Guilin- Wednesday, August 3, 2016

     The hotel seems to offer an Asian and a Western breakfast buffet.  We were directed towards the Western one, which was great with us.

     Typhoon Nida had been threatening us today, but was downgraded to a tropical storm, and ultimately just gave us cloudy skies and about an hour's worth of rainfall this morning, during the daytime anyway.  (Guangzhou was hit much harder, we later learned.)

     We met Jackie at 8:30 and headed out to see the landscape around Guilin.  The area is famous for its "karst" terrain.  You see the unique and distinctive hills as soon as you leave the plane at the airport.  The town itself is surrounded and punctuated with limestone peaks.  The formations jut up abruptly out of the landscape and have very steep sides.  They are usually lushly covered with green but patches of vertical limestone often show through.  The region beyond the town continues with these dreamlike hills, giving the landscape a look from out of a Dr. Seuss drawing.  The ridges look like the backscales of giant sleeping dragons.

     Jackie pointed out several limestone formations in town this morning.  We saw the backside of Elephant Trunk Hill, but sadly, didn't get a good look at it.  It looks like an elephant drinking from the river.  (Jackie said that when Bill Clinton visited here as president, he didn't want to speak in front of a hill shaped like a Republican elephant.)  We also saw the "Seven Stars," which are seven peaks along a ridge in town.

     We went to MoPan Hill Wharf on the Lijiang River to catch our boat.  There were at least a dozen large passenger ships there waiting for the thousands of visitors.  Each had two enclosed decks with comfortable seats and tables and a third "sun deck" on top, even though there wouldn't be any sun today.  When  the boats got underway, it created a convoy of sightseers, chugging up the Li, with each boat following behind the next past the surreal landscape.

     We saw water buffalo along the banks in several places.  The first and biggest herd that we saw was near "Bat Rock."  You have to use quite a bit of imagination to see how some of these formations got their names.  This one is supposed to look like a bat, but the most Scott could see was that it might look a bit like the top of Batman's logo.

     Scott and Anna, and later Julie, ventured out onto the sundeck shortly after we got underway.  Emma has gotten a cold, and she was content to stay in her comfortable seat below and watch through the windows as the landscape passed by.  Eventually, the rain started and drove all of us below.

     Jackie had bought us all bag lunches, and since we were sitting at a table, we started eating as the landscape passed us.  We didn't know how long the rain would last, so the family ventured up to the sundeck all together with a borrowed umbrella.  We didn't last long then because Emma was shivering and getting goosebumps, so we waited below for a bit longer.

    Eventually, the rain slowed and finally stopped, and Scott and Anna were both back up top, taking lots of pictures and video of some of the most famous parts of the river.  Nine Horse Hill has many patches of the bare vertical limestone, and many of them look like horses.  If you can see nine horses total, it's supposed to mean that you are intelligent.  We could see a few, and maybe a pony or two, but we also saw a big frowny face, so that doesn't seem good for us.

     Around the bend from Nine Horse Hill is a scene that is pictured on the ¥ 20 note.  Several people were holding one up to take a picture with it and the real hills in the background.

     Once the rain stopped, it was fun being on the upper deck.  The breeze felt nice, and the clouds were welcome.  If the sun had been beating down, it would have been too hot.  The clouds even made a misty fog that draped through the tops of the rocks and made them appear even more mystical.

     We saw smaller craft on the river.  They looked like they were made of bamboo, but Jackie said that they were actually made of plastic.  Most were set up for tourists to ride on, but a few were being used by fishermen.  We saw a few with cormorants, the birds that are used to fish with, but we didn't actually see any in action.

     The entire cruise lasted about four hours.  The whole regatta of tourist boats arrived in Yangshuo with all of their passengers at about the same time.  The town was expecting that, and had an enormous long row of stalls set up as a tourist trap.  Jackie warned us that pickpockets were active in this area.  We pushed along with the crowds to a fleet of electric golf-cart-like vehicles that taxied us up past even more shops.  In some ways, the town resembled a tourist town in the Swiss Alps, with the limestone towers dominating the shops below, with low sloping roofs.  Among the shops were several places that offered a "fish message," where you put your feet in the tank and have fish nibble the dead skin off your feet.  Julie has often said that she wanted to try this, but we couldn't convince her to do it now that she had the chance.

