Duei bu chi - China part IV
Today we are going to take a riverboat cruise down the Li river to see some of the most famous Chinese scenery in the world. Most people, when you mention China, think of Beijing and Shanghai, maybe the Terra Cotta warriors, certainly the Great Wall. Usually people don't think of Guilin and few people know about it even though they've probably seen it. I'm not going to narrate much today other than to explain where we are. I'm going to let the scenery speak for itself.
The day we took our Li River cruise was cloudy, misty, and a little rainy. The tour guide that we had said that people argue over whether Guilin is prettier by rain or by sun and that the general consensus is that it's beautiful either way but that the mist, clouds and rain, as you will see, offer an element of mystery and intrigue that you would never get on a sunny day.
By comparison, Guilin, with a population of 600,000 is a small town relative to the other cities we visited and would visit. Beijing is home to a hefty 14 million, Xi'an to 6 million, SuZhou, which we'll visit in a couple of days, has a population of 7 million (up from 3 million in 2002) and Shanghai a staggering 17 million. To put it in perspective, Wichita, Kansas, my hometown, has a population of around 500,000. It is, and has been for some time, the largest city in the state of Kansas. The largest city in the U.S., New York, New York, has a modest 8.2 million.
Of all the cities we visited, Guilin was the perhaps the most mysterious. We didn't spend much time there - just the 3 hour boat cruise, a visit to the university, which is home to Solitary Beauty Hill, and a foot massage. We were on our way the next morning. We didn't stay long enough to learn much about the tiny, beautiful farm town, but as you'll see from these photos, what we did see was breathtaking.
The unique mountain structure is the result of limestone erosion. The mountains along the Li River in Guilin are of limestone, resulting in the one-of-a-kind shapes you see here.