After a month in Yangshuo, Guangxi in southern China, my weekly schedule seems to be in place. Monday through Thursday I travel east of Yangshuo along the Li River to be a volunteer teacher in DuTou and FuLi primary schools. Fridays I travel north to be an Owen/Buckland teacher for some ninth graders in Guilin, but more about that later.

Mondays through Thursdays I generally leave the apartment by 7:45. I walk fifteen to twenty minutes to the bus station in central Yangshuo. The town is awakening. Parents and grandparents are getting children to school. Shops are opening. Vendors are selling breakfast breads and milk drinks. Workers are pedaling, motorbiking, and driving to jobs. The traffic picks up as I progress through the town. Some streets are already busier than this one.

At the bus station I take a mian baozi, so named for its loaf of bread look. It's the mini van. The ones to FuLi are always parked in this spot. They depart every ten minutes. The driver hopes to carry ten passengers and will stop to pick up people along the way if he is not at capacity. The van seats six passengers "comfortably" and ten by adding a box between the middle seats and a board behind the driver's and front passenger's seats. We drive through the outskirts of Yangshuo, two tunneled kaarst and farmland countryside for fifteen to twenty minutes to reach FuLi. It costs Y2.5, or 30 cents.

At Fuli I walk again for about twenty minutes. Once I took a san lun che, three-wheeled vehicle seen in left half of picture, and will do so again if the weather demands it. The road is only partly paved and the ride was very bumpy! FuLi is a quiet town of 20,000 except on days whose numbering includes 2, 5, or 8. Those days are market days and I meet many country people on the road headed to that business and social gathering.

At this landing I catch one of these boats to cross the Li River. The boat ride will take about five minutes, the wait for the boat to depart can add ten to fifteen minutes to that. The dock is at the bottom of maybe two dozen steps and yet people use these boats to ferry their bikes and motorcycles across the Li. And large incredibly heavy loads are carried up and down on a pole slung over a shoulder.

After docking on the DuTou side of the Li, it's a five minute walk to the school. DuTou is a small village of 2000. As I draw near to the school, I can hear the students preparing the buildings, the grounds, and themselves for the new day. Students, some barefooted, turn from their activities as I cross the playground to call, "Hello!"