Vietnamese border and more boating

True to his word, A Wu woke me up at 7am. I did the same to Ailun and Anzhe in their room while A Wu took his shower. I wondered why, as we got in A Wu's car, Anzhe looked nearly as white as the sheets we'd slept in. With trembling hands he passed me his camera, and tried to show me the eight-legged monster that had spent the night in his towel and didn't take kindly to being woken up by an Englishman wanting to dry himself. Ok it was just a blooming spider.

Anzhe's friend

Because we'd not been told what we'd be doing for these couple of days none of us had sufficient clothing. I did try to wash some clothes in the hotel, but by the morning they were somewhat predictably wet due to the 99% humidity I dare say. So I had the ignominy of wearing the previous day's shorts and a totally unironed shirt. Anyway, we drove through beautiful mountains, alongside rivers following the valleys through the paddy fields until we reached Vietnam.

Well, Vietnam was more of a "beauty spot" for which we had to pay about a tenner each to enter. Not only that we had to buy flip flops as it would be a bit wet. Of course if we'd been told this we'd have brought our own flip flops that we'd bought just days earlier in Pingguo but that wasn't the point. We drove back down to the ticket office (why you can't buy tickets at the place you present them is known only to the Chinese - I guess it's to keep more people employed in meaningless jobs). Then we came back and entered the border place where they ensure you stay on a well marked path and point out to you the "beautiful views" where you should take photos from.

Some sort of milestone by Vietnam

This sort of stuff really pisses me off. Yes, it's beautiful, or at least it would be if there weren't signs telling you so. We'd love to have got off the beaten track to see some things first hand but that was transgressing the rules. Anyhow, Ailun took plenty of photos. He got talking to a couple of women but unfortunately nothing came out of it. We ended up (unsurprisingly) at a number of stalls selling Vietnamese produce from coffee to sexually enhancing pills (I thought they were just dirty playing cards until I asked, then felt extremely embarrassed).

Ailun apparently discovering his sphincter for the first time

We did have a good meal outside the border place, and Anzhe and Ailun are now both converts to fried bees. And mysterious eggs that apparently you have to leave underground for months first...

I've already posted pics of fried bees but we also loved the brown eggs with snowflake patterns

I found that I had no shadow in the midday sun. Then I noticed the sun was directly above us

After the Vietnam border we drove for some time to the place we were supposed to meet A Wu's friend. During this time we learnt of Anzhe's fantasy: somewhere, in a paddy field in Guangxi, there is an 18-25 year-old paddy field worker woman who is actually quite pretty. But she has a problem. Her washing machine has broken down. Anzhe happens to be the only washing-machine-repair-man in the area, and goes to her help. As strange as it sounds, when Anzhe arrives the wind picks up and blows the light cotton robes off the nubile paddy field worker, revealing her young body, pert breasts pointing to the midday sun. Man this is so much a fantasy; the only paddy field workers were in their 50's with skin you could make jackets out of. 5/5 for imagination though....

Andrew's fantasy setting

We got to another boating place a bit later where we met two rather pretty women, saying they could get us in for a discount. It is in these situations where I feel rather uncomfortable. I asked A Wu why they could get us in for cheaper when it looked obvious they were working for the boating company. I didn't get an answer. We drank tea with the girls, then parted with a lot of cash (about 60 quid for the four of us). And then they came back with the tickets. Apparently we'd just saved 20 quid or so. We had a very in-depth conversation about what we could bring with us on the boats. I asked if it was safe to bring cameras and they said "yes" of course - we can put them in plastic bags if necessary. I asked why that would be necessary and they said because they might get wet. Which was sort of the point of asking in the first place. Anyway, just as we were all leaving to go to the boats we were told it was probably better to leave the cameras in the car to avoid them getting wet. Man if only we got a straight answer in the first place...

We all bought a broad brimmed hat for a quid each, as the sun was beating down and I felt my feet already burning. Luckily, as we'd found near the Vietnam border, the sun is directly above you so a hat will shade all your body unless you're a fat American. We followed some blokes down down down a mountain path, where the sun got lost and it started raining in a nice refreshing if humid way. It took all of half an hour to get to the place where the boats were, by which time we (I) fancied a beer. Unfortunately that was the only drink they didn't have there. However a couple of minutes later we were being hurried onto our dinghies for our next trip.

This time each dinghy had a bloke paddling for us and we were able to take in the beautiful surroundings. We stopped for a few minutes under what I think was a fig tree and sampled the delights of the luscious fruits. Very sumptious and I'd love to take some home. But no time and I basically acted like a wasp and gourged myself for 15 minutes before getting back on the dinghy to enjoy the next 3 hours. And it was very enjoyable. It wasn't quite as much white water as yesterday's boat ride, but that didn't stop Ailun diving out of his boat at one stage while we were waiting for the others to catch up. I bet he wish he didn't; he was in the water for all of a minute but when he got back in the dinghy with A Wu he had four leeches on his legs. He spent the next half an hour trying to check his balls without the other boats seeing!

After the boating A Wu decided we wouldn't meet his mate after all as it was too late. Luckily I had downloaded all the world's maps on my Nokia E71 and with GPS I was able to tell where we were. I deduced it would take a long time to get home so we stopped at a food place and had some lovely pork and beef. I'd forgotten that A Wu doesn't eat beef for some quasi-religious reason so all the more for us. We got back before 11pm and managed to grab a headwash - the thing we'd all been looking forward to all evening.

There were plenty of pretty girls for Ailun, but he spotted one of them playing some war game on the computer and was unheard of for the rest of the evening