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After two months, we were ready to leave the construction noise and crowds of Shanghai and set off on a week long adventure.  Using her limited Chinese, and an assortment of travel books, Liz worked hard to plan the perfect getaway with sporty outdoors activities, adorable villages, and luxury pampering.  We finally settled on a trip to the village of Ping An and the town of Yangshuo. 

Despite Liz's efforts, many important details were lost in translation. For Instance:  Our hotel, the beautiful LiQing guest house is not accessible by car. We only discovered this important detail at 2am when, after 3 hours of driving and several flight delays our driver parked his car along the rocky shoulder of an isolated dirt road.  Sleepy eyed, we pulled our luggage out of the cab's trunk and asked the driver to point us towards our hotel.  He flipped on his flashlight and pointed it at a seemingly endless mountainside stone staircase. Guided by our driver and his tiny flashlight, we hauled our luggage up the mountain.  After twenty minutes we finally stumbled into our hotel room and collapsed on our our impossibly hard beds.   (In the next day's light we saw that we were walking along sheer cliffs!)

Ping An is a cute village stacked in layers up the side of a mountain along the Dragon's Backbone rice terraces.  

Early in the morning, we took off on a hike from the rice terrace village of Ping An to the equally beautiful rice terraces of Dazhai. We struggled to find our way using the best map the internet had to offer: a hand-drawn approximation of the surrounding villages.  After about an hour, we encountered a giant bulldozer building an inter-village bypass. Just as Liz was about to insist we turn around and find another route, a grandmotherly minority woman popped out from behind the bulldozer and guided us to her village for lunch, which she said was a good midpoint in the hike.

Her house was huge and mostly empty, except for a fabulous entertainment center complete with color TV, satellite dish, and DVD & VCR players.  Other parts of the house weren't as advanced, e.g., the kitchen was basically an empty room with a fire pit and wok.  She cooked us lunch with her grandson on her lap.  She apparently supports a family of 4 with her magnetic personality and novel bargaining technique (Chinese-English translation courtesy Liz):

Seth: That lunch was delicious!  So, uh, how much do we, uh, owe you...?
Minority Grandma: How much would lunch be in Ping An?  Pay what you think is fair.
Seth: Ok, how's $10?  
Minority Grandma: (Shaking head) I don't think so...
Seth: $15?
Minority Grandma: (Shaking head) I'm afraid not...

At this point Liz intervened and bought several of her tchotchkes to smooth things over.

Slideshow: After lunch we walked through the notoriously beautiful 500 year old rice terraces from the Ming Dynasty.  (Interesting fun fact: dogs eat rice right off the stalk.)

In Dazhai we took a couple buses back to our hotel in Ping An.  We had one of the local specialties: chicken and mushrooms fire-roasted in a fat cylinder of bamboo.

The next day we took buses from Ping An to Yangshuo via Longshen and Guilin.  Actually we never got to Longshen.  On our way the bus driver stopped and waved down a bus going in the opposite direction.  He pointed and said "that's your bus."  Apparently the drivers get on the radio and plan your whole itinerary.  Cool, eh?

We stayed several nights a short walk up the river from Yangshuo at the Li River Retreat, a hotel run by an Australian expat with a can-do attitude.  (We know what you're thinking!  Are there any Australian expats without can-do attitudes?)  Yangshuo is known for its striking karst mountains, which are the improbably tall and skinny mountains you've seen in ink paintings or the 20RMB note.

Slideshow: Our Yanghuo itinerary: 1. Enjoy the view of some karst outside our hotel, 2. take a cooking class, 3. Go to the light show on the Li River, directed by Zhang Yimou of Olympics opening/closing ceremonies fame, 4. hike from Yangdi to Xingping in the karst mountains, 5. bike from Yangshuo to Liugong, eat lunch at the notoriously good restaurant on the river, 6. hang out with the cormorant fisherman.  (Unfamiliar with cormorant fishing?  It's simple: tie a string tightly around a cormorant's neck; throw him in the water; grab him when he's swallowed a fish, turn him upside down and shake the fish out.)