On our second day visiting Guilin, in Yangshuo County, we took a bamboo raft tour in these covered rafts:
I like how even my shot of rafts has those awesome Super Mario Bros mountains in the background. :)
Here I am pretending to punt the raft!
It's tough! You have to jam that bamboo stick all the way into the riverbed and push really hard!
Once we started taking pictures, this merchant punted up to rent us traditional outfits for the photos:
But I really liked HER outfit a lot, actually, with the hot pink and purple boots and straw hat. :)
That's an instant digital photo booth in the middle of the river! These were everywhere in China. They would take your picture with a DSLR and then immediately print it and laminate it, typically charging 10-20 RMB (about US$1.50-3.00) per picture. Note that the tents in the background were for pictures, too.
The craziest part, btw, is where the power comes from. I looked behind the setup and saw that all these electronics are plugged into a power strip, and that power strip's cord... goes straight into the water! It presumably runs underwater all the way to shore? And it didn't look particularly reinforced, either. o_O
And now, taking pictures in those outfits! In the back is "Camel Mountain".
To be honest, I felt like the outfits were maybe a little bit exploitative of minorities? I'm undecided.
I think these guys are cheating:
Finally, we saw a demonstration of cormorant fishing:
They put a ring around the cormorant bird's neck to prevent it from swallowing the big fish, and then they retrieve the fish:
The birds do eventually get fed. :P