Fenghuang, Hunan, China
November 23, 2013
I was up at the crack of dawn yet again, infarct well before the crack to be fair.
We said that we would get up and head down to the river to try and catch sunrise. Doc and Shua arrived really early as they are staying in a different hostel and as I said before Doc’s English is pretty limited so when I was trying to explain that it was cloudy and there would be no sunrise today it didn’t quite go in, so we headed down to the river anyway. Surprise, there was no sunrise.
Still it was good to be up and about early as it was really quiet and still at that time so after a bit of breakfast we all hopped on a boat and took a wee tootle up and down the river.
It was quiet with visitors but still quite lively with locals. People stood at the side doing their morning Tai Chi and various other exercises, women washing clothes in the river, washing vegetables ready for the days cooking. It was good to see. Once back on shore we went for another mooch round the narrow winding alleys. One particular food place caught my eye which had a whole pig in the window as well as two live geese just outside on a box waiting to be sold. What struck me the most was the three trays at the front. One with Crabs, the next one shrimps and the final one was deep-fried wasps! Wasps?! I’ve tried some food in my time but wasps? I don’t really fancy getting a mouthful of wasps. I don’t like and I’m certainly not going to eat them! Interesting non the less.
Doc and Shua headed back to their hostel and me and Hui just spent a couple of hours doing some more mooching before heading back ourselves. I was supposed to be going out on the night with them all but started to get some pretty bad shoulder pain, hopefully off the bag I’ve been lugging around with me and not from the mossie bite I got here on the first day. So I stayed in and rested up after I had popped out on my own for a little bit food and a few coffees. I hung around the hostel and sorted a place to stay in Guilin and Yangshoa so tomorrow all I need to do is book my sleeper train to Shenzen for Thursday night then that’s me all sorted to the point where I hit Hong Kong and then Malaysia from there.
