All you need to know

Stuck in Guilin!

Flight delayed for as yet undisclosed period for maintenance :(

Lobby

Just checking if the tablet can push photos as the eePc transformer blew and despite four visits to the local PC shop the replacement never got any closer than "coming soon, here at (now + 4 or more hours)"

about to take longest trip ever

Waiting for 1 hr taxi to 2 hr flight Guilin to Shanghai then 7 hr layover before a 12 hr  flight to Frankfurt. And then a train ride to Warsaw most likely.

This will be a new record for both of us.

Google services.cn

Word to the wise: favor non-Google services in China. So far Google search tends to not respond (historically the Hong Kong one was best) and gmail is both slow and inclined to lock you out for "suspicious activity". The suspicious activity lockout is particularly awesome because you need a phone call or SMS to resolve it and some of us don't travel with phones :D

Bing search and M$ free email (using an @live.com to email => blogger) OTOH work far faster and more consistently. You know, the opposite of how it is at home!

Getting Started

Long flights plus time zones is weird. We left 11pm August 3rd, arrived 2am August 5th. The airport has a cool roofline:

 

 

As this is a bit early to checkin we decided to chill at the airport for a couple of hours before taxiing to the hotel (http://www.templeside.com/deluxe/deluxe.html). Hooray for the Lei Cafe :D

 

 

We caught up on reddit and booked flight/hotel for Yangshuo. 

Once 6am rolled around we found the taxi queue and headed into town (~1hr, 120 yuan metered). Some problems are universal it seems:

 

 

The idea of lanes with minimum speed limits is one Vancouver could use!

 

 

We arrived at the hotel at 7am or a little thereafter. Front desk and the little alley the rooms are off are both pretty cool.

 

 

 

 

Front desk was open but our room wasn't quite ready so we crashed at front desk for an hour or so while the room was prepped. As of 8:35am local time we are enroomed and pretty much ready to crash for a couple of hours to recover from the not-so-restful flight.

  

Karsts!

August 6th we should be flying to Guilin then promptly heading for Yangshuo to see karst formations!

First two nights we'll be crashing at www.yangshuomagnolia.com if all goes to plan.

In theory this is posting to rptripnotes; Pavan please verify and let cool.trip@live.com know.