Our hotel in Guilin was fine, and after a good night's sleep and breakfast Lily picked us up and we drove through Guilin to the boat docks on the Li River. Guilin is a smaller city -- of some 700,000 -- and has the typical tropical/sub-tropical indoor/outdoor lifestyle with open storefronts and restaurants spilling out onto the street. It looks a little scruffy compared to Xi'an, and the town parks seem a little cheesy. But of course the city is not why one comes to Guilin: one comes for the landscape.
The area around Guilin is limestone, and something about the rock and the rainfall has resulted in the formation of thousands of steep sided hills, shaped like skinny watermelons, jutting at times several hundred meters out of the plain. The surreal landscape is one of the iconic images of China, and the boat trip down the Li River showcases many beautiful peaks.
We were fortunate with the weather -- it had rained the night before and the habitual haze had cleared somewhat, so we had good viewing conditions. Actually, aside from the nearly omnipresent haze and/or smog and a few hot days in Beijing at the beginning, we have been very fortunate with the weather on this trip. The only day that it rained was the first day in Xi'an, and then only in the morning and only lightly.
The boat, which could perhaps have seated about 125 people was half-full, with plenty of foreign tourists, and heavily air-conditioned. Fortunately there were several open decks so I spent most of the time outside in the warm breeze (the day was noticeably cooler and less humid than the night before). Sampans, sometimes made of bamboo, more often of PVC pipes (apparently the local authorities want to preserve the big bamboo stands), puttered past, water buffalo and their calves grazed freely in and out of the water on both sides, and a steady parade of tourist boats chugged down the river. I think I mentioned how popular the area is? And despite the parade it was a lovely cruise.
After about four hours we disembarked in Yangshuo, a small town that has developed into a backpacker and adventure tourism center. It was a zoo -- full of souvenir shops, aggressive street vendors, calls to come and see from all sides, and even some disfigured beggars. It wasn't pretty. After fighting our way up from the boat landing and along the main road we hopped into an open taxi for a drive into the countryside to "see rural life". Actually the tour offered us the option of renting bicycles or the taxi but "fortunately" I had hurt my knee again the previous day bicycling on Xi'an's walls (I'm going to have it looked at once we are back in Germany) and so we took the taxi. "Fortunately" because it was a hot and humid mid-afternoon, the traffic was heavy for a few kilometers along the main road until we turned off along a country lane, and the lane afterwards was appallingly bumpy: we wouldn't have had fun if we had cycled.
And suddenly we were in the deep countryside. Small plots of land on each side, some flooded (growing rice, lotuses (the roots are edible), and water chestnuts), some dry with all manner of crops. Many of the houses were still made of mud brick (although new brick and concrete ones were being erected here and there). There was even a farmer ploughing a small plot with a water buffalo. And at one corner there was a gaggle of old and not so old peasant women who punced upon the taxi and tried to sell us things. When that failed, they started to beg. Lidia, always empathic and with a good heart, wanted to give them something, but once she did their begging rose to a fever pitch and she was mobbed... she was almost crying at the end, so buffeted was she emotionally, and so bad she felt for not being able to help them more. I pointed out to her as we drove away that before she goes to India she is going to have to find a way to deal with her emotions as regards beggars... because if she starts to distribute money there, they will gather like flies, and she will end up being buried alive and/or torn apart: there is no end to beggars in India.
We drove off with the women running and screaming behind us, but they soon gave up, and after a few minutes more we turned into the yard of a small farm on the edge of a village. The tour company has an arrangement with the owner of this farm, a widow with more than a little business acumen (she had managed to bring up five children on her own after her husband died young, and now she has struck this deal...), that she keep it more or less in its original rural state (the "less" being the flatscreen TV on the wall of the main room) and welcome tourists like ourselves. In other words, it was real and not real, if you know what I mean.
There was a hand-powered stone mill outside, a similarly powered water pump, pigs in a pen, chickens wandering around, and a small market garden, while inside the walls were bare except for the aforementioned TV, cheap portraits of communist luminary (ultimately farmers did pretty well out of communist land reform compared to their previous status as serfs), and little pictures drawn by her grandchildren. Jars with pickled produce of various sorts and home-made spirits, lined the walls, and there was the absolute minimum of furniture. There was electricity (rural electrification was another major achievement of the Party), and in the kitchen she cooked with gas (produced from decomposing pig manure we were told!). Felt very authentic overall.
It had taken us perhaps 20 minutes along very bumpy roads to get to the farm, and I wasn't looking forward to doing them again, nor to seeing the peasant women once more, but I had a feeling that we might have taken a roundabout route to "set the scene". And indeed when we left the farm it took all of two minutes, along a well-surfaced lane, to get back to the main road. So, file this under "most things in China are both what they seem and not", along with the Xi'an Ming walls I talked about yesterday.
We drove back to the hotel and had dinner with a very nice Indian couple we had met and talked with on the boat earlier in the day. From New Delhi, well educated and with two daughters married and living in the USA, the conversation ranged widely and it was a charming evening.
