Guilin 1: Trip down the Li River

"I often sent pictures of the hills of Guilin which I painted to friends back home, but few believed what they saw. " -- Fan Chengda, Song dynasty scholar ; Song dynasty was 960-1279.

We have Richard Nixon to thank for our trip down the Li River. At the time of his second visit to China, after all the unpleasantness of Watergate and not having him to kick around any more, he returned to China as a tourist and asked his hosts for a ride down the Li, to see the scenery praised by Chinese artists and scholars for centuries. "We had to rent some fisherman's boat for him then," Arthur, our guide, said, looking back at the half-dozen fully loaded tour boats following us.

The scenery is otherworldly. I know of nothing else like it anywhere. The photos I took utterly fail to capture its beauty. If you want to see other people's equally inadequate attempts, go to Google / images / Li River. It's not just the individual rock formations rising around the river behind the bamboo groves on the banks, it's mile after mile of them, towering like huge limestone fingers, grey and beige and brown and red and black rock beneath green shrubs, each unlike all the others, each and all so unbelievable that the mind simply gives up trying to make sense of them and surrenders to a sense of wonder and delight and repose as more and more come into sight around each bend.

People actually live here, poling rafts made of three or four bamboo poles or PVC pipes to fish with cormorants or to peddle fruits and vegetables to passing tourist boats. Talk about minimalist watercraft!

The standard trip takes anywhere from two to four hours, depending on how the river is running. Mercifully, the spectacle runs out before the trip ends or the tour operators might have to pry their customers away from the boat railing as they beg for "please, just a few more minutes". There are the inevitable souvenir stands (see earlier post on the "hello" people), and I bought a "silk" scarf and a "pashmina" shawl because I found them beautiful. We paid 15 yuan each to ride golf carts the half-mile to bus to take us to the airport and back to the Amsterdam in Hong Kong. Our China excursion was complete.