Cooking class today at the Yangshuo Cooking School with Chinese cook Sophie. First to the market to get our ingredients. There were 4 of us in the class with two others from Paris. We did see some chooks in the market but declined to see other live animals. So we stuck to checking out the local vegetables. Then it was off to cooking school. We made steamed stuffed vegetables (mushroom, tofu and melon stuffed with minced pork), eggplant Yangshuo style (using black bean and chilli paste), beer fish (using cat fish), chicken with cashew nuts and green vegetables with garlic. We have noticed here that if we try to order bok choy in restaurants no one knows the name so we just order green vegetables now and mostly we get bokchoy (although once it was lettuce). It was fun cooking and I realised how much I miss it when travelling. We had the food we cooked for lunch.

ducks at the market

dried foods

green vegetables – yum

mushrooms

my work bench

Paul cooking

Speaking of food, I have noticed some unusual items on various menus (well unusual for me anyway, not for Chinese people I guess). Some I recall are: bee larvae, caterpillar, frog cake, chicken feet, pig ear, snake wine. Today we saw octopus which had been grilled on a stick which looked good.

octopus on sticks

It has been raining today and was a good day to do cooking. After the class, we went back to West Street to have cappucino’s and do some bargaining for items which we have seen. It can be amazing how much a price can fall. We are not good at bargaining but try to at least get a price which we think is reasonable.

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Sometimes you are just plain lucky! We were so lucky today. Our cruise from Guilin up the Li River gave us window seats if we wanted to sit and better than that … we were the first boat to leave which meant there were no large boats in front of us. There was a line of boats ready to leave, one after another. How lucky! The view was constantly magnificent with massive limestone cliffs and the beautiful river which passed by villages, caves, fishermen and other small tour vessels -some were made from PVC piping (used to be bamboo) with a few seats on them and not much distance between the top of the boat and the water surface. The trip took close to 5 hours and is well worth it.

Li river cruise

boats on the Li River

houseboat on Li River

reflections on the Li River

small boats and big cliffs

more reflections

us on the Li River, trying out the selfie technique

The fishermen who fish for their families often use cormorants to find the fish. Apparently most commercial fishermen use nets. There were some houseboats to be seen but not many and our guide said there used to be manyhouseboats here.

fishing with cormorants

After arriving in Yangshuo, we walked up West Street and there were lots of shops and hard to resist buying a couple of things!! There was a man selling honey wih bees buzzing around him … !!!!!!! Later we came back to West Street for dinner at Cloud 9. We sat on the balcony and it started pouring with rain – so uch that we thought we were back in Northern NSW. Again we were lucky! The heavy rain began just after we arrived at the restaurant and essentially stopped just before we left. We had Sezchuan chicken and there was so much chilli on the plate it was hard to see the chicken and ,even if you didn’t eat the chilli, the chicken was so hot. Lucky we ldon’t mind hot food! We also had tarot chips (not cards) just to check out what they were like … oh and some local beer.

Paul and our guide in West Street

bee keeper in West Street

wet in West Street

Tonight we went to the famed light show in Yangshuo which was as fantastic as everyone said it woud be. We decided to get the expensive seats in a box with a roof. This was also lucky because it did rain. But definitely go to the light show when in yangshuo.

us in our box seat

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