You'll probably recognise this place.....

  Guilin, China
Friday, December 1, 2006

Guilin - chances are you've never been here - chances are you've seen a picture of it in your local Chinese! For those of you who haven't looked at the pictures yet, have a look now and you'll recognise the scenery and landscape - Sheer limestone rocks sticking out of the ground, some as big as mountains. In the traditional Chinese paintings

Makes a good painting

you will have seen, there's always a ghostly mist surrounding the hills, lending the place a slightly mysterious air - you might think this is artistic license - it's not - apparently this place is plagued by low cloud for about 300 days of the year and certainly the few days that I've been here have been no exception. It's also been cold, so a cruise down the river necessitated breaking out the warm weather gear I'd been hoping not to use till I got to the Andes next year!

Guilin as a city, is the smallest place I've been to in China. It only has 600,000 inhabitants and probably most of those work in the service industry. My brother told me that this is the 9th most popular tourist city in the world, but as 95% of the visitors are Chinese it doesn't really make it onto most Western holiday itineraries, which is a shame. Now, I can't verify my brother's claim, but when you arrive here, you're left in no doubt at all that this is a place geared entirely for tourists. By the time I got to my hotel room, I'd been asked on six different occasions if I had tours organised. Perhaps the strangest one was in the bus from the airport to town - a mobile phone was passed around from the driver with a tour guide at the other end offering his services!

As for things to do in the city, other than the river tour, it's a bit sparse, especially if the weather's not great. There's a very scenic park, called Seven Stars, which contains some of the limestone hills and a cave complex, along with the mankiest zoo I've ever been too in my life. It also holds Camel Hill, so named because it looks like a camel

Camel Hill

- which I think it did! On the riverbank in the city, there's a famous rock formation called Elephant Hill, though unlike the camel, I just couldn't see it!

Elephant Hill

The River Cruise is the highlight of the visit, though. Starting off around 20km outside of the city, it meanders down the river to a little town called Yangzhou. On route you're treated to some spectacular scenery

More painting material

as well as trying to work out why some of the hills have been given the names they have. Mother with child was a blob of rock and The Goat Herd was just weird!

When you reach Yangzhou you have to work your way down a street crammed with traders and some really persistent hawkers. It's only about half a mile long, but it takes around ¾'s of an hour to get to the end of the street. But it did provide me with an interesting sight, as a woman tried to sell me some fake Euro coins. They were pretty good and at the equivalent of 10p per coin, remarkably good value. However, as I won't be in Europe for some time, it didn't strike me as being an entirely sensible purchase! In Yangzhou we were meant to be shepherded of on another tour round a lake and a tourist village, but myself and three Hungarians decided to grab a taxi and head off round the surrounding countryside. These three, it turned out, where the Hungarian delegation of the Youth Hostel Association who had been at a conference in Canton. The leader of the group, a guy called Laszlo, was about 60 and he explained to me that this was his 2nd trip to China. His first was about 25 years ago as part of a Hungarian Government delegation to China to discuss "Internal Security" - I didn't ask and he wasn't saying!

The taxi idea was spot on - our driver who spoke no English at all, figured out roughly what we wanted to do and immediately took us to some more caves, which we didn't want to do!! But, we went in and it was very worthwhile - they were certainly more spectacular than the ones in the city, but the Chinese do seem to have a penchant for coloured lights and it kind of takes away from the overall effect

Stunning caves

. However, following this minor detour, we managed to explain that we wanted to see some real Chinese villages - this he understood and took us to a place where we could take some bamboo rafts down the river...... But, third time lucky - we didn't get onto the rafts and proceeded back towards town, but this time, we did stop at a proper farming village. We had a look around and exchanged pleasantries with some local farmers, gave the kids

Family of farmers

a few sweets and generally tried not to look too much like we were gawping, which we were. I'm not sure that some of the villagers were too happy with us being there and when a rather nasty looking dog was let out of one of the houses, it was back into the taxi quickly!

And so back to Guilin, via a rather stressful hour long bus ride. Fortunately it was dark so we couldn't see all the risks the driver was taking, but the swerving and the sudden braking suggested a man whose prime objective was getting there, but not necessarily in one piece!
And that's pretty much it in China. I kind of officially leave the country today to head off to Hong Kong. - Hong Kong being an autonomous region. China's been so much more than I'd expected and hoped for, but I'll probably take the opportunity to reflect on it more when I'm lying on a nice warm beach in Bali this time next week!

Rob