Party At the Moon Tower

Er, hike to the moon cave. 

I can never resist taking pictures of tourists taking pictures next to signs telling them to take pictures. I especially liked this one, because of the translated sign reading "Hailed Moon Platform." Sometimes, it's the translations that make sense, but are still just a little off, that amuse me the most. 

Here are some shots we took along the way. The stairs were pretty shallow here, but they got much steeper. There's the Moon Cave through the trees, one of a few rest stops, and the two of us at the summit. The hike only took about 45 minutes, but it was steep enough that some people (including our guide Susan) had trouble making it all the way up. 

Susan, it should be mentioned, was a very cute 23-year-old whose English was just barely not good enough to be a full-time English-speaking tourguide, so she only dealt with Chinese tourists. We kind of stumbled across her on our way from the Li River cruise to the hotel, as she was our point of contact for the River Show tickets. We both thought she was a good tourguide, witha great personality, good-enough English, strong knowledge of the region and a real willingness to help us do whatever we decided we wanted to do. 

We made it to the top, through the cave and to the best view. Here's the panaroma. Notice the woman fanning my mom -- she fanned my mother all the way up the mountain, then all the way back down, while also lugging a cooler full of cold drinks. That turned out to be a pretty good business decision for her. 

Then we were off, biking back to Yangshuo, to check out of the hotel and head to Sanya, our last stop on the trip.