Greg and I have spent the last few days in Guilin and Yangshuo, in Guangxi Province, areas popular with Chinese tourists and backpackers alike for their impressive limestone karst peaks and views of the Li River. Both towns are beset by roadside hawkers and souvenir shops, but Yuangshuo, despite its higher concentration of tourists (and therefore tourist-traps), is the more pleasant of the two. The center of town is a maze of shops and bars that make for enjoyable evening strolling amongst the jovial crowds, but escape to quiet rural roads and spectacular scenery is just a quick bike ride away. Guilin is much larger and its sights, while beautiful, run a little like theme parks, with large regimented tour groups and entry fees.

Culinarily, Guilin is known for rice noodles and for restaurants with their ingredients caged outside their entryways. According to Wikipedia, it is also the source of a famous local rice wine, or baijiu, a local chili sauce, and pickled tofu, although the rice wine is the only one of those we sampled- it's very sweet and fairly strong, and I liked it enough to buy some samples to take home. We tried the rice noodles with horsemeat for breakfast, after arriving in Guilin on the overnight train, and they were quite good as well, although the meat was (unsurprisingly) a little tough.

Both in Guilin and Yangshuo, river snails are found in many restaurants and markets. In Guilin, I resorted to drawing a little picture of a shell to order a dish of the snails, which taste and feel a little like clams. Later, after a cruise down the river took us to Yangshuo, we had them stuffed with pork and mint. At that same meal in Yangshuo, we had what might be my favorite dish so far: fried duck tongues. They were crisp on the outside and tender and fatty on the inside, and they were served with a little dish of curry flavoring for dipping.

Another new treat we found in Yangshuo was this goopy colorless jelly (I know, could I make it sound more appetizing?) that I could not identify completely- the only translation for its name that I could get was "porridge." But the light, floral flavor and the photos on the stands selling it (recognizable from afar by their large, steaming dragon-headed pots) lead me to think that it is related to lotuses. It is served with chopped nuts and raisins on top, which were fine, but I preferred the taste of the goop alone.

In Yangshuo I also took my first cooking class of the trip, at the Yangshuo Cooking School. The class began with a trip to the market, a huge series of warehouses with just about every fresh ingredient you could want, from live chickens and butchered dogs, to tofu and lettuce stalks. In the class we cooked five delicious dishes, including another local specialty, fish cooked in beer. Although the dishes were not complicated, I think the class certainly improved my wok skills. Plus we got to enjoy the fruits of our labors on a courtyard overlooking the Li River.

As always, more photos are up on Flickr.