Sep 7: Minority Theme Parks

It turns out that our tour package to the Li river included an additional tour through a place called Shangri-La, decked out as a stylized local village of the Zhuang people -- referred to simply as a "minority" by the Chinese -- adjacent to the real village.

"They don't wear clothes," said our guide before we got there. "They wear animal skins!"

In fact, what they wear is animal print cotton, but who's noticing? I was far too busy trying to figure out -- as we were slowly ferried around a lake stopping in front of various platforms to see costumed girls dancing, leopard-print-wearing men sounding hunting horns, and warriors jumping out of the brush to shake a spear at you -- why it seemed so familiar.

And then it came to me. . . It was It's a Small World -- except the puppets were alive. If that sentence just gave you the heebie jeebies, I assure you, the ride was still worse.

Sep 7: The Li River

The mountains along the Li River today were everything they are touted to be. Mesmerizing, beautiful, unique.

This is what the mountains look like:

--dromedary humps, dolphin fins, rhino horns

--wet sand, plop-drop sand castles

--something out of Dr. Seuss

--morel mushrooms

--Bose Einstein Condensates

--giant ant hills

--stalagmites

--medieval fortress towers

--a boa constrictor eating an elephant

But most of all, they look like Chinese paintings of mountains. Tall, narrow peaks round and smooth covered in feathery foliage with the occasional jagged edge of a cliff.

Which makes sense. There isn't, really, anything to do when confronted with this geology except figure out how to paint it. It is a bygone conclusion that someone would put in the time to develop painting just the way the Chinese did: textured brush strokes to draw the trees, minimal details to echo the simple lines of the mountain, and chiaruscuro shading to show the mist-mellowed horizon.

All day long I had the last line of my bat mitzvah haftorah portion running hrough my head: "The Lord G-d hath spoken, who can but prophecy?" The Li river exists, who can but paint?

Useful Advice We've Been Recently Given, But Probably Won't Use

Once you've been quoted a semi-exorbitant price for the pleasure of picking a poisonous snake for the restaurant to kill and cook for you, be aware that the price quoted was not the whole price, but per kilo.

But they do throw you a bone and weigh it only after they've decapitated it, bled it into a shot glass for you to drink the blood, and cut out its gallbladder -- which, when eaten, will increase your virility.

Sep 7: Welcome to Guilin

Last night, Eleni and I landed in the Guilin airport at 9 PM. We've been reading up before a city about a day ahead, so we knew a little about the region--that it was known for its gorgeous limestone mountains and its adventurous cuisine that includes snake and rat. Unsure if we would be able to get a hotel at that hour, we had made a reservation that morning at the only mid-range hotel that had answered the phone. Content that we had everything under control, we hopped in a cab, ready for a good night's sleep, after the previous late night.

Yeah, right.

We got to our hotel, and had our first -- minor -- setback. They wanted payment up front, and didn't take credit cards. We'd planned on changing money in the morning, but luckily had enough Chinese cash on us to pay for one night.

It was up in our rooms that we hit the second, bigger set back. It wasn't just grungy, it was kind of worse than that. Maybe our clue should have been on the phone when the receptionist defensively boasted that they had TVs in every room, and 24-hours of hot water. But, as Eleni put it, they could have, say, saved their money on the TVs and invested it in giving us toilet paper. Or mopping up the water on the bathroom floor. Or putting a mattress on the wooden box that served as a bed.

Eleni and I have each done our share of budget travel, and we can roll with the punches, it's just that we hadn't planned on going budget this time. We started getting infectious giggles, as we checked the rooms to make sure there were no bugs, and decided maybe we could both just hold it for two days. I announced we just needed a breather from the room -- we should go for a walk, get our bearings in town, and figure out how to solve the problem that we had no cash, no one took credit cards, and we wanted to get on a boat at 8 AM the next morning before the banks opened.

We walked up the street, weaving through sidewalk restaurants, still crowded despite the late hour. We quickly noticed that all the restaurants had bright red plastic bins filled with live cockles, turtles, mussels, scuttling crabs, and fish, all available for your eating enjoyment. It took a moment longer to notice the cages in the shadows behind these -- I spotted pheasants and big furry mongoose-like things before I decided I really didn't want to know what was in them.
We wandered up the street and walked into another hotel that we figured from our Lonely Planet map was a three-stars hotel called the Golden Elephant. Using sign language we established they couldn't change money for us, and then communicated that we wanted to see a room. "The bathrooms aren't much better" I muttered under my breath to Eleni as we checked them out. We decided that three stars wasn't better enough that we would change our rooms that second, but we would check into this new hotel in the morning.

Now we needed to find an international ATM somewhere, and we set out for a Bank of China -- the one bank that sometimes, but not invariably, has a heart-warming Cirrus logo on their ATMs. We had walked about a block when Eleni glanced up at a neon sign to our left and said with a great sigh of relief: "Oh, wait, THIS Is the Golden Elephant." We walked into a much brighter lobby and greatly amused the two men behind the desk as we all communicated in about 20 English words and established a) that these rooms really were much nicer and worth checking into right then at 11:30 at night, b) that they would let us pay with a Visa, c) that we could book tickets at 7:30 the next morning for the river tour, but only if we had cash, d) no they didn't change money and e) they had no idea where an international ATM was.
Eleni and I walked back to our original hotel -- past all the doomed sea creatures -- and told the startled cashier we were checking out. We forfeited the $10 we had paid for the room without a second thought. Back through the restaurants, now rolling our luggage, and we were soon ensconced in our new, clean, toilet-paper-friendly room.

One problem solved.

The money gods were with us, too. While the two fancy hotels we stopped in couldn't give us cash since we weren't staying there, the ATM -- at the end of a dark lonely road that I might not have been able to bring myself to walk down alone, so I take back everything I ever said about not being sure about traveling in twos -- happily spit out piles of colorful Yuan for us.
Half-past midnight, and the second problem solved.

The only thing left to tackle was the fact that after all of this we were now hungry. There was nothing for it. . . On our fourth time past all the caged animals, we stopped for dinner. We walked with our waiter over to the food, glanced around, and then pointed decidedly at the largest eggplant we could see.

Grilled and spiced, our freshly-killed dinner was wonderful.