KARA OK!!

So after a long day of touristy things it was time to unwind. The girls got ready and then we headed up to the lounge/bar on the top of the boat. We were excited as we'd seen the signs plastered everywhere advertising free KARA OK from 8-9pm. Joy and Soniya were straight up there with a brilliant rendition of Wannabe and gradually most of the tour got up to perform, even Alex a few times with his covers of Blue turning out to be his favourite. The Chinese audience had at this point only clapped their own singers and looked a little puzzled by our attempts but we knew what would impress them, our performance of the Gangnam style dance. We all got into our positions, the tune started and away we went. We were brilliant, everyone got their steps perfect, Erik even went for a little solo at the end and started stripping. We turned to the audience our faces bright with hope that they would clap and cheer for us. Did they? No. Ah well we clapped ourselves silly anyways.

Up until now, apart from our lovely blog readers, we hadn’t had an opportunity to share Threeman (Awkward Auckland) with other backpackers. We were somewhat nervous to suggest it, what if they didn’t enjoy it as much as we did, what if there are too many players? We had absolutely no reason to fear. It was a huge success. We started off with a small group of about seven who quickly picked up the rules and as our cheers caught their attention, more and more people wanted to join in until we had about twelve in the end. The Threeman hat (Rach’s woolly purple one) became infamous and we were soon listening to the profanities of those unlucky enough to be Threeman. It started off quite tame until people started running out of beer, so we started handed our Rice Wine out. Then we ran out of that and moved on to Vodka. The game only ended when we had drank every drop of alcohol we had brought on board the ship. There were quite a number of the group very drunk by this point, but as experienced disciples of the game we were only slightly drunk so could merrily watch the carnage we had created.

The next morning woken once again by the warbling woman on the loudspeaker system we managed to snatch a few more precious moments of sleep before we had to get up and pack. As we came out to the lobby we were greeted by a gauntlet of hard stares and shouts of “That damn three man game!”. It seemed that more than a couple of the other members of our group had some gargantuan headaches and for some reason seemed to blame us. We did warn them as to the effects of playing Three man though and they have only themselves to blame.

After departing the boat we headed for a town called Yichang stopping off at the Three Gorges Dam along the way. The dam was not as impressive as we’d hoped and a little shrouded in mist. It is still however very daunting to hear of the figures involved and it still remains one of the largest in the world to this day. At Yichang we stopped off at a shopping mall where a group of us headed straight for some hangover remedy otherwise known as a BigMac and Chicken Nuggets. It tasted soooo good and Alex had to go up to get a second cheeseburger.

After a little wait we boarded another bus that took us to a station for the bullet train. The bullet train was incredibly fast but was not of the same level as found in Japan and it wasn’t long before we were turning to other sources of entertainment such as making our tour leader, Joy, sing Call Me Maybe in front of the entire carriage. We then had another brief wait in another train station before boarding another sleeper train. Woooo! The station in all fairness was probably the best we’ve seen so far, there were no children weeing on the floor, no-one spat, the toilets were actually not a biological hazard and there was only one person smoking at the entrance to the loos. Quite pleasant actually. And so we are now on our way to what our tour leader says is her favourite part of the trip, a small town called Yangshuo.

Rex’s Rules of the Road

• Disclaimer: - Three man will give you headaches the following morning unless you take adequate precautions.

• Eating Western food is missing the point a bit when trying to experience new cultures. However every once in a while it is nice to know what you are going to eat before it gets to your plate.

• The dam is a large block of concrete and unless you are impressed by large scale civil engineering you might not be that impressed by the sight, however the figures involved are simply mid-numbing.