China - Guilin - 3/19/2005

The official part of the trip is now over, and the hotel in Shanghai even feels emptier.
Rohit and I left the hotel at 9:15 am after checking out. The taxi took us to Hanqou airport where we were able to figure out what airline counter actually was "China Eastern". The checkout procedure was straightforward and we managed to breeze through until the security checkpoint, which is funny to see is always just as congested as in the US. But after going through it, we sat to wait in our gate for an hour or so. A few minutes before boarding time I was getting worried since there was no sign of our airplane or even of agents at the gate. Even worse was the fact that the name of the city had dissapeared from the monitor in our gate. 15 minutes before departure I was able to find out that the plane had been moved to a different gate, just at that point the announcement came over the PA that our plane was going through final boarding, so we had to run to the new gate.
We managed to safely catch our flight to Guilin. An interesting finding is that airplane food also tastes as bad in Chinese as in the US flights. When we got off the plane, as expected, our guide wasn't there to receive us.
After screaming at people over the phone our guide walked in late, and it turns out that she was given the wrong flight information. Luckily we were now rolling out to visit Guilin's hills, we first visited one called "Elephant Hill", called like that because it looks like and Elephant drinking from the river Li. Then we went to visit Fubo Hill, where we got to climb all the way up the hill and saw the view of the whole city from it.
From there in order to kill some time we went to visit an Art Gallery where we saw some very interesting paintings, some that even cost more than a car (about 50,000 USD). From there we went to a "Western" dinner where we had a different selection of platters, that were not too bad. And once again I was thrilled to find Flan, although it was not as good as the one in Shanghai.
After that we went back to our hotel in Guilin to get an early night's sleep before going out tomorrow to Yangshuo.