Travel Weary

Well, it's 3pm, and we're more or less settled in at the Paradise Resort Yangshuo. "Resort" might be an overstatement, but "paradise" pretty well hits the mark. Yangshuo lies beside the slow-moving, murky Li River, and is home to those beautiful, tree-covered limestone peaks that you see in tacky Chinese restaurant paintings. In the paintings, they always look a little cloying -- too good to be true, like they're ripped out of some child's storybook. In person, the effect is quite different.

We left the wharf at Guilin at about 9:30am and boarded one of the dozens of cruise boats lined up along the riverbank. Our boat had two levels for seating, with an observation deck on top. Each level had small tables, around which the guests could sit. Our guide led us to a table-for-four on the upper level. We took our seats, and I poured hot tea into four small cups, and passed them around the table. After quite a bit of bumping and nudging the boats next to us, we made it out onto the open river.

As our boat drifted away from Guilin, we left our seats and headed to the observation deck to enjoy the view. And what a view it was. As the mid-morning sun chased away the mist, the legendary karst peaks arose along the river and to the horizon beyond, verdant and majestic -- great green hands lifted in silent prayer. One bend after another, mile after mile, the river revealed new treasures; cliffs and crags, obelisks and effigies, cloaked in bamboo, cassis and osmanthus. Fanciful names like "Woman with child, waiting for husband," "Elephant hill" and "The seven stars" would have seemed immoderate in any other setting.

I've downloaded a few of my pictures to the laptop, and like my shots of the Great Wall, they're a bit disappointing -- I've once again failed to capture the beauty of the scenery. I guess you'll just have to visit these places yourself to get the real picture.

At any rate, I'm going to spend a little time getting some photos ready to post, and then I'll visit the business center at the hotel and see if they'll let me plug my laptop into their hub. If not, I'll have to wait 'til tomorrow to post this at a local internet cafe. We'll be in beautiful Yangshuo for five days, so I'll have plenty of time to tell you about the town later.

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It's 6:00 on a foggy Tuesday morning in Yangshuo. I wasn't able to use the internet connection at the hotel's business center, so I'll need to find another place to plug in. It's frustrating, but no real biggie, I guess. When we adopted Chien from Vietnam in 1998, there were no internet cafes, and a phone call to the States was something like 10 bucks a minute.

Anyway, it's morning in Yangshuo, and I have no idea what the day holds. Nestled among the same emerald peaks that left us so speechless on yesterday's boat trip, Yangshuo is a tiny town with a large number of bars, and a higher proportion of white folks than any other place we've seen in China. Swap out the mountains for a beach, and we could be in Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand in Cambodia. This place is backpackers' heaven. Every year, thousands of hardy trekkers hike their way across large portions of China, and most of them stop for rest, provisions and beer in Yangshuo -- I should have done so myself when I was younger, had fewer responsibilities and more connective tissue in my knees.

The town itself is very small, and seems to consist of a tiny wharf (from which we arrived yesterday) a main drag lined with hotels, bars, restaurants, shops and souvenir stands, and a few side streets. The side streets siphon off the overflow from West Street, the higher- rent main thoroughfare. Beyond the town itself lie mountains, terraced rice paddies, caves, dirt roads and, of course, the Li River. We literally have no plans for the next week; we really just want to relax, maybe explore the countryside a bit. Next week, when we get Xiu Dan, things get complicated, and our time here will be much more about her and much less about 'China.'

Our hotel is quite nice, but not particularly fancy. Here, one pays for the location more than the accommodations. That having been said, we're at the only hotel in town with a pool, a climbing wall and a pingpong table, all of which will help us relax by staving off the boys' inevitable boredom after a few days of slumming about in paradise.

Last night, we walked around the town and found a tiny place advertising Thai food about a block from our hotel. We stopped, and the adorable little waitress (okay, I know I'm sounding patronizing here, but she really was adorable. She could have been 11 or 17; I couldn't tell. And she smiled all the time. And I'm a week away from having my first daughter. Sriram, don't you preach at me...) offered us a table on the second floor. We chose a table by an open window, overlooking the street. Okay, so it wasn't really a table. It was an open-sided box, more like a bench, and we sat around it on pillows, Thai style. It was very cool, and I'm thinking of having my dad build something like that for our living room. We may finally be able to get rid of our dining table.

The menu was varied, and we ordered a mishmash of foods -- pizza, fruit salad, spring rolls and a Thai red curry with beef. All of it was good. The curry was really good, and was way spicy, just as we like it. Kori said to the kids, "They're open for breakfast and lunch. Maybe this would be a good place to get some snacks and do some homework tomorrow. Chien reclined, stretched and said, "(Yawn) This place may be too relaxing for homework."

Speaking of homework, the kids have done a really good job keeping up with their assignments. Pak had a bit of a breakdown yesterday, but overall, they've been pretty willing to work on their three Rs. Amazing, actually; I can't imagine having to do worksheets on vacation. Oh, wait. I do have to right those quotes for the Hathaway Brown Annual Fund campaign this week. Dang.

Well, I'm still full from yesterday's dinner, but we should probably get up and get breakfast pretty soon. I'll try to find an internet connection by mid morning. Crossing my fingers...