Staying in the Nanning Public Security Bureau's Science and Technology Hotel and guess what - there is free Internet in the room! We drove from Guilin to Nanning today via Liuzhou, and big industrial (very polluted - you could cut the air with a knife) city. In Liuzhou we went to a protected area, which turned out to the a public park with limestone karst hills - full of people celebrating the New Year! It always amazes me how the concept of wilderness is so foreign in China; in this park, on the top of one of the hills is an endemic species of the Aster family (Asteraceae) found nowhere else. Nature does its best to co-exist alongside people here, and sometimes does quite well in places one might not expect. These public scenic parks are heavily visited, but respected and loved.

Fireworks in a shop

From Liuzhou we drove through kilometre after kilometre of sugar cane fields, all being harvested - by hand. This part of China is a main sugar growing region; we crossed over the Tropic of Cancer, so are now officially in the tropics. Nanning is a very large, thoroughly modern and amazingly clean city - the cleanliness of its streets puts London to shame. Still New Year - the firecrackers go off all night and everyone is having a great time.

We ate the leaves of the black nightshade, Solanum nigrum (a common British weed, thought to be poisonous, but obviously not very, at least in China), at supper tonight - still no aubergines, but I am hopeful for tomorrow!

GPS coordinates of Nanning: 22 deg 49.075 min N, 108 deg 20.330' E