Thursday, December 16, 2004
Yangshuo
Some say the area around Yangshuo is the most beautiful place of China. The town on the Li river is surrounded by a forest of weirdly contorted karst peaks which seem taken out of an ink painting.
Yangshuo is nested 70km south of Guilin, in the south-eastern Guangxi province. To avoid a 30 hours train journey from Kunming, we took a domestic Air China flight (the first of our journey!) to Guilin and then a minibus to Yangshuo.
The countryside was just a few minutes away from our friendly little hotel. Despite the weather (mostly grey and sometimes rainy), we had a very nice stay there. The quiet walk along the Li river, with occasional crossings on small bamboo rafts, is probably the best way to appreciate the landscape.
Apparently undisturbed by the loud tour boats from Guilin, some fishermen and their cormorants still do their job the old way. A rope is tied around the bird's neck, so it cannot swallow the fish it catches. Every 7th catch, the fisher has to loosen the knot in order to feed the cormorant. If not, we were told it refuses to work...
Renting a bike is also a good and easy solution for sightseeing. The paths at the foot of the mountains are quite flat.
In the evening, Yangshuo has a street full of souvenir shops and backpacker style pubs providing the usual entertainment (pizza, english permier league football and Carlsberg). But beside it, the atmosphere is much less artificial. We found excellent (and crowded) restaurants serving the tasty local speciality: river fish cooked in beer. On the whole, considering the beauty of its surroundings, the place is not yet too much of a tourist trap, but it might soon become one...
Yangshuo is nested 70km south of Guilin, in the south-eastern Guangxi province. To avoid a 30 hours train journey from Kunming, we took a domestic Air China flight (the first of our journey!) to Guilin and then a minibus to Yangshuo.
The countryside was just a few minutes away from our friendly little hotel. Despite the weather (mostly grey and sometimes rainy), we had a very nice stay there. The quiet walk along the Li river, with occasional crossings on small bamboo rafts, is probably the best way to appreciate the landscape.
Apparently undisturbed by the loud tour boats from Guilin, some fishermen and their cormorants still do their job the old way. A rope is tied around the bird's neck, so it cannot swallow the fish it catches. Every 7th catch, the fisher has to loosen the knot in order to feed the cormorant. If not, we were told it refuses to work...
Renting a bike is also a good and easy solution for sightseeing. The paths at the foot of the mountains are quite flat.
In the evening, Yangshuo has a street full of souvenir shops and backpacker style pubs providing the usual entertainment (pizza, english permier league football and Carlsberg). But beside it, the atmosphere is much less artificial. We found excellent (and crowded) restaurants serving the tasty local speciality: river fish cooked in beer. On the whole, considering the beauty of its surroundings, the place is not yet too much of a tourist trap, but it might soon become one...
