Guilin – Haikou
Last day in Guilin today. Having gotten to the hotel fairly late last night, the first order of business was sleeping in. We finally made it out of the room around 10am (which has some benefits, like a very short line at the breakfast buffet). With nothing specific to see, after dropping our luggage off with the bellman, we headed off in the direction of a massage place we had found a few days earlier. Of course the specialty here is Chinese massage, which is more like a typical massage than the stretching and pulling style Thai massage we availed ourselves of every day in Phuket. Even better, they are even cheaper here. For an hour of massage, the rate is 25 yuan (about $3), so sparing no expense, we went for 2 hours each.
The rest of the afternoon we spent just walking around Guilin, mostly along the river and through the pedestrian market. Of the time we have been here, this has been the best day weather wise – very warm and perfectly clear, so it was a great day for doing nothing in particular. Wandering through the big town square we saw a big screen (like they have in Times Square) playing Tom and Jerry cartoons that we took pictures of for the kids. It is things like this that always surprise us a little bit as to how similar life here is to any big city like Seattle or Vancouver.
In the evening we headed off to the airport for our flight to Haikou. No signs in English again, but we are getting surprisingly adept and getting around without them. The plane was completely full (as has been pretty much every flight here), but the trip was short so we were quickly back on the ground in Haikou and in a cab on the way to our hotel. Our driver (who tried to scam us of course) apparently learned his skills watching NASCAR, weaving in and out of traffic at twice the posted speed limit, getting us to our destination in the same 40 minutes the hotel estimates the trip should take while taking a long enough route to turn a 30km trip into 70km (and earn more than double the regular fare). Still at 150 yuan we were better off than with the 200 yuan flat rate he wanted to charge from the airport.
Tomorrow begins a new phase of our trip, with far more lounging on the beach or by the pool and far less looking for things to do. Whether there will be anything interesting to post here in the coming days remains to be seen.