Guilin - Li RIver Cruising and Light Show
After a bit of late night of drinking in Lijiang, at one of the most un-stereotypical Irish bars I have ever been to, we caught a flight to Guilin, via Kunming.
It took a while, but we finally arrived at the Bravo Hotel, which looks out on to the large lakes that are scattered around the centre of town. On our arrival we were greeted by a staff who spoke excellent English and who invite us to have a welcome drink rather that the rather more typical Chinese ‘hospitality’ of demanding a deposit and then just dumbly shoving your passports back at you. For a moment I wondered if the plane hadn’t accidentally flown to Japan! Don’t get me wrong, we have stayed in some excellent hotels and while nowhere we have been badly treated, but somehow beaming warm welcomes are just not how it is done in China.
We had dinner in the hotel, in a restaurant that overlooked the pool in the atrium; which was some tasty stir fried squid with chilli and some ginger and spring onion shrimps, which were the tiny eat in one go kind that were tasty, but occasionally fought back with a stab to the inner mouth.
The next morning we were picked up to get on the boat for our Li River Cruise; the Li River is, by Chinese standards pretty small, but it is definitely one of the most iconic. It slowly makes it was south from Guilin through the lime stone karst mountains that rise up pretty much vertically from the otherwise totally flat landscape, to become these softly rounded lumps that look identical to those you have seen a million times in Chinese ink paintings and always assumed was just an artistic style. The mountains are pretty amazing, not just in their shape, but in the sheer number of them that loom seemingly out of nowhere, from being a slight shadow in the morning mist to being a huge hulking things towering over you. The whole area, even now in the dry season is prodigiously green, with emerald firework displays of bamboo sometime erupting from the riverbanks, fields of rice, and the osmanthus trees that Guilin is named after. The boat creeps along, sometime slowing to a near crawl as the river becomes little that a few feet deep, with sand banks scrapping lightly on the hull.
Bamboo rafts, are slowly poled down the river, some of them hitching up to the cruise boats to deliver fresh produce for the on-board kitchens. Water buffalo are often found lounging in the water, or the local people come down to the water with horses or to fish with cormorant birds, who are trained to dive and catch the fish but return them to their handlers, giving you postcard pictures of the rural idyll of south China.
There are a number of cliff faces that are said to resemble things, such as the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, Guan Yin, or most famously a Painting of 9 Horses. There is also an area of hill known as the golden brocade which appears of the 20 Yuan note.
The boat arrived at Yangshou, a small town on the Li River where we stayed for a few days. Our hotel was a little way from the town itself, on the banks of another river, the Yulong.
That evening we went to the Li River Light Show; a theatrical production that uses the river itself as a stage, from the director of ‘Hero’ and the Beijing Olympics, Yimou Zhang.
With a backdrop of the sugarloaf hills a huge number of local farmer and fishermen and women sang and danced a number of spectacular shows all of them using smoke, light, floating set dressing, a host of bamboo rafts and inventive costumes; from a number of hugely long red sheet strung across the river being moved in synchronised waves by a guys on a number of rafts to hundreds of women signing in Tron-like lit costumes, walking along moving walkways in the river. It was a very grand production, both the number of actors and singers, the water side stage also the imagination of using the lights and river scene so well.
Pics:
Guilin
It took a while, but we finally arrived at the Bravo Hotel, which looks out on to the large lakes that are scattered around the centre of town. On our arrival we were greeted by a staff who spoke excellent English and who invite us to have a welcome drink rather that the rather more typical Chinese ‘hospitality’ of demanding a deposit and then just dumbly shoving your passports back at you. For a moment I wondered if the plane hadn’t accidentally flown to Japan! Don’t get me wrong, we have stayed in some excellent hotels and while nowhere we have been badly treated, but somehow beaming warm welcomes are just not how it is done in China.
We had dinner in the hotel, in a restaurant that overlooked the pool in the atrium; which was some tasty stir fried squid with chilli and some ginger and spring onion shrimps, which were the tiny eat in one go kind that were tasty, but occasionally fought back with a stab to the inner mouth.
The next morning we were picked up to get on the boat for our Li River Cruise; the Li River is, by Chinese standards pretty small, but it is definitely one of the most iconic. It slowly makes it was south from Guilin through the lime stone karst mountains that rise up pretty much vertically from the otherwise totally flat landscape, to become these softly rounded lumps that look identical to those you have seen a million times in Chinese ink paintings and always assumed was just an artistic style. The mountains are pretty amazing, not just in their shape, but in the sheer number of them that loom seemingly out of nowhere, from being a slight shadow in the morning mist to being a huge hulking things towering over you. The whole area, even now in the dry season is prodigiously green, with emerald firework displays of bamboo sometime erupting from the riverbanks, fields of rice, and the osmanthus trees that Guilin is named after. The boat creeps along, sometime slowing to a near crawl as the river becomes little that a few feet deep, with sand banks scrapping lightly on the hull.
Bamboo rafts, are slowly poled down the river, some of them hitching up to the cruise boats to deliver fresh produce for the on-board kitchens. Water buffalo are often found lounging in the water, or the local people come down to the water with horses or to fish with cormorant birds, who are trained to dive and catch the fish but return them to their handlers, giving you postcard pictures of the rural idyll of south China.
There are a number of cliff faces that are said to resemble things, such as the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, Guan Yin, or most famously a Painting of 9 Horses. There is also an area of hill known as the golden brocade which appears of the 20 Yuan note.
The boat arrived at Yangshou, a small town on the Li River where we stayed for a few days. Our hotel was a little way from the town itself, on the banks of another river, the Yulong.
That evening we went to the Li River Light Show; a theatrical production that uses the river itself as a stage, from the director of ‘Hero’ and the Beijing Olympics, Yimou Zhang.
With a backdrop of the sugarloaf hills a huge number of local farmer and fishermen and women sang and danced a number of spectacular shows all of them using smoke, light, floating set dressing, a host of bamboo rafts and inventive costumes; from a number of hugely long red sheet strung across the river being moved in synchronised waves by a guys on a number of rafts to hundreds of women signing in Tron-like lit costumes, walking along moving walkways in the river. It was a very grand production, both the number of actors and singers, the water side stage also the imagination of using the lights and river scene so well.
Pics:
Guilin