After HK, it was on to Guilin and Yangshuo. To get there, we took the oddest bus I’ve ever seen–an overnight sleeper bus full of tiny, coffin-sized bunk beds. It looked like catacombs, and if you were more than 5′8 and 150 lbs., you’d be on the floor if the bus took a corner. After an 11 hour ride, we were there, and upon exiting the bus, random strangers were in hot persuit of us trying to sell us tours and get us to stay in their hotels. For our entire stay, the people here were very pushy, but the amazing scenery made up for the persistant locals.
On our first day, we took the bus to visit Seven Star Park. The highlight of this was definitely the Seven Star cave–a really impressive cave with tonnes of colored lights placed around the rocks to accent the formations. It took about a half hour to walk through the entire thing. Then we found a taxi driver willing to drive us around all afternoon for the bargain price of $5.00. He took us to the Reed Flute cave, which was basically the same idea as Seven Star, but a bit larger and more impressive. That night, we took a took a river cruise, and along the way saw plenty of pagodas and a short opera performance.
The following day, we booked a day tour of Yangshuo, which is much more rural than Guilin, and has a much more impressive scenery. It has narrow but tall, green rolling mountains everywhere. Unfortunatly, like the majority of tours in China, we were roped into going to a stupid crystal factory where they herd you into the showroom and expect you to buy things. Luckily, it was short lived, and we moved onto a river raft cruise followed by the highlight, a two hour boat cruise down the Li River. If you’ve ever seen The Painted Veil, this is the same type of landscape. That evening, we got tickets to to a show called Impressions Liu Sanjie, a show that took place entirely on water. It is directed by Zhang Yimou, who also did the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The choreography and sheer manpower of this show was amazing.
The next day, it was off to Beijing. You can see all our Guilin/Yangshuo photos HERE – Nat