Today’s plan had been to hire bikes and cycle to a local village with a lovely couple we had met yesterday on our rice fields tour.

It had to be cancelled though as both Geoff and David had upset tummies.

So we got off to a slow start today but by lunchtime after having a very interesting chat with an American staying at our hostel, (more about that later )we were ready to start our day.

Before leaving the hostel we arranged to meet up with David and Sakhi for dinner.

Our plan was to go to the Solitary Beauty Peak but due to bumping into Mr American again our plans changed 🙂

So we found ourselves in a taxi with a private guide for the afternoon.

First stop was a local silk factory who specialised in Quilts and Quilt covers

We learnt about the silk worms and how they stretch the silk.

It was amazing to see 🙂

Did you know that they also fry and eat the grub out the silk cocoon, something I did not fancy trying.

We also learnt that real silk does not catch fire but just smolders and smells like burning hair.

The burnt ends do not go hard either but just crumble into ash.

Next we went to the Yao mountain, the highest mountain in Guilin.

You go up by cable car and the mountain views are fantastic even in the low cloud.

You then have the choice of coming back by cable car or toboggan, can you guess how we did the return journey ?

After this we went to the Guilin tea science and research institute.

Here we learnt about the picking of the tea then the process it goes through before it’s ready for using

We had a lovely guide who did a wonderful tea ceremony for us where we were allowed to sample 4 different teas.

All 4 we sampled tasted wonderful, one had a very surprising sweet taste.

It was hard trying to decide which one we should treat ourselves too but decided on the ginseng oolong tea 🙂

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