Day 253: Dog for dinner?

After a breakfast of crackers in the room, we returned to last night's restaurant, where I went local and topped up with some rice noodles, pork and sauce – one of the staple breakfasts around here. We then walked a bit further into town, where we came across another big indoor market. Along with all of the usual veges and the like, in one corner, we spotted some rather disturbing-looking carcasses hanging from hooks. We had a fair idea what they were but were drawn, morbidly, over to have a closer look. And yes, they were what we thought – a couple of eviscerated, hairless dogs and cats and large pieces thereof. Worse, there was a cage below containing two scrawny, very miserable-looking ginger felines. Kate and I wondered how our animal-loving daughters would great this grisly scene, but both seemed relatively unfazed, if still quietly horrified. 

We then walked up West Street – the tourist centre of Yangshuo, which was pretty much like most other tourist centres in China, with its limited array of shops and limited array of restaurants. It started to rain as we reached the end of the street, where we walked down some stairs to the river. At the base of the stairs was an old cormorant fisherman with his birds, who quietly implored us to have our photo taken with him, for a fee of course. Out on the river I spotted a better option – an old woman paddling along with her cormorants, one of them airing its wings.

We wandered around the back streets for a while, stumbling across a makeshift outdoor market, where lots of elderly Chinese women were selling a handful of vegetables each. As we meandered through it, Kate spotted, from a distance, a stall where a woman was selling a huge slab of something brown and bubbly, which she realised was pork crackling. I investigated further and found that the crackling had roast pork attached to the other side of it, so I got the woman to hack me off a slice and then hack that slice into little pieces of oily, crunchy, salty heaven.
 

After a lunch of fried rice, noodles and dumplings in a little roadside restaurant, we headed back to the hotel, stopping off at a 'supermarket' we had seen on our way to the hotel yesterday. While there were a few aisles of 'normal' supermarkety stuff, most of the shop was given over to local delicacies of one sort or another – mostly candies made from every sort of fruit and vegetable imaginable (including taro). In among these we found a bag containing grains of something black and slightly shiny. The packet had pictures of ants on it and on closer inspection we realised that, yes, these were big bags of black ants. 

We dawdled again at dinner time and by the time we made it to the guy with the chicken cart, he was all out, much to my despair. We crossed the road and had dinner at the same buffet restaurant. This time, my selection included a spoonful of a pork and chilli dish that was so spicy it was almost hallucinogenic. As we walked back to the hotel, Kate spotted some movement on the stairs we had to climb to get from one road to another and discovered a medium-sized toad in the undergrowth. By now, the sun was setting, so I continued on down the road past the hotel on my own to see if I could get some nice photos of the limestone hills along there, but I was a bit late for that too.