Im going to make her eat that flag

Tonight is our last night here in Guilin (pronounced gwaylin for all you round eyed folk). Small city, big cliff promontories called karsts, and huge terraced rice paddies. The rice paddies were quite a draw for us. They shoot up the steep hillsides for hundreds of feet, forking and branching with the many ridges. The problem with visiting them is that they are a few hours away, deep in the mountains near a series of villages that had no road in or out until 1997. That alone is quite fascinating. The area is home to one of China's minority groups. The woman in this group cut their hair only once in their entire lives, when they are eighteen. Not only that but the long piece that gets cut off is then bound at one end and tied back into the new frock. They comb it and comb it and then wrap it all up tight around their heads. It makes quite a tidy bundle but I really cant imagine the weight. In honor of their incredible dedication to hair growing Nate buzzed his head last night. It cost him two dollars and took ten minutes. I doubt anyone even thought about saving any of the clippings.
A delicious specialty of these rice-growing, long-maned folk is callef bamboo chicken and bamboo rice. Basically large pieces of bamboo are opened at one end, stuffed with either rice or raw chicken along with ginger and mushrooms, and then plugged back up with a corn cob. The whole cylinder is then thrown onto the grill. The green bamboo slowly chars and releases its water into the food, cooking it in a most tender fashion. Satiated on this we were prepared for the long upward climb through the terraces and humid sun.
I mentioned that the area is hard to get to. What I mean is that no public busses go in that direction so one is forced to sign on with a tour group. We did that and our guide nearly managed to ruin every redeeming quality of a thousand years of history. We were the only westerners in a group of twenty-five chinese. For those that have never had the pleasure of encountering a Chinese tour group know these three things: the leader carries a flag, the tour guide uses a microphone no matter how close you are to them (even if it is less than a foot), and pictures of EVERYTHING are a must. So our guide would rattle off a few thousand words in Chinese and then HELLO!! YES!! HELLO!! WAKE UP!! to Nate and I and then procede to yell for a few minutes in broken english about the area around us. Of course all accompanied by healthy flag waving. You may have noticed that I was cleverly avoiding the name of said minority group. Not my fault. I blame in on unintellible english filtered through a kareoke microphone.
But all that aside, the country here is beautiful. We are leaving tomorrow, on a boat in fact. The boat, apparently made of bamboo, is going to take us down the river for a few hours to our next stop. We only have another week or so in China before we enter Vietnam.
I have received a few calls for more photogrpahs. Heres the thing: Blogger along with facebook and other similar sites are all banned in China. There are a few sneaky little programs that allow you access. But when we can get in it is usually with limited access. So we have not been able to put pictures up. Sad, yes.