Yangshuo 2

Took it easy in the morning and walked up and around one of the hills next to town giving a nice view of the river and hills, and a good chance to get bitten by mosquitoes. After lunch I got a bike again and this time took a different route out of town and quickly found myself on the road I should have been on yesterday. There were plenty of other cyclists this time and the scenery was great. Eventually made it out to Moon Hill (a mountain with a moon shaped hole in it) where I bumped into an Australian guy who was thinking about doing the climb up the mountain. Decided I wasn't going to up because I wanted to be back in town in time to see some touristy light show on that evening. Aussie guy thought that sounded good and so cycled back into town with me. That worked out great because he was ace with the bargaining skills - he got us tickets to the show at a greatly reduced price. When we were grabbing dinner a lady came up to us looking to sell camera memory cards and he also haggled her down to a tiny fraction of the original price (tiny fraction of the shop price too). Dinner was also dead cheap - 8 RMB for spicey "Guilin Noodles" which were great. We got a mini bus to the light show place and from the ticket gate walked through a floodlit tunnel of bamboo and emerged at a huge arena looking out onto the river with a few thousand people already seated expectantly. Our seats were down the front and had a great view. We were looking out into the blackness for 10 minutes until a tiny lone figure was lit up somewhere out in the river and then suddenly the surrounding hills were lit up from below to amazing effect. It gave the impression that the whole river for kilometers around acted as the stage. Which is just as well as for the next hour and a half there were at least 500 dancers and singers on bamboo rafts performing - the whole thing was just incredible. I subsequently found out the director is the same guy doing the opening ceremonies to the olympics in Beijing. If that show was anything to go by the olympics will be brilliant. We were expecting a huge standing ovation at the end but I guess thats just not how things are done here. Everybody just left in dribs and drabs once the ending was in sight. Couldn't believe no one stayed longer. On our way out the crowd for the next showing were already lining up. After we got back into town we ended the night playing Poker Dice or something similar with some of the other backpackers staying in town.