CHINA, this time its for reals (HK to Ping an)

Left HK on the subway to get to china and entered china at a totaly different port than i intended too. When i entered initialy there was a huge area on either side forcoaches waiting. This one had nothing. i entered from the hongkong side through a subway and walked over a bridge into china. On the chinese side there was nothing, other than a subway, I took the subway to a station with an airport symbolwith the hope there wold be a bus station there, It took about 40 minutes and cost about 80p to get to that station. There was a bus station at the airport so i took the bus back to guengzheng (My Spelling for every Chinese city will be wrong) the 2nd city i was in in china.Annoyingly the bus station we were droped at was the most inconvinient place, it was miles away from the main trainstation and bus station. I was heading to the rice terraces so needed a night bus and according to the net this was the only place to do it. I got a pice of paper from the woman at the information desk with the statin written in chinese symbols. I used this to show cab drivers but about 5 in a row declined to take me (some said no, other just looked at the paper and drove off) finaly one guy took me but he was moaning the whole way as the trafic was awfull. I was taken to the opposite side of the cityalong the main motorway and it cost me about 6 pounds, this trip took well over half an hour. I got a ticket to Guilian and had 3 hours to kill, I went for food and found a Bruce Lee fast food resteraunt but the food looked like crap in the photos so I walked further to a Mr Lee resteraunt. The Mr Lee resteraunt was good. The portions wer4e huge and costed half of a KFC or MD's, it was basic stuff like noodles and rice with chicken but it was good, and you got free tea.
I got to guilin at 6am in the morning while it was still dark and i got a bus to longsheng which took two hours but i realised i fogot to get more money out. I had a look around longsheng for a bank and found about ten of them but they were all local banks that wouldnt take a visa card. They had names such as "The peoples rural bank of China", I'm not sure why this was in english.this meant a trip back to guilian in the hope there was a better bank there, if not i would need to go back to guangzhou where i knew there was a HSBC as i had used it before. I found a bank in guilian that worked after about half 40minutes of searching around the bus station. It was a simmilar situation as Longsheng as there were many banks about but not any i could use. i wentto longsheng again and then got the bus to the rice terraces. you cant get a scheduled bus so you got in a minivan with a bunch of locals with crying babies and waited foir it to fill. I got to the terraces at about 6pm.