Day 25 - Saturday, Nov. 9 - to Guilin

Countryside

Another early start.  We’re off - by high-speed train - southeast to Guilin.  I won’t be needing the little card the hotel gave me to show a cab driver that says, in Chinese, “Please drive me back to my home in Chengdu” and then the hotel’s address.  Good-bye, toilet seat that lifted automatically when I turned on the light; so long, self-opening window curtains that welcomed me home with a “show’s starting!” touchbutton.
       The railroad station is on the outskirts of Chengdu - much easier, I’m sure, than running this new line through the high-rises.  They check passports here, as they do in the hotels.  Big Brother is watching.  As we wait, a family with their one-son-only eats his morning noodle bowl off their suitcase.  Then dad plays with him while mom mans her smartphone.  I can’t help but think that this child’s China has little in common with dad’s, and dad’s has little to do with grandpa’s, which was certainly very different!  What changes two generations have seen!
       The aerodynamic train looks like a more pointy-nosed version of France’s high-speed train.  (I’ll see old trains on side tracks that look like the squared American ones.)  We board and say good-bye to Kari, our local guide, who’ll stay behind in her hometown.  As for punctuality... the clock hand moves from 8:19 to 8:20, the doors close and we pull out of the station.  We’re off from Chengdu to Guilin.  Six or 6½ hours, with only two stops.  And yet we travel at between 190 and 245 km/hr (118-152 mph).
       To achieve that, when creating a totally new rail line (only ten years old), the Chinese seem to have measured the altitude at the point of origin and the altitude at the destination, then just drawn a straight line between the two.  No curves.  And mostly tunnels.  Mountains be damned!   I’d seriously say 60% of the trip is in one tunnel or another.  In between, we get glimpses of those mountains, plus farmland and forest.  The farmland starts out with small garden patches on land along the tracks in the city.  (In France those plots would be given to retired railroad staff.)  These mountains may still have pandas, but they’re too remote to be part of the Green Great Wall Stanley told us about up north, trees planted annually by Chinese citizens on a sort of Arbor Day every March 15.

       The fog lifts a bit but the sky stays grey.  We pass massive hothouses and some rice paddies.  (We’re headed northwest to southeast, from wheat country to ricelands.)  We also cross areas that show “the old China”:  dirt roads, trails on hillsides, traditional one-story houses in small hidden valleys.  And the architecture changes:  the houses are dark wood instead of white adobe and roof tiles are green, not dark red.  In contrast to this are multiple construction projects almost everywhere:  half-built highways, pillars over valleys for railroads or bridges, concrete vertical trunks awaiting a raised roadbed... with crews working Saturday.
       We pass a town-city being built... the factory first, then streets, then houses.  In the countryside (what we see of it), there are steep slopes being reforested, either to control erosion or grow citrus.  Who carries those seedlings all the way up there?  In other places, leaves are turning yellow.  The outside temperature goes from 16°C to 14° then 20° and finally 24° (60-57-68-75°F).
       At Chongqing, a mother gets on with her 5-year-old daughter.  They share the seat next to me.  It’s fun watching them play rock-paper-scissors, which I didn’t know was an international game.  When we get off at Guilin, after only one other stop (Guiyang), I leave them my seat by the window.  The little girl waves and says “bye bye”, coached by Mom.

Outside the station in Guilin, we meet our local guide, Sonny.  He offers us a little cookie made with the osmanthus plant (plumeria), for which the town is named (Guilin = osmatis forest).  Along with mandarin oranges and kumquats, it grows well in this subtropical climate.  (We’re at the same latitude as Miami, near the Tropic of Cancer.)

       Along the road are mountains of karst, the same rocks we will see along the river tomorrow, and for which the region is famous.  We’re headed to the Reed Flute Cave at the top of one of them, open to the public since 1962.  We take the-little-train-that-could up to the top (“I think I can, I think I can...”) and walk for an hour through the cave’s chambers.  It’s strikingly beautiful inside, and dry, seeing as the monsoon season is over.  The only problem is the crowds - which Stanley says never happened before... but it is Saturday.

Elephant Rock

       Guilin is a small town - population only 1 million - with several ethnic minorities:  Yao, Dong, Zhuang, Miao.  It used to have a city wall around it, like Xian, but that is now gone.  We weave our way past camphor trees whose fragrant wood is used to make furniture and especially hope chests for girls.  And past banyans whose multiple limbs provide much-needed shade in summer when temperatures can reach 100°F (40°C).  There’s also a thinner relative of Spanish moss growing from some trees.
       Half of us get off the bus to view Elephant Rock; the rest go directly to the hotel.  Big mistake on our part!  Although it’s a lovely site - a huge hill shaped like an elephant with a trunk and 600-year-old pagodas on top - there’s going to be a marathon tomorrow and lots of runners and spectators have come.  Traffic jams everywhere in this center of town.  (At best of times, Chinese traffic is just a giant game of chicken.)  It takes 1½ hrs for what should have been a 10-minute tour and a 15-minute drive.
       So it’s off to bed for me.  I eat lunch leftovers - potato chips, a banana and the osmanthus cake... and I’m in bed by 9:30.
       Tomorrow only the river.

Guilin