Tuesday, July 22nd Today we got up early for our big river cruise down the Li. The cruise was amazing. Just wait until you see the pictures (many posted after the jump, and we have exponentially more if you ever want to see them)! It also completed the range of every possible form of travel city to city in China for us. The cruise ended about 4 hours down river, through the karst peaks, in a much smaller town, Yangshuo. By the way, Chinese refer to Guilin as a small city; it is a city of about 5 million. Yangshou is about 600,000 (miniscule by China’s standard) and honestly has a real small town feel.

Once we got off the boat, we checked into our hotel, walked around the town, climbed a path to a mountain peak with viewing pavilions, shopped on the street, had another great dinner (Cloud 9) and now we are relaxing at an outdoor bar (Bar 98) under a ceiling fan trying to stay cool even at 10pm in the dark, writing run-on sentences because typing and punctuation may make us sweat.

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Monday, July 21 Today we made a big move. We slept in slightly and then caught the airport express bus. The bus left from in front of a nearby hotel and we had to fend off many persistent cab drivers desperate for our fare. After waiting for a discount airfare (per the advice of our reliable friends at CITS) the only plane tickets left for our date were first class. They encouraged us to fly the next day instead, but the tour must go on. We enjoyed our first class treatment in lines, lounges and seating and it only cost the same as a U.S. coach domestic flight. This leg of the trip was noticeably different from our black market bus experience. Josh kept waiting for several people to pack in around him in his spacious seat.

Arriving in Guilin well-rested and fed, we were met at the airport by another CITS rep and driver to get us the 45 minutes to Guilin’s center. En route we bought our Li River cruise tix and arranged transport to Shenzhen. We got settled in the hotel and set out to explore Guilin. Guilin and the countryside around it are beautiful! A highlight of the trip. The surrounding karst mountains are the craggy and narrow peaks seen in most Chinese watercolors. It is impossible not to sweat here with hyper-humidity and high temps. A few times a day, a torrential rain occurs for about 5 minutes. We sweated while walking the city, climbing two twin pagodas and walking along the Li River. The pagodas are in the middle of a lake.  The moon pagoda (7 stories) is reachable by bridge, but the sun pagoda (solid bronze, 9 stories, with elevator) can only be reached via an underwater tunnel. (A very difficult to find underwater tunnel, I might add – we almost left without finding it – it was behind a wall! And there was no one there – the pagodas were unmanned.) 

We also sweated over an excellent Sichuanese dinner at Yi Yuan, maybe our new best dinner yet. The deliciousness consisted of Sichuan spiced chicken, smoked duck, spicy pork, stir fried green beans with chili, garlic and pork, fried rice with egg and beers. Approximately enough food for four (Americans), we tried to do the job. Luckily, after such a big meal we were able to shlep back to the hotel. And fall into a food coma.

(Update – in looking for a link for Yi Yuan, I found that in March of 2009 it was named the #1 restaurant in Guilin!  Not that we have a large sample size, but, nonetheless, WE AGREE!)

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I can’t tell which mapping program is better so I have included two maps.

We are headed in a counter-clockwise direction, beginning in the upper right (i.e., Northeast) corner in Beijing.  Since the green and red push pins are not labeled with the appropriate city names and do not tell us “geographically hindered” people what cities they are “tacking”, here’s the list in chronological order:  Beijing, Datong, Pingyao, Xi’an, Guilin, Yangshuo, Shenzhen and ending in Hong Kong.

Map #1

Map #2

Here is the first map zoomed in a bit differently.  The map of the states beneath it is set at the exact same scale just so you can get an idea of how far we will be traveling.