dining costs of less than $20 each per day, "weeks" look entirely affordable. Unfortunately, that's not an option for the two of us - we have a flight tomorrow to Lijiang, a city in the Tibetan foothills several hundred miles to the west of here. And we have a train to Hanoi that we need to catch in several weeks; our visas to Vietnam begin in the 11th, and every day past that date that we spend in China is one less that we will spend in Vietnam.

I'm quite curious about the geology of the karst peaks around here, but my resident geology expert has so far been unable to offer more than educated guesses about how this landscape formed. Google searches were hardly more successful, turning up webpages like this one. I'd certainly appreciate any ideas...

I loved the Jan. 30 day trip we took to the spectacular rice terraces near Longsheng, where some 650 years of human labor have carved more than 50 square kilometers of mountain terrain into rice paddies. I suspect that the Pyramids in Egypt must evoke a similar sense of wonder that people created something so vast without any of the machinery that we would use today.

I should offer several final notes on the blog, and on our cell phone. As Meryl mentioned, we are unable to actually read our blog, including comments, so email may be the best way to reach us for the next couple of weeks. Pictures are going to be few and far between until we find an internet cafe that will let us plug in either our own computer or USB Compact Flash card reader; in the meantime, I'll continue to link to photos on other sites that give some idea of what we have been seeing. And we'll probably be entirely without internet access from about Feb. 4 to Feb. 7 or so, when we will be staying at the Wenhai Ecolodge, which got a very nice write-up on Page One of the NY Times' Travel Section a couple of months ago. On a different note, I believe that I forgot to post the requisite country code you need to dial our cell phone from the states: The full number is +86 1366 946 2501. That should work everywhere in China.