Adventures

This time while I'm writing for my blog, I'm surrounded by the most amazing lime stone peaks. I'm in a town called Yangshuo, in one of the Southern provinces of China, and the scenery is fantastic, sublime, jaw-dropping and...bizar. we arrived 4 days ago at nighttime in the city Guilin. Well, we almost hadn't arrived at all because we almost, ehm, missed the plane. Yeah, well, the thing is there are a lot of domestic flights in China. They are cheap and you can book them one minute in advance if you want to. So we booked our flight on Wednesday to fly away from our palmbeach bounty island on Friday. Allthough the last couple of days it was a bit of a soggy bounty; we finally were remembered what the word 'monsoon' implies. No dramas (Tim's favourite expression) though, because after 10 days the beach gets kind of...sandy, and sticky, and salty. So we entertained ourselves with, let me think, not with much that's for sure, well, I can't remember but we were entertained. mainly by eating breakfast, lunch and dinner at wonderful Western-food restaurants. Man, they had to use a horse-cart to carry the loads of pizza's and tortilla's we stuffed our faces with. Luckily I was able to sustain supermodel figure by playing in the sea, dodging the waves like crazy. Happy times man. If there was a market for body-surfing-without-board, I would offer myself as a tutor (80 Yuan per hour). All you do is just dive with the wave just before it curls, and don't forget to take a deep breath. Sometimes the waves are a bit bigger than you had calculated with the result of being mercilessly slapped to the seabottom as if you were a bag of unappreciated potatoes. (I know I'm using some Dinglish here: Dutch/English, but hey, hope it works). So after a few hours of feeling like unappriciated potatoes, I think you're allowed to eat some appreciated fried ones.
Besides eating and being live beach entertainment for all the Chinese passer by-ers, we did actually have one real adventure. That was the day Diana, Tim and I rented scooters to explore the island. The scooters were brought out from a crack under the stairs in our hostel, dusted off by the chef-cook/handyman, who subsequently tried to bring the things to life. One worked fine and stood purring, ready to go. The other one however, had some difficulty regaining consciousness after what we guessed had been a long winters sleep. We had almost given up hope when the beast started roaring, and slightly nervous I mounted the saddle. I gently twisted the gas-handle, and off we went! Driving grandma style at first, amazed by our courage to venture into the mass of cars, bicycles, randomly crossing pedestrians and crazy motorbikes that is calles Chinsese traffic, we quiclky gained confidence and speed. We skilfully manouvered our bike through the mess and found some nice, relatively quiet roads heading towards even-better-bounty beach. All went fine, racing along the highway with quite amazing view on the hills with lush greens forests. Highway sounds pretty cool, but there weren't that many cars and the drivers were actually very well behaved. This seems the right time to give a short note on Chinese traffic. The first thing you need to know is that if you're on a Chinese road, you need a horn. The biggest, loudest horn you can find. And get one which is easy to reach because you.will.need.it. People don't use index lights. If they want to move, they just blow the horn untill everything is blown out of the way and they can proceed their journey. Luckily, Chinese are 'careful' drivers, so if you are peacefully cycling/walking at the far right side of the road, no oncoming traffic in sight, they still blow the horn, suitable for the Titanic, at least three times, just in case you got a fit of retardedness and suddenly jumped into the middle of the road. Anyway, DAMN those bloody horns. I used to think. Untill I got myself onto a scooter. Addicted after only five minutes I beeped my way between cars and motorcyclists, beeping twice just in case.
But than, happily beeping away, disaster stroke. I turned the gashandle, preparing for a spurt up a hill, and...nothing, no more power. The thing quit. We parked on the slope and while dark clouds assambled above our heads (this is no lie, there really were clouds), we grasped our heads trying to think of a solution. Desperately trying to wave down passing traffic for help, we felt panic rising in our bodies, as a threatening wind suddenly started blowing. Haha, nooh,

Damn, i know this is a crucial point in the story, but meanwhile I am already three days ahead. In fact, I am in the most noisy internet cafe on...Hong Kong Island. I saved this story when some guy came up to me to ask how long I still needed to use the internet. There was only 1 computer so I felt guilty. My internet time here is also nearly up so I will just post this story untill I have time to finish it!

ohoh 4 minutes left, better post it!

bye bye my friends, papah and mamah,...ok, brothah and sistah..gotta post!