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One Day in Guilin

Challis Hackley
Jan 29, 2018
3 min read

So my next four-day vacation was to Guilin and Yangshou. We did both places on the same trip so this week I'll tell you about the city of Guilin and what we did there and next week I'll tell you all about Yangshou and all the great things I did there, which was, by far, my favorite vacation in China. Anyway, here's the quick details and then a daily summary of all I did.

Quick Reference

Travel

Metro system in Nanjing, Plane, Taxi, Peter's bus, and (as always) lots of Walking

Accommodations

The Sky Palace Youth Hostel in Guilin

Food

The plane provided food, and I’ve heard that every Chinese plane ride provides real food (as real as airplane food can get) no matter how short the plane ride is. We ate at various restaurants along the way. Our tour guide Peter had some recommendations. We got a lot of fruit along the way, some of it Peter bought for us. My favorite was the bamboo rice at the terraces.

Activities

Sight-seeing, hiking,

What I Did

Thursday

It took us an hour and a half to get to the airport but once we were there things went really fast. The Chinese people are used to crowds so they know how to deal with them. So we fumbled and wandered around for a bit before we found where we needed to be and what we needed to do. Once we did though, it literally took us like twenty minutes to get our tickets and get through security. After our flight got delayed for almost an hour and a half because of “air traffic control" we boarded in like fifteen minutes flat.

Our tour guide, Peter, arranged for a cab to pick us up from the airport. So that was kind of cool getting off the airplane and seeing somebody standing there, holding a sign with our names on it. We got to our hostel in Guilin at like 1 AM but it was so cool there and there were a couple of kittens so we didn't go to bed right away.

Friday

Eight hours after we got there, we checked out of our hostel and met our tour guide Peter for the first time when he picked us up. He took us around the city, which was not what I was expecting but was beautiful all the same. We visited the four lakes with the sun and moon pagodas. Walked around the lake and park. I swear, Guilin is one of the most active cities I've seen. There were people, especially older people, moving and dancing all over the place, big groups and small groups, all with their own stereos blasting a cacophony of music ans sound. I loved it. I think I could have stayed there for hours, watching them all enjoying life.

From Guilin, we took 2-hour a car ride to the Longji Rice Terraces. We hiked up the mountains, past Yao and Zhuang villages and small shops. We stopped and got lunch before hiking up the terraces themselves. We went up to the nine dragons and five tigers viewpoint and the moon and seven stars viewpoint. It's stunning and astounding. Logically I know that if you build something for hundreds of years it will keep growing but I can't believe it. It feels surreal, like the rice terraces shouldn't exist. They're lovely.

We hiked form viewpoint to viewpoint, along the lines of the rice-terraces, over bridges, and through villages. It felt like walking in a fairy tale.

The mountains, the villages, the people, and their traditions. Walking through one of the villages, Peter showed us an old watermill. The women of the Yao Tribe have this beautiful hair that they only cut once when they are eighteen and then they keep their hair and twist it into their hair everyday. At one point, Peter found all of us a walking stick and I felt like i was off on some great fantasy adventure, traversing the terrain in search of something magical.

There were a lot of steps and I was fell as asleep fast on the three hour car ride to Yangshuo.