A couple of weeks ago we decided we really needed to start seeing more sites in mainland China. Now that I am finished with my MBA we have more free weekends to travel. So, I went out to the elong travel website and looked at the “must see” cities in China. Guilin topped the list so we booked a trip. Once Andy told his coworkers that we were going to Guilin, they all started quoting something they had learned when they were little children about how “Guilin is the most beautiful scenery in the world.” But then, as foreigners, we joke that every city in China says they are the most beautiful, so we didn’t know what to expect.
We arrived in Guilin on Thursday night and checked into the Sheraton hotel. We could immediately tell that the air quality was better in Guilin than in Shanghai by our deep breaths and the stars we were able to see in the sky (only a few but more than Shanghai.) Friday morning we awoke early in order to meet our tour guide, Eddie in the lobby by 9:30am. We loaded our stuff into a small van and then proceed to go to a small tire fix-it place to repair our tire. Not exactly comforting, but we went with it. Soon afterwards, the tire was repaired and we found ourselves being driven deep into the hills near Guilin. We were very excited to see mountains and trees and our fun was not even spoiled by the three hour ride on a winding road with a potential head on collision at every corner. Luckily our driver was safe and notified potential oncoming traffic that we were coming at every corner with a honk.
In the tea fields in Guilin, China
Our destination was one of a few cities who have become famous for farming by using terraces in steep hills. While the crops on the hills were beautiful in the summer, covered with ribbons of green, the pictures from the spring look quite amazing as well when the crops are water-covered. The village we went to was called Lianji. While you could tell that at one time it was a farming village (these terraced farm plots date back to to the Yuan dynasty…about 800 years ago), the village has clearly been transformed into a tourist village today. It was disappointing but I guess you cannot blame them. Winding along the path to the village was a plethora of shops to buy goods “made in the area.” Many of the village homes are now hotels complete with air conditioning and Internet access. Then around every corner when hiking up the main corridors within the farm hills were women dressed in traditional clothes who you could have your picture taken with for a small fee. We gave in with the Yao women with really long hair because I thought it was such a unique thing. These women grow their hair our since they are young and cut it once when they are 18 and again another time and then they wrap the hair from the previous cuttings in with their really long hair to form a dome-like shape around their head. See the Guilin pictures page for a photo of it and also check out the following website for further reading on the Yao ethnic group: http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/01780/chinese-ethnic-group/yao.htm. After lunch, taking many pictures, hiking around the hills for awhile and stopping at a few of the stops I mentioned, we headed back down the hill after a very enjoyable day. We were happy to get our fix of mountains, that especially Andy (since he did not go home for the summer) was in need of.
That night, we tried to find the Chinese restaurant that had been recommended to us but couldn’t find the door (sounds like a lame excuse), so we ate at Guilin’s version of Paulaner (a German beerhaus/restaurant.) Later we were supposed to take a lake tour of Guilin, which eventually happened but not until after we sat in the boat with it floating away and an engine that wouldn’t start. The driver of the boat tried for about 45 minutes to get it to start, to no avail. Finally the on call Friday night boat motor fix-it guy arrived and replaced a part on the motor and we were on our way. Apparently, the Chinese government, after a visit to Guilin by Bill Clinton in 1996, has invested a lot of money into the tourism industry in Guilin. What that meant for the beautiful lakes interwoven within the city was that they were covered by replicas of the worlds famous bridges such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Arch de Triumph, etc. On the boat tour, you travel underneath all of these bridges as well as by various pagodas that would light up and put on a brief show (either people playing traditional Chinese music or acting). The funniest part of the entire evening was when our very own musician on our tour boat started playing his traditional Chinese er-hu instrument to the tunes of Jingle Bells, Auld Lang Syne (New Years Even song), etc.
Saturday was our tour of the Li River. The river was quite shallow, yet they have managed to figure out how to host dozens of large tour boats on it a day. The scenery on the tour was absolutely incredible! Around every bend there was another beautiful set of hills. Our tour guide was quick to point out what each popular mountain looked like and its corresponding name. “See how that mountain looks like there are some horse faces on it? That is called Nine Horse Cliff.” I got into the fun and came up with “Alligator Scale Ridge”, and its prey, “Poor Lamb Hill” and oh so many more. At the end of the four-hour river cruise there was supposed to be this really nice town, but we only saw a tourist trap. So we pretty much bolted through it, had the driver pick us up and then drove back to Guilin. We still had quite a bit of time left in the day so I asked to have the guide take us to a local tea ceremony. What we ended up going to was even better. We went to an organic tea farm and learned a lot more about how tea is grown, processed and served. I do plan to add a page to this blog about tea because I learn so much more with each tea ceremony we do. That night we found the door to the “Good Luck Restaurant” and enjoyed quite the show. As if ordering was not entertaining enough with our super smiley waitress and many menu items that we wanted not actually being served (and then her trying to communicate that back to us), the dinner show included hula dancers, jazz dancers, Chinese singers (really high-pitched voice) and some interesting outfits to match each ensemble. Oh and I cannot forget the mystery of the evening. Why when the cooks came out of the kitchen, were they wearing rubber boots? What is going on back there? Dinner was followed up with a bit of shopping and then we turned in for the night.
Sunday, our last day in Guilin, was spent touring inside the city. We went to a couple of local parks. The first had a lot of potential beauty, but much of it was manmade. Another park we went to, keeping with the seeing animals in hills and mountains was called Elephant Hill Park. Yet another site had some old Buddha sculptures that had miraculously escaped Mao’s wrath during the Cultural Revolution. The final attraction, after lunch, was an incredible cave full of stalactites, stalagmites, columns and even fluorescent lights to illuminate the cave’s features. I am being facetious about the fluorescent. We were actually saddened to see such an incredible cave complete with a sidewalk all the way through, neon lights attached to the backs of stalactites and stalagmites and then, yup, you guessed it, signs saying what animal the stalactites/stalagmites looked like pounded into the cave’s formations. The bastardization of nature is something that is, of course, not unique to China, it is just really obvious here. It seems as though right now the country is so focused on capitalism that nature preservation is only an afterthought, if that. That said, the cave was still really cool. Oh and one bat had survived whatever the Bureau of Cave Preservation had done to all of the other bats, so we were happy for that.
The tours ended early on Sunday so we proceeded back to the hotel to get out of the heat and rest. We watched two HBO movies (I cannot tell you the last time I did something like that) and were quite lazy. I finished the fantastic book I had been reading all weekend (The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham) which ironically was about an expat woman living in Hong Kong in the early 1900s who traveled to inland China with her husband to fight the cholera epidemic. They made a movie of the book a few years back and I guess the story was changed so that the woman lived in Shanghai and they traveled to Guanxi province (where Guilin is) so it was quite apropos. Later that evening, being quite sick of the standard, bland, Chinese dish we got at every place we had eaten, we ordered western food in the hotel. After that, we decided to get a foot massage at the place next to the hotel. It was crazy because they had the movie Misery on while we were getting massaged. I kept jumping and the massage ladies would laugh at me. The massage was great until two Chinese guys came into the same room (we were separated by a curtain) and they lit up cigarettes. I wasn’t quite sure if it was appropriate to ask them to put them out, but it was really gross. I really hate the ubiquitous smoking in China.
All in all our trip to Guilin was highly successful as we had a great time and saw some wonderful scenery. If you caught my sarcasm, you can probably tell that we have a bit of a yearning to visit somewhere where there is less tourism but are not quite sure yet where that might be. I guess we are very spoiled coming from Idaho where you can drive three hours and be in the Sawthooths and hike for hours and not see another person. It’s all perspective I guess.
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