Day 26 - Sunday, Nov. 10 - Guilin & Li River

The Li River

In spite of leaving the hotel early, we get snagged in more traffic jams through town.  Let’s blame the marathon.
       Guilin has many small shops, and no building - including apartments - is more than six stories high; taller ones (nine stories) were built in the suburbs.  After all, this is a place tourists - foreign and domestic - come for the beauty of the site, not to see high-rises.
       And surprise!  There’s a bit of a morning mist, but the sun comes out, and the first blue sky we’ve seen since Xian.

On the drive to the wharf in Zhujiang, our local guide Sonny tells us a bit about the region.  The Li River is full of fish, especially carp and catfish.  As for reptiles, there are vipers in the bushes of the hillsides... snakes called “five steps to death” because that’s all the farther you’ll get if bitten.  (We’ll be on a boat, so no fears.  Plus they’re hibernating now.)  Birds?  Yes.  Domestic ducks but also migratory birds like egrets from Siberia and residential birds - kingfishers, wagtails, kites, white-collared crows... and cormorants, once migratory but now trained to fish (with straw braided around their throats so they won’t swallow their catch... you can never be too careful!).

After a sign saying “the end” (and meaning the highway ends), we board our ship and sail off on a four-hour trip downriver on the Li, a tributary of the Pearl River, the third largest in China after the Yangtze and the Yellow River.
       We see the most picturesque part:  Bat Hill, Writing Brush Peak, Snail Hill, Green Lotus Peak, and especially Nine-Horses Hill, which is supposed to be a fresco with a galloping white horse.  I don’t see it really, but it’s all so breath-takingly beautiful, so different from anything else we’ve seen so far.
       The karst “peaks” on both banks of the Li River are made of calcium carbonate from the bones of marine animals that died and sank to the bottom of the sea.  Then the Indian subcontinent crashed into Asia and slipped under the Asian Plate, forming the Himalayas... and also these mountains.  What was once the seabed is now high in the air.  Then erosion did its job. 
       These are the hills you see on so many Chinese works of art, and now I’m seeing them in person.

Our end port is Yangshuo, a “tiny” town of only 10,000 people.  All but a skeleton crew get off.   The boat will head back upriver on a nine-hour sail.  I wish I could sail with them.
       On the bus ride home, we pass farms abandoned because crop prices are very low.  The government won’t raise them - that would be unpopular - so farmers just give up.  The income is not worth all the effort.  So with less rice farmed, China has had to develop a hybrid variety of rice that gives double the yield.
       Back in Guilin, we take a route that avoids the marathon.  We pass many scooters and I notice one driver on a Vespa smoking and actually looking at his smartphone... while driving!  No helmet.  He’s not the only one.  Vespas and other motor scooters are popular... faster than bikes and only 3,000 yuan ($432).
       After a shower and some reading, it’s off to Alec’s fourth and last presentation:  The Rise of Modern China.  Then a lovely dinner with the largest “lazy Susie” yet.  We’ve been together long enough for friendships to have formed and no one has been left out, except the one person who chose not to come.  The rest of us, at two tables, have a gay old time, with lots of laughs, full glasses and an amazing shrimp dish.
       Full and happy - or vice versa - we head off to our rooms.  Tomorrow:  Shanghai.