Tie on Life Jackets.

Be warned; bakeries in China can be your best friend or be the stuff of nightmares. We frequent bakeries more than I thought while vacationing, because bread makes a quick and packable lunch when you are planning on being in the jungle, riverside all day long. But more on the duality of bakeries;They can be your best friend because cutely packaged milk drinks are a delicious combo of coconut and some other milk like beverage, but are also bringers of terrible news because of two things; meat floss and red bean. Meat floss is the bane of Chinese food. It's a stringy substance that lurks inside rolls and under crepes. It's disgusting and I have no idea why it's in everything. Red bean is also another bringer of disappointment. The stuff looks like raisins, chocolate chips, and cinnamon, meaning you can literally eat disappointment. You think you are biting into raisin bread, or a roll filled with chocolate but nope. There are beans in your bread. You are eating bean bread. It's worse than thinking you grabbed a chocolate chip cookie and instead find out it's a raisin cookie. 

However, I can't be too sad because even when I have to put on a still wet swimsuit and having a breakfast of bean bread because today is set up to be an incredible adventure. Yesterday, we had booked tickets to go river drifting. Basically, you get stuffed into a blow up raft and placed in a holding tank until the dam breaks and you careen down a jungly river path, slamming into rock walls and splashing into little waterfalls and falling down huge drop offs. Hannah was our saving grace and pulled out the camp games while we waited and while we made the hour or so drive up the river. We climbed higher and high into the overgrown mountains before getting off and locking up valuables, changing into swimsuits and taking a very chilly bus ride to the top of the mountain. I'm thinking the open air shuttle would have been really gorgeous in the summer time, but it made the ride a bit chilly considering I was covered in goosebumps and it was raining. Did I mention that it was raining? Good thing we were planning on getting soaked via the coursing river. 

At the end of our nippy shuttle ride, a pile of maybe not that secure helmets and life vests that you just tie on were supplied. I secured my "life vest" with a few bunny eared bows and snapped on a helmet that didn't feel that heavy and climbed into an inflatable raft to be launched down waterfalls. Oh, China. It was terrifying and awesome and was also in the middle of the most beautiful jungle. Hannah and I screamed and laughed and got so so so so wet especially when our raft got stuck under this waterfall and a man with a camera had to pull us out and back on course. I especially liked not being able to see what our next drop looked like when; the biggest falls were always preceded with a dam like area, where you floated lazily until the gentle current pulled you closer to the man with the huge bamboo pool guided your raft to the mouth of an enormous drop. It was incredible. To make it even better, certain sections were bookended by orange groves giving the rain scented air a "Soarin' Over California" twist. To really top things off, on the very last drop the clouds above us poured rain. It was the hardest rainfall I've ever been in and it was awesome. Hannah and I tossed our hands in the air and watched enormous drops plop into the coursing river before we were fished out to board the shuttle back down to the base. 

Again, excuse the photo quality. A picture of a picture can't really capture the whole "I'm having so much fun but I feel like I should have signed some sort of waiver before doing this" face as well as I'd like. 

A hot shower and dinner at West Street (get the banana crumble at the Minority Cafe!) capped off Tuesday's adventure, and only whetted our appetite for what Wednesday held. I skipped out on the bean bread and instead opted for a massive mango breakfast before delving into the real countryside of Yangshuo.  I can't imagine getting sick of this view...ever. The group of us turned down a deserted country path, attempting to get to the area of the river where you can ride bamboo rafts. So off we went. Someone had a speaker hooked up to their bike, playing some Rogue Wave as we pedaled through a postcard. We ended up finding the place, but there would be no rafting today; all of the rain we had enjoyed this week had flooded the river, making it too deep to raft in. In fact, it made the sidewalks too flooded to even bike on, though we did have fun pedaling through calf deep river water. 

I loved the biking and swimming combo, by my red-haired friend was less amused: See photo.

Naturally, the next option is to find a large bridge to jump off of, so we took the path less traveled buy after purchasing fresh flower crowns from a crooked toothed woman and a few spears of pineapple to fuel our biking. Things really got remote from that point. We biked for stretches down windy roads between karsts carpeted with dense greenery. When we did pass through civilization, we quietly coasted through tiny whitewashed villages with tile roofs, where woman on teeny wooden stools shelled peas or did the wash. Traffic consisted of a farmer walking his geese to another flooded rice field, or a pair of oxen lazily waltzing across the bumpy road. 

(I have about 13,304,127 pictures of this place). 

The bike ride had to come to an end, but it was a very happy ending indeed. Mango sorbet riverside and a lunch of egg friend noodles is pretty lovely way to spend the afternoon. Although I would have loved to bike the same route home, we wanted to ride home in the remaining daylight which meant taking the highway. I'm impressed my rented beach cruiser handled the downhill-under-construction-and-bus-studded highways to well- other people's cruisers popped tires and had other difficulties, but eventually we all made it back to West Street for sandwiches (oh, how we have missed sandwiches sans meat floss). I munched on a bowl of fresh cut watermelon while I walked back to the hostel and sorted out plans for tomorrow; we're planning on doing the same itinerary, but this time atop motorbikes.