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Are These Molehills
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Strange hills dot the landscape, known as Karst mountains, basically they are formed from limestone and other minerals and they are everywhere. It's kind of odd to see the towns built around them but they are very beautiful in the countryside, in fact the countryside is the only place to really visit since the towns are a little fake and Yanshou has only been built for tourists.
We arrived in Guilin after an arduous 12 hour sleeper bus ride through mountainous roads which werenot quite finished, people were throwing upallaroundus. What's more some of the people on the bus had feet that either hadn't ever met soap and water or were having a very bad day, the driverwent on a stinky foot hunt and handed these people plastic bags for their feet. Anyway Guilin is a pleasant city with rivers running through it and a lake in the middle, it has been highly stylised for tourists and has bridges built in different styles crossing the rivers in various places (one is meant to ressemble pont neuf in Paris). Our hostel (Flowers) was really pleasant and friendly, it's well known by westerners and we met loads of French people.
Yanshou is about an hour to the south and only exists for tourism, it's almost like Bangkok although there are less westerners. The real pull is the countryside surrounding the town, it's dotted with the amazing hills, rivers and tiny villages. The hills at the Xingping village even supplied the inspiration for the 20 Yuan note. We took a trip along the Li river in the early evening on an illegal boat to save some cash and cycled through the fields and villages the next day bumping into stones all along the unpaved road. Well unpaved except where they are drying some cement with straw on the road, perhaps in a year there will be a road and thousands of tourists travelling by bus instead of cycling.
Further down south, on the coast in fact is a sleeping town Beihai which is supposedly famous for its silver beach. Yes there is a beach but it's hardly worth writing home about, in any case we stayed for a few hours and were disappointed both by the town and the beach. One thing about the beach and the rest of China is the fact that women go around with a dustpan and brush to sweep up the rubbish that gets chucked by the other Chinese. It's mostly a thankless job and could be avoided if people used the bins which are right next to them, however it does create work for thousands of people.
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