Cruising on Li River

Every tourist to Guilin does a river cruise on the Li river (shui / water) passing the karst mountains (shan / mountain). In winter the river is totally dry and no boat can go on the river, however, now being rain season, there was sufficient water.

The boats started at 9:30 am. The boats meaning: around one hundred boats at the same time, one driving after the other. That's Chinese mass tourism at its best! And one hundred boats is low season, as I was told they have up to 300 boats. Most of the people on the boats were Chinese and Chinese love taking photos of themselves in front of famous rock formations. Famous rock formations were the rock ressembling 'Guanyin buddha', an apple shaped karst rock, a rock where you had to search twelve horses and last, but not least, the '20 kuai landscape'. So what's that? On the 20 kuai banknote there's a landscape painting of one special spot on Li river which every Chinese tourist wants to have a photo of. So imagine dozens of Chinese standing on board, guessing: 'Is this the 20 kuai?" or shouting out "Now this really is the 20 kuai!". They started shouting 20 minutes before we actually reached the '20 kuai landscape' which of course was officially announced and nobody could have possibly missed it. But what a fun!

When I reached Yangshuo, the destination of the boat trip, I got myself a bike and drove out into the countryside until where the streets end and the water buffalos work together with farmers on the fields and rice paddies... Very nice views again.

At night I visited the famous show 'Impression' , directed by the Chinese director Zhang Yimou. Just imagine a stage on the water between five karst mountains and impressive light effects using mountain and water as part of the stage. Definitely not inexpensive (around 300 kuai if you really want to see something), but this show owns a "wow!", not for the minority girls singing, but for the great fishermen scenes and light effects.