yangshuo river rafting

a couple weeks ago, i had the opportunity to travel to yangshuo (on the 24 hour train ride i wrote about before). yangshuo is an interesting place. the terrain is beautiful but it's also a huge tourist destination and backpackers like to travel there as well. here's a view from our hotel showing macdonalds and other tourist shops and hotels in front of this beautiful place.


one afternoon we got to go on a river rafting ride, which was awesome! we drove towards the river and then walked a short distance to get there:

here's our first view of the river:

it was one of the most beautiful and peaceful places i have been, moving slowly along that river.

there were a lot of two person bamboo rafts out of the river that day, each poled along by a chinese person who worked at the place where all the rafts began from.

here's some of our friends as we went up the river first:

my friend alison and i on our raft:

we eventually reached this little falls, and we got off the raft, they carried the raft up and over and we kept going up the river.
eventually, we turned around, and came back towards where we started from, so on the way back down, we had to go over these falls. there were a bunch of larger floating rafts with people and computers on them right past these little falls on the way down. they took multiple pictures of every raft as it went over, and then right after we went over, we had to get off the raft and walk onto one of the bigger ones, where they would show us the pictures on a computer that they had just taken. we could choose however many we wanted and they would print them then and there on a nice card and laminate them and sell them to us. very efficient! and then we continued down the river.

view from the front of our raft:
and on the way back down:
some water fights took place on the way back. =) and one of my friends had an awesome "driver" who serenaded us with chinese songs. imagine floating down a river where there are no sounds but the water. we couldn't even here people talking on other rafts--usually other rafts were not near us. but we could hear the sound of the chinese man singing as floated down the river behind us. there isn't really a way to describe that singing.

as we left the place where the raft trip had begun, there were little covered places where people were hanging their laundry, and apparently also storing their scooters and bikes and other things.