Yangshuo Adventures

(Max)

All right, so yesterday was quite the adventure. We started the day off with a nice early start at 7:45 a.m. when our tour guide, Summer, took us to the well-known Elephant Hill. About a fifteen-minute walk from the hotel, this natural rock structure resembles a massive elephant dipping its trunk into the Li River for a drink. Local myth tells that the elephant was a servant of the jade emperor and was sent down to earth, but when the elephant realized the beauty of Guilin, he decided to stay. After about a half an hour stay at this site we returned to the hotel where our driver took us to the very famous tour attraction, the Li River cruise. I can’t even start to describe the magnificence of what we witnessed on that four-hour tour.

Limestone karsts, covered with lush green vegetation, could be seen as far our eyes would allow. It looked like something out of a dream; I couldn’t believe that such geological beauty could exist unless it was manufactured by someone’s imagination. We passed plenty of farms, mostly mandarin plantations, which were being tended to by their owners. Occasionally we saw a farmer leading water buffalo to the water’s edge for a drink. Whilst all of this was going on Caitlin, Ms Lockrow, and I were getting a significant amount of stares from the other passengers of the boat. A nice Irish family was the only other group of white people on the cruise so they received plenty of looks as well. Lunch was great, many different assortments of meat and vegetables, as well as some kind of fried animal that we didn’t really know what it was. An attempt was made to order the snake wine that is tradition for the DS group on the cruise but unfortunately it was not available. We wrapped up the afternoon by arriving in Yangshuo and checking into our hotel, only to continue into the evening with more adventure.

At about three we rented bicycles and our guide lead us out of central Yangshuo and into the countryside. As it is the Spring festival, and Yangshuo is a VERY popular tourist spot for Chinese, the roads were a nightmare. Dareus, Timmy, and I had quite a fun time weaving in and out of traffic, with the possibility of getting hit by a moped, car, or truck not really crossing our minds. We are some real adrenaline junkies. The ordeal was a bit more stressful for Ms Lockrow and Caitlin. Once we reached our destination, a small branch or the Li River, we boarded a small wooden raft and floated down the river for about an hour. While drifting we were able to witness cormorant fishing. Quite an unusual yet ingenious practice, cormorant fishing is the process of training and using cormorants to fish for you. The fisherman ties a rice string around the bird’s neck and releases it to submerge and search for fish. Once it has caught one, the fisherman retrieves it and pulls the fish out of the bird’s neck,; the bird is unable to swallow the fish due to the rice string. All of us actually had the unique experience of holding the cormorants, which were much heavier than expected. After this, we biked back to the hotel using a series of back roads to avoid traffic, unsuccessfully I might add, and had dinner. We crashed as soon as we reached our rooms, the day had been a fun but tiring one.

Ceiling of the breakfast room of our hotel in Yangshuo!