Sunday, July 10, 2011

China Post #41 Li River Cruise and Bus

On our last day in Guilin Linda was giving a presentation on environmental responsibility to the workers at Ging BaBa's company. They grow organic mushrooms and other product and then make them into Chinese medicine. While she was giving the presentation Dylan and I headed out on the true Li River cruise. We were picked up at the hotel by a van and met up with a bus that took us right past the tourist shops that we had stopped at on the Chinese tour and straight to the dock. There were certainly shops at the dock but that was to be expected and we were not there for long anyway. We boarded a boat with 3 levels, two inside and the last outside as well as some decks on the second level. Once onboard we joined the procession of boats on the Li River headed towards Yangshuo.
As we were motoring along the river these guys on bamboo rafts would paddle up to the boat at an angle and ease their way in to be able to grab hold and tie up to the boat.
They would either be selling fruit or some type of souvenir, you could do your shopping on the river.
There were countless beautiful sights along the way, including this that is considered one of the best in all of China, shown on the back of the 20 yuan bill.
Here is Dylan enjoying his boat ride.
After making it back to Guilin we had to get things packed up to head to Wuzhou the next day. Wuzhou is where Linda was born and her family lived before moving to Hong Kong briefly en route to Dallas. In the morning we headed to the bus station in Guilin and Linda took some pictures of the snacks that you could get in the station, such as these.
The scenery continues for hours outside of Guilin with seemingly endless karst peaks and small farming town tucked in the valleys between.
It took about 3 hours before we finally emerged from the karst forest into a landscape of more rolling hills. Wuzhou took about 4 hours to get to in total and is quite a bit lower, there is a river that flows down from Guilin to Wuzhou. Wuzhou is a small city built around the confluence of the river from Guilin and a larger river which dominate the landscape along with the rolling hills.

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