THURSDAY!   If it’s Thursday, that means it’s Friday Eve – THE WEEKEND!  Folks, every day may seem like a weekend on the Riding4beer 2011 China Tour, but this is hard work.  We’re always on the move which means we’re always trying to buy bus tickets or train tickets or get rooms at dive hostels or run down hotels.  Now that may seem simple, but nobody here speaks English and everyone speaks Chinese – it’s the weirdest thing!  Getting bus tickets today to head to Lijiang tomorrow took over an hour of intense negotiations, pantomime, arm waving and picture drawing.  We’ve posted one of the pictures we gave the young female ticket agent below.

Anyway, this is was our last day and night here in Shangri-La.  Tomorrow we’ll be on what we’re told is a “three underwear” five hour bus ride through muddy Himalayan mountain passes to catch a train north to Chengdu.  We have a few hours in between changing trains in some god forsaken town (Guantong – not even on the f’ing map!), so we’ll try to post from there again tomorrow, but it’s possible that it could be delayed a day – or it’s also possible we never make across the mountains on that damn bus (Chinese highway statistics show about 1 out of 10 buses in this part of the country suffer fatal accidents).

That being the case, we doubled up on our Malaria medicine in the hopes that the “vivid” night dreams would happen while we’re awake and mixed it with large quantities of beer.  Once we were adequately hallucinating we went to the Shangri-la public square to join in the night dancing with the locals.  After that we don’t remember much, but we did wake up back in our hostel room about 3am with a half eaten wheel of yak butter cheese, an empty box of Chinese Viagra and a pile of dead “D” cell batteries.  Off to the bus….

            4 PICS TODAY AND A VIDEO - WE SWIPED HIGH SPEED INTERNET FROM THE BANK OF CHINA!

      
 After we got the bus tickets we figured, why not try?                    You can't believe Happy Hour in this bar!

      
           Yup, That's Stacy doing the Yak Dance!                        Kevin teaching the Commies the Electric Slide!

                          VIDEO BABY!  CRANK YOUR SPEAKERS AND CLICK ON THE ARROW!