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Your everyday livestock
This was not an uncommon sight from our bus outside the city of Guilin. Where are we? As I publish this entry, I am sitting at my desk on Pender Island, Canada and Dianne is sitting at hers in Dalian, China. I came back to Canada on May 15th and spent a week visiting our younger grandchildren. We are planning renovations to our cottage on Pender and I am here to do cleanup so the contractor can do his thing. But more importantly, I am here to assist where possible when our next grandchild is born. Lucky me!
Dianne has to stay in China until July 1st when she arrives back in Canada to start the summer round of visiting.
Back to our Chinese travels….
Giulin Our flight from Shanghai got into Guilin a bit later than we had planned but our trusty guide was there to pick us up. We had used China Highlights last year for our trip to the Panda Reserve so we decided to go this route again. Tony packed us into our small bus and away we went. Because it was getting dark we couldn’t really answer his question as to why the airport was so far from Guilin, a small city of “only”
Hard at work
Lots of sewing machines around; this woman was using an old treddle machine. Weather was very pleasant for working out doors. Not like Jinshitan at the same time period. 700,000 people. Turns out to be the only area flat enough to build an airport!
A very pretty city, lots of greenery. Of course, this could be due to it being much further south than Dalian. It was shirtsleeve weather the whole time we were there whereas Dalian was still pretty chilly. The hotel was right on the Li River with good walking paths along the river. We could have walked for a long time in a pretty nice environment except that we were quite busy.
After breakfast, we piled into the bus to head to the Terrace Fields. These are a couple of hours away so we had lots of time to view the scenery which included (who knew?) lots of karst mountains. We also saw lots of rice paddies. And to my surprise, lots of water buffalo. They are used to plough the rice paddies and we saw a lot of this. Pretty tough work. I can’t imagine how the people can work all day in ankle deep water and mud under a beating sun.
Karst Mountains I had never heard of karst mountains so it was quite an eye opener to me. If
Rice paddies
Rice is grown anywhere there is a flat piece of ground. In the south they can get two crops per year. But its mostly manual labor. Tough job. you want to read (and see) more about them, click
karst mountains. When you look out the hotel window you can see a “mountain” right there, jutting out of relatively flat ground. Buildings surround them and continue until the next peak pops out of the ground. Pretty incredible.
Longji Terraced Fields After quite a climb, the bus stopped at a small terminal where we switched to another bus to take us on even more harrowing switch backs to the top of the Longji Terraced Fields. Once the second bus stopped, we got to climb even higher through a mountain village. The path is lined with small stalls where members of the local minority community vie to sell you all kinds of home-made merchandise. Nobody wants to buy on the way up. It was quite a climb and fairly warm. Just before we got to the top we stopped for lunch. Great food. Especially when you realize it all had to be carried in.
The effort was worth it. The views are tremendous. The walk back down was supposed to be easier but due to the irregular steps was actually quite a chore. One of our group stopped to
Outside the Hotel
The streets were wide and flat; good for cycling. The promenade along the river would have been nice had we had more time. Next visit. negotiate for a blanket. This set a target price for negotiations and we bought a neat table runner.
At the top of the hills there are guest houses where tourists can spend the night. There are no access roads to these hotels so the suitcases are carried up by people who looked to be older than we are but certainly in better shape. Some had wicker baskets on their backs each of which contained a large suitcase for the tourists also trudging up the hill. The porters didn’t seem to be as winded as the tourists. I guess if you do this every day you get used to it.
The rest of the walk and the drive back to Guilin were pleasant. Going down hill you get a better view of the countryside. And it is spectacular. They showed us books with pictures of the same scenes at four different times of the year. All were great.
After supper we did a walkabout. The first stop was to go out into the river and watch the cormorant fishermen doing their thing. Each fisherman was on a reed boat that looked like it would hardly float let alone
Full service hotel
No Chinglish here but note the 6th star. It was actually a very nice hotel. be a platform for fishing. Each one had three or four cormorants that would dive into the river and usually bring back a fish. The fisherman would call the bird over, grab it by the neck and squeeze the fish out into a wicker basket. Off the bird would go and the cycle was repeated. There are still 700 people fishing on the river, presumably not this way. The surprising thing to me was that we did it after sundown. The boats had two bright lights so we all could see, and one has to assume that this must attract the fish somehow. It seemed that fishing this way was more difficult at night.
We walked through the main park in Guilin which is beautiful. Having seen it at night when it is all lit up, we want to go back during the day when we have more time to explore. There is a river cruise you can take which is much faster but you don’t get to stop and admire things that interest you. You go where they go.
The Next Step Li River cruise and visit to Yangshuo
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