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Good lychee pancake morning, everyone!
I love lychees in all forms, and it just so happens that the Guilin Royal Garden Hotel serves lychees and pancakes, which, when combined, become little pieces of Heaven! Also much like Heaven is the landscape along the Li River, where we found ourselves at 9:30 sharp for a cruise!
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The morning started hazy and never really cleared, but it didn’t matter much. We were surrounded by phoenix tail bamboo, herds of water buffalo, and vendors on bamboo rafts, all dressed for work in their conical hats!
About an hour into the 3.5-hour ride, the karsts really became magnificent. We passed the Wall of Nine Horses, which was covered in great splotches shaped like horses, and Carp Hill, which was shaped like… Yup, a flopping carp! We even passed the exact location that’s featured on the 20-yuan note! See?
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After all the sights and sightings, we made port in Yangshuo County. Now this is interesting: In China, counties are the parts that make up a city, so Yangshuo is just a part of Guilin! Three and a half hours down the river make this one huge city! Yangshuo was pretty small though. Su Yesthatsright marched us through the bustling marketplace to a bike rental spot and lined us up with a local farmer, who only spoke the local dialect, to guide us down the bumpy dirt roads around Yangshuo proper. We had a rocky start and lost some of the older members of our group for about twenty minutes, but when we all got caught up again, we turned off the main street and began a wild tour of the local farmland.
Even with the haze, this is some of the most beautiful country! The karsts are so unique, and the rice and lotus paddies are all full of water, which reflects everything into one giant rift of space and time! Some of the karsts even had bald patches on their faces that looked like eyes and smiles! What a cheery place! All around us, the sun was shining, the cows were mooing, and the trees were giggling! No, really!
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I was surprised at how many nice hotels there were along the back roads of Yangshuo, where even the roadkill is exotic (poor baby cobra…). Apparently, a lot of artists come into this area and set up camp to take pictures and make sketches in order to return to their studios and paint what they saw. There are also a lot of hidden adventures that we didn’t have time to explore, like the suspended walkways between karsts and the karst climbing area where people had gone up over fifty feet and attached stuffed animals to the rock. Some of them were so high up! I would have done it too, if I had a stuffed animal.
We made a triumphant return to the market then jumped back in the van for our final event of the evening, the Dreamlike Lijiang Night Ballet and Circus. Now, when you’ve seen as many acrobatic shows as I have, you become a little skeptical that there is anything left on stage to make your mouth hang open. In China, you must remember that jade belongs on jewelry, not in your mind!
Right from the get-go, there was a beautiful number that featured a misty curtain of green laser light, and at intervals, a girl with a parasol would pop out of the mist, float across stage, and vanish again into the green! There was a high-flying pirate trampoline act where one of the buccaneers leapt onto the mast, caught it with his legs, then flipped back down! In another act, a girl was lying on her back, and- I can’t even begin to describe the apparatus- but she managed to bounce a basketball up eight platforms on a post and into a net using only her legs to move the post! And the weapons act! Ferociously flawless! To add a cherry to this sundae of a show, all but two pairs of performers were between four and fourteen years of age! That may not be saying much for beavers, but for humans, that’s pretty incredible! I was completely speechless at the finale. I hope my dreams tonight are half as spectacular!
See you in Dreamland!
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