The #1 thing that we both wanted to see in China but never managed in the past was karst formations. To see karsts one heads for the Guilin area, except Guilin is described as overrun by local tour groups so we planned to fly to Guilin and immediately taxi an hour or so to Yangshuo for a somewhat quieter experience.
Our flight wound up being quite early so we got up at 5am, got to the airport really fast (no traffic!), and wound up in the domestic terminal with some time to kill.
Breakfast seemed in order. Domestic terminal options were limited. We wound up with tasty steamed buns and rather mediocre tea eggs.
Next we went in search of coffee. Sleepy judgement, airport pricing, and general high cost of coffee in China resulted in the most regretted purchase of the trip to date: about $16 worth of coffee.
Idiots! After our coffee extravagance we were still hungry so we had another $10 (at ludicrous airport prices) worth of buns and dumplings:
These were quite good!
After a couple of hour flight we landed in Guilin. It was staggeringly hot. As in hotter than Beijing (rated "breathtakingly hot"). Our hotel had helpfully arranged for a taxi to meet us. Our taxi driver started the car and the AC then we all hid under a tree while the vehicle transitioned from oven to sweltering so we could get rolling.
As the car headed for Yangshuo two magical things happened: the AC started to win the battle against the heat and karsts began to appear.
Eventually we reached Yangshuo and detaxied. Between having been in AC for the last hour and the time of day approaching the hottest part the staggering heat was once again staggering.
We staggered our way through checkin and made our way to our room, which thankfully had AC. Less thankfully it only had AC when the key card was present so AC was only on when we were actually in the room. More thankfully, the room had a functioning shower and very comfortable (if you like firm beds, which both of us do) beds.
Less thankfully the hall of scorching outside our room was not air conditioned.
Overall we were pretty happy with the place.
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