We arrived in Yangshuo and caught an illegal taxi to our hostel but I had to give him credit as he had a stack of business cards from all the hostels which he handed to me and said “which hostel?” I simply found the card for Tripper’s Carpe Diem and we were off. Our welcome wasn’t the best at the hostel but it was completely out of their control. There was no electricity from 8am-7pm (the government was putting in new pylons), there was construction on the property behind (the farmer building a new house) and a terrible drumming racket coming from across the valley (an 88-year-old women had died and funerals here go all night with intermittent fireworks). This didn’t really matter as we were planning to do lots of activities over the coming days. This hostel also has an unbelievably comprehensive activities guide so we didn’t waste time and booked a horse ride for the following morning.
Margaurita on the white horse
our guide did a good job to getting this angle
lovely day for a ride
thirsty work for the horses
beautiful place for a horse ride
this coordination wasn't easy
trying to coax the horses out of the water
Looks like the horse has done this before
"good horse, good horse"
posing with our guides cowboy hat
check out the white horse smiling
In the afternoon we walked into town to catch a bus to Xingping where we were booked to go “Drifting” which is a form of white water rafting. Having rafted in Victoria Falls I was sceptical as to how good this would be but I was pleasantly surprised. They have taken a river and created weirs strategically at various points down the valley. and in some parts they have built up the river to create channels. This is all necessary because there are no guides as such, it’s just two people per raft and you hold on while you drift down the gorge. We didn’t take cameras and the souvenir photos were expensive so here are some photos I found on the net to give you an idea of what it was like.
Drifting in Xingping - photo by Dan Ouyang
the river was quite rough in places
crowded weir while drifting
Despite the crowds it was a lot of fun and rougher than you would think with some big drops on some of the weirs and a great way to spend 2 hours in the summer heat.
Why Rory Alexander is in China 