This morning we drove to the Li River where we planned to take a 3 and half hour cruise. We walked to our boat, and I overheard a couple of French girls talking. I heard the word bateur and thought, 'Hey, that means boat in French.' Amazing what you remember from language tapes.

The cruise was absolutely beautiful. The landscape was like nothing I've ever seen before. The boat had two decks. The lower main deck had tables and was where ate lunch. The upper deck was used for sight-seeing. Of course, there was a little store there as well. While in the lower deck, I heard some Japanese girls scream behind us. I later found out that someone's eel had escaped, scaring the hell out of the tourists.

We could see cormorant fisherman on the river. The fisherman were on boats of basically three bamboo rods tied together. The cormorant is a bird that is tied to the boat. It cathes the fish. The fisherman then squeezes its neck to make the bird cough up the fish into a basket. Several times a number of these little boats would latch onto our boat, and people would try to sell T-shirts kept in the baskets.

For lunch a hot pot was placed on each table and we had to cook our own food. Meals never seemed to lack surprises. There was a huge shopping area where we got off the boat. I ended up buying a pair of silk kimono type robes for friends who had asked me to get them something along those lines. The bus took us to an early dinner at the Guilin Grand Hotel. We then arrived at the airport where we took China Southern flight 8933 to Guangzhou (Canton). This time we were on a 737.

Flying over Guangzhou in the evening reminded at least three of us of Las Vegas. There were lots of lights in this city of 5 million people. This time two buses were used to take us to our hotel, the Gitic Riverside. The guide on my bus told us about the serious crime in Guangzhou that make even him nervous about walking the streets. From the window I could see a youth expertly wielding numchuks as he walked down the street.

After settling in (I was in Room 2015), Miroslaw and I went for a walk. Miroslaw tried countless times at the desk to reach the woman we'd met in Beijing who was from this city by phone. The best he ever did was to reach her mother who didn't speak English. We didn't know it at the time, but Joanna still wasn't back from Beijing yet.

There wasn't a whole lot to do around our hotel, but we were right next to the Pearl River which made the views from our rooms spectacular. When we got back inside, we decided to try the karaoke bar in the hotel. The waitresses had slits in their skirts that went right up to their hips. Gary decide to join us. It turned out we were the only customers which seemed to be the case whenever we tried to find nightlife on previous nights. Gary treated us each to a drink. It turned out to be rather expensive. The hardest part was communicating what we wanted to our waitress. I had a screw driver which turned out to exceedignly small, little more than a shot.