I'm melting!

The heat here is excrutiating. Indescribable. It's been so humid so far in China that a kind of smelly fog has blocked out the sun and kept us all safe. Well no more. A thunderstorm on Saturday cleared the sky and it's 99 farenheit outside. We trekked through the rice paddies of Longji for 5 hours yesterday and, unable to take the heat I removed my top.

Well I got a little burned and I've got the most ridiculous tan mark across my back and chest now where I was carrying my bag. Had to walk round with an umbrella all day today!

OK so when I left you I was eating breakfast at a Normandy cafe with cockroaches in the tables. We stayed at the Fawlty Towers Hotel that night and the one after which turned out to be not such a disaster as its namesake might suggest. I did hand some clothes in to be washed and got them back wet and smelly the next day but otherwise it was one of the best hotels so far. I was propositioned by 3 prostitutes along the 100m walk from the bar I was at to the hotel one evening but location isn't necessarily everything when you've had to sleep with grey pillows and a squat toilet in your room!

The stay in Yangshuo was rather action packed! We managed to go swimming through mud in a cave, cycle for miles in the pouring rain along dirt tracks, go Commorand fishing, climb a small mountain and still save enough time to get plastered on numerous occasions.

On Saturday we stayed at a guest house in the Longji valley. The scenery is perhaps the most amazing thing I've ever seen and the guesthouses were pretty interesting too. They build them themselves out of what smells like eucalyptus trees. I'd guess the the buildings are about 95% timber with no kind of insulation or anything and the plumbing is just a bunch of hoses leading in and out of the squat toilets. What this means is that if you're on the 4th floor you can hear people moving around in the reception. This morning we were woken up by the guesthouse's cockrels that cock-a -doodled from about 6-7 in the morning until we left at 9. I could hear Erin (the leader) shouting 'Motherf**er downstairs every time they made a noise. Anyway I have more to say but alas no time. Will try to fill in the blanks next time.

Thanks for all the emails. It's good to see lots of you are reading this. FYI Tom: Erin's the only yank in the group, The Hoser (meaning Canadian equivalent of a chav) (someone who wears a took, eats doughnuts and shovels snow)(Ricky, Lahey and co.)(Tom, check out 'Strange Brew' Canadian TV show) is Canadian. The rest are just happy to be on holiday and look cheesy.