Stuffed Noses and Other Stuff

Despite taking a self-proclaimed sick day yesterday, I still have the sniffles today.  We slept in to re-arm our immune systems and woke up to rain.  So, we skipped the bike ride and headed to a cafe for lunch and travel planning.  We pulled out our travel books (did we tell you about how we picked one up on the rooftop of a nearby hostel a couple nights ago) and proceeded to price out alternatives.  Well, it seems they all cost approximately the same and so it's just a matter of deciding what we would prefer to do.  Should we replace our couple weeks of beach-bumming in Southern Thailand with a trip to Malaysia and an equally gorgeous island beach complete with diving, less malaria, and easily accessed via Kuala Lumpur (hub for Air Asia--the low cost air carrier in these parts) or go overland towards Laos and begin making our way down the Mekong a few weeks early?  When no decisions are bad ones, how do you decide.  We may be resigned to flipping a coin. 

In other news on the travel front, we talked to United today to get our flight from Hong Kong to Phuket moved out a couple days and found out that , indeed, our flight to Phuket is not subject to a change fee waiver and that we'd have to wait a month to find out if our flight to Bangkok is eligible.  It looks like some progress on resolving the situation is being made, but it's still too soon to tell whether or not we should add Thailand back into our itinerary. 

We are hanging out in the hotel room now planning for an early bedtime so that we can get up and go for our long-awaited bike ride in the morning and perhaps some Tai Chi (or as they say it here, Tai Ji) in the afternoon.  And then probably some local food to eat.  After trying out some of the "fancier" places around here that serve Western food, we have decided that when in China you should eat Chinese and have found a couple local places that beat out anything we have had here for more than twice the price.  Unfortunately, when we ask to have most things made vegetarian (sushi) we end up with something and uncooked lettuce on top.  Which, in addition to not having the very good vegetables and seasoning that you get here, we can't eat the uncooked lettuce.  Oh well! Reid managed to get some very good clay pot rice with vegetables, so I guess I'll give that a go tomorrow. 

Now that the influx of domestic tourists have vanished, Yangshuo seems almost like a ghost town.  In part, there are just so many restaurants and bars that when it isn't packed, most places are virtually vacant.  Oh well, we've learned that the fact that we are the only ones eating at an establishment isn't any indication of the quality of the food or service.  And, we ended up able to keep our room and only pay an extra 70 yuan ($10) for two nights as a result, so we were happy with how that worked out.