     Jackie offered us two ways to get through town.  Julie decided to take the route through the market.  She wanted to see what Scott had seen in Guangzhou, back in 2004.  She got that, whether she really wanted it or not.  The first things we saw when we entered the market were long rows of plastic tubs.  Each tub had a different kind of critter in it.  Some had snakes or eels.  Others had either large crayfish or small lobsters.  Still others had frogs and others had snails or scorpions.  All were alive and wriggling because the Chinese want their food to be "fresh."  Beyond that were many foreign looking vegetables, including "white squash" which looks like a giant cucumber.  There were several roots that Jackie didn't know the English name of, and there may not be an English name for them.  But the finale was back corner where the fresh meat was.  Several small dogs were in the process of being butchered and were hanging, cut open, on meat hooks.  Several other animals, including rabbits and a few cats, were in small wooden cages awaiting similar fates.  We were horrified, but Jackie seemed to think our reaction was funny.  We wanted to get out at that point, but still had to go by tables with displays of intestines and other entrails before we could get to the door.  We now refer to this stop as the "Market of Horrors."  Anna was the only one of us who snapped a picture, but she has since deleted it.

     We stopped briefly at the Yulong River bridge, which was a beautiful spot.  Yulong means "Meeting the Dragon," because the dragon that is supposed to live here because he enjoys the scenery.  On that portion of the river, only real bamboo boats are allowed.  A live camel was also there because a rock formation that looks like a camel is there too.

     Since we had seen the tea farm yesterday, there was an opening in the schedule this afternoon.  Jackie suggested we add on a trip to Silver Cave.  We wouldn't have seen the cave except that the weather had changed our plans, so these clouds had a silver lining.  (Get it?)  There are many caves in region, due to the same limestone "kasrt" land that caused the landscape above.  Silver Cave is said to be the biggest and best of them.  In many ways it is what we expected.  Colored lights illuminated the rock formations in beautiful shades.  Some particularly interesting groups of stalactites and stalagmites have been given names and fanciful descriptions, of course, and an audio tour described each as we approached.  It took a bit of imagination to see the reasons for the names of some.  One group was supposed to look like Buddha preaching to his disciples.  Another was "ice cream."  In several places, reflecting pools of water made the curtains of limestone seem twice as long.

     One unexpected thing about the cave, though, was how much walking there was and how many steps up and down there were.  The entire path was supposed to be about 2 km, but almost all of that was going upstairs or downstairs.  We were all very tired after that.

     On the ride home, Julie talked with Jackie about life in the U.S.  She taught him two new words- "grocery" and "taco."

     We noted the large number of scooters here.  They seem to have replaced bicycles, and that says a lot here.

     Jackie left us at a restaurant just around the corner from our hotel.  It was called "Mcfound," and Jackie said it had both Chinese and Western food.  We didn't see much "Western" other than some steaks.  They had "pizza," but only two kinds- a fruit pizza and another one loaded with toppings.  Julie tried to order a cheese pizza using the pictures on the menu and her dictionary.  She had the waitress puzzled.  "Just cheese?  Just cheese?  Only cheese?  No beef?  Just cheese?" she kept asking.  When the pizza came, it was basically just cheesy bread with no sauce, and only a little larger than a personal pizza to feed the four of us.  When Julie ordered drinks for us, she pointed to the word "water" on the menu, and asked for four.  The word she had covered up was "lime," so we ended up getting four lime waters, filled with what Emma called "a veritable salad" of green leaves and lime slices.  The seeds made the straws hard to use.

     We returned to the hotel on our own, crossing one street, and went to bed.  Dinner had been about 7:00, so it had been a long day and we were all tired.