The pictures of this trip are on http://picasaweb.google.com/mr.walker.tkd23, http://picasaweb.google.com/mr.walker.tkd6, and http://picasaweb.google.com/mr.walker.tkd7.
We woke up at 10 a.m. after I had had a bad night's sleep. We had breakfast in the hostel and Jeremy (who was basically our tour guide) asked if we could stay in the hostel for another night. We had only booked that hostel for one night and didn't really have a set plan as to where we would be staying for the rest of the nights. We only knew that we wanted to be in Guilin, visit Yangshuo and see the surrounding area. The rest we would figure out as we went along. It turned out that the room we were staying in was vacant for another night, so we booked it. We decided over breakfast that we would visit some sites in Guilin, including Elephant Trunk Hill (one of the many karst mountains that makes the Guilin area famous) and the Reed Flute cave. After breakfast, we got ready and started walking through the wet and muddy streets (it had been raining) of Guilin to Elephant Trunk Hill. We got a little lost, but eventually made it. We didn't know if we should pay and go in to Elephant Trunk Hill to walk around since it looked like it could rain any second. Instead, we took a 20 RMB bamboo raft ride on the Li river around the Trunk. The ride was pretty fun. The driver even stopped on a "beach"across from the Trunk where locals were selling all types of seafood. We didn't buy any because we didn't trust the quality of the Li river and the food didn't look that appetizing. Afterwards, we ate lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant. I accidentally dropped my phone in the bathroom and the back cover of my phone went into the toilet. I knew I couldn't get it out, so I just left it there. Luckily, my phone didn't fall in. After our filling and delicious lunch, we took the #3 bus to the Reed Flute cave. We were taking pictures outside of the cave with the karst mountains in the background and a fairly large group of Chinese came up to us to have their picture taken with us. It started to rain, so we went to buy our tickets and stand in line to go into the cave. The cave itself was enormous and beautiful. Pictures of the cave are on the Picasa websites, which give you an idea of how pretty the cave is. I think Jeremy's pictures of the cave came out better than mine. The tour was, of course, in Chinese so we didn't understand what they were saying about the cave, but I don't think we really needed to understand the tour guide to appreciate the magnificence of this cave. From the cave we took a taxi back to the hostel, where we relaxed for a little while until we decided to go to dinner in a restaurant near the hostel since it was pouring and we were tired. We ordered Sichuan dishes that were familiar to us, but it turned out that the food was not that great at this restaurant. We returned to the hostel after dinner in the still pouring rain and stayed there for the rest of the night.
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