广西 tandem bike journeys

In just a few short days, Guangxi has become one of my favorite places of travel in China so far. We took a raft from Guilin to Yangshuo down the Li River (漓江)some days ago and have stayed here ever since. The town is touristy, especially along the main pedestrian West Street. But in spite of that, I think this place is well worth seeing.
We spent two days tandem biking around the countryside. On the first day we took a cave tour within which we took a mud bath and went to some hot springs. We also climbed up a small mountain for wonderful views of the otherworldly limestone peaks which shoot up and down like the beeps on a heart monitor. Apparently there are some 70000 of them in this area. We met some local ruralites, including a guy of the Zhuang minority who told us of old traditions of his culture and then made us some food. The countryside is teeming with strawberry fields, rice fields and orange orchards, graveyards exploding with firecrackers to ward away evil, and water buffalos everywhere.
The second day of tandem biking was an even longer and more convoluted journey through the farms and dirt poor villages where we got lost a handful of times on the way to a 600-year old bridge. Along the way we met a small group of people from Beijing who were also lost (more to come about them). The scenery was fantastic and the weather optimal. We biked and biked through dirt paths in the farms and pathed roads and finally reached the bridge. On the way back to Yangshuo we took a much more direct route by hooking up with a major road, passing wastelands of towns and being passed by massive trucks overloaded with stock, motorcycles, and other vehicles of the Mad Max post-apocalypse.