after cleaning up as much as we could from the magical cave, we cruised through the countryside on our super-sexy electric scooters (kind of like motorcycles, but without the engine...or the noise...or the bad-boy sex appeal aura______actually, i'm gonna say that riding an electric scooter increases sex appeal by about the same factor as riding a too-small tricycle). eventually, we arrived at a dock on the side of the yulong river to the west of yangshuo. after (again...and this is a repeating theme of our whole chinese experience) debating prices with the bamboo rafter-men, we hopped onto three two-person rafts. you'll see them in the pictures, but they've got the world's crappiest lawn chairs attached to maybe ten thick, parallel bamboo sticks and are propelled by one wrinkly, tanned, super-ripped chinese dude. our bamboo-pusher-man was named mr. huang. we chatted for a while, but after he started talking about how he could predict how the alignment of the stars at the time of my birth and the chinese name i had picked would impact my future i stopped paying attention. eventually, he gave up on mysticism and picked a topic dearer to my heart: girls...though his approach was a bit crude. he kept yelling at all the chinese girls on shore (or with other guys on rafts) (or by themselves on rafts) that they should swim on over and take a spin with the americans. leaning over to speak more quietly, he kept telling me that americans could pretty much hook up with any chinese girl they wanted and that i should probably take advantage of that. (on a related note, our hotel manager told me the same thing one day. having heard this enough to make me grumpy, i replied sharply: "so...what does that say about the foreigners, and what does that say about the chinese girls?" he thought for a second and responded: "they're desperate...and the girls are easy." "yeah. exactly what i was thinking.") we told mr. huang that we didn't need any dating advice, thank you, and that it'd be best if he just kept pushing while we went swimming. we did, and he did. when we got back, however, he suggested that we go to Xi Jie later that night and find girlfriends. i laughed pretty loudly (the idea of picking up girls with this wrinkled 50 year-old dude was that funny) and he got confused. "no! seriously! chinese girls like you!" i laughed even louder. "thanks, but no thanks" i told him. he made some more comments on the way down the river, but for the sake of all women and those unmarried men reading this page i won't repeat them. suffice it to say that i got pretty grumpy with him. eventually, he persuaded us to stop at this barbeque place on the side of the river for some chicken and fish. i told him we'd buy him a drink and he promptly ordered a beer (the first of two we bought for chinese guys that day). while we waited for our barbeque to cook, he kept hitting on the girl cooking the lot of it...even though she was married. i told him off for it and he told me it wasn't a big deal because her husband wasn't there. oh freak. though, he did kind of hook us up with a couple of girls at that same barbeque place. that's the next story!
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