The start of the last leg

Well Gillian and I made it to China! This is our last country to travel before coming home, but we still have over a month to go. We had a very adventurous Easter, we took a 18 hour bus journey on 3 different buses from Hanoi, Vietnam to Guilin, China. Leaving Vietnam was a chaotic mess of people shoving to get their exit stamps. While waiting in the mess a people we made friends with 3 Canadians and discovered that we paid 3 times as much for our Chinese visas simply because we are American! There was a very clear distinction between the disorder of the Vietnam boarder and the sudden organization of the Chinese boarder. We were placed in a golf cart mini van and driven all of 500 meters which we were not allowed to walk to Chinese immigration. Surprisingly neither of us had any problems and we made it through just fine. We were able to fine our bus okay thanks to the signs they made us put around our necks like kindergartners that in Chinese said what bus we were on. Guilin is one of the China's oldest tourist cities due to the amazing natural beauty of the region. We have seen more hills and caves in the past week then I have seen in my entire 26 years and the everyone of the hills has a funny name and a temple at the top. To me the city is very western and modern. We got to stay with Gillian's good friend, Elsie, who way the best tour guide yet! We took 2 days and went to the Longji Rice Terraces which are only about 2 hours form Guilin. The rice terraces are even better then the pictures and a wonder just to see how they were made and still being farmed. It was a great break for us. We stayed the night in the village of Ping'an which is in the middle of the terraces. We hiked the second day to a little village about 3 hours away up and down stairs, over hill after hill. Along the way we meet a women from the local village who was bugging us to have lunch at her house. We thought if we told her we do not eat meet, she would give up.....but no. She used it to her advantage and began picking wild greens and baby bamboo for our lunch. After 2 hours of hiking with her we gave in and had an amazing lunch at her home. She brought us into her home which was a larger wooden structure which was basically one huge room. We hung out with her mother who was 76 years old and still working way chopping wild greens for the animals. We were watching our hostest build a open fire in one corner of the house and cooking our lunch when we heard pigs. We were trying to figure out were the pigs were since we could hear them but not see them anywhere. The 76 year old grandmother mixed up a pot of mush which we feared was our lunch, but then she picked up two of the wooden floor boards and lowered the mush down to the pigs. She then swept all of the scraps on the floor into the whole of the pigs to eat. That is what I call efficiency. We had an amazing time the rice terraces. The experience was peaceful and beautiful . We both would have loved to spend a week there.