[Itinerary Page]The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
May 10 - Gettin' Into Guilin
Today we cruised down the Li River and really saw the unique landscape that makes this area so magical. Between Margene and I we came back with close to 500 pictures and when you see the few that I was able to include, you will understand why the shutter kept snapping. I apologize for the delay in getting these up onto the site, but you can imagine (or perhaps you can't) the amount of time it takes to sort through them, select those to use, edit, re-size, assemble and write up the report. I am still working on it as we approach time for our plane to leave Hong Kong for San Francisco, so I will give you what I can now, finish it all on the plane and upload it when I get back to the US.
We all agreed that if we knew then what we know now, we would have passed on the Yangtze cruise and just come to Guilin. We saw more spectacular scenery in four hours than we did in three days on the other boat ... for a lot less money.
The downriver trip ends at Yangshuo (sounds like "Yang Schwo"), a small town whose primary purpose seems to be to clean as much money as possible from the disembarking passengers ... and they have become quite proficient at it. I would be interested to spend the night sometime, just to see what it is like once the last tourist bus has headed back to Guilin. If it is anything like the Italian hill towns, it might be much more pleasant after the feeding frenzy passes.
We fought our way through the gauntlet at the dock (actually, the whole street from the river to the parking area is a gauntlet) and got out of Dodge as quickly as we could. We asked our driver to take us to the small village of Xing Ping (sounds like "Shing Ping") because it was close and seemed like a neat old place. Alas, it seems that Xing Ping has also become a bit of a tourist spot. At least we saw the tour busses coming and going but we didn't run into many tourists, at least in the parts of town we wandered around in. So either they were misdirected ... or we were!
Cruisin' Down The River on a Saturday Morning
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