Busy day in yangshou

Chris has been itching to climb for 6 months and today we finally found a
place for him and so, not wanting to pull him back to the beginners class he
went off to climb and I had the more fun job of trying to book train
tickets.
It turns out that because of the crazy summer holiday buying spree there are
no tickets this close to our leaving date and since we mmust get back it
looks like we are going to have to fly to Hangzhou.

I decided to get some culture so took a Chinese calligraphy lesson to try to
improve my Chinese characters. This was really fun and spent a couple of
hours practising the different strokes before practising a few characters,
it was pretty cool and I avoided buying a set but did buy a brush, identical
to the one I used in the lesson!

After my lesson Chris met me at the hotel having had a great climb in the
morning and over lunch we decided we would have to fly.
We went back to the hotel and booked our flights and then asked offhand if
it was too late (at half 3) to join the kayaking trip.
The hotel manager made a call and then said the bus would arrive in 5
minutes!
We changed and got into a small minibus and were driven to a small villiage
on the river.
After being driven through what was actually a pedestrian shopping street we
stopped outside a warehouse from where he produced two well used plastic
kayaks, paddles and life jackets older than me!
He took us to the waters edge and asked if we could swim before helping us
into our boats and pushing us off. No guide, no training, the only direction
was turn left and paddle to the bridge, we can't miss it and it should take
around 3 hours.
Since we were both kayakers and there was no real whitewater we decided to
go with it and so paddled out into the afternoon sun.

The views were beautiful and Chris's waterproof camera was very useful as we
paddled and floated in the strong current.
The sun started to set and we started to wonder just where this bridge was
when it rolled around the bend.
We were pretty tired as we arrived and asked how far it was, turns out it
was 11km the section we paddled! Not bad! But Chris 's morning climbing
really showed as he was dead!
We missed the last bus back but luckily the company left a swanky brand new
car for Chris and I to climb into smelling of river water for the very high
speed run back to town totally exhausted and in desperate need of a shower.