I was lucky enough to visit Guilin and Yangshou in the Guangxi region of South China. I won this amazing incentive with one of Pentravel’s preferred partners China Experience! And how my partner and I experienced China!
Guilin and Yangshou is situated on the banks of the Li River. Language was quite an obstacle, as the local people do not understand or speak English at all not even sign language helped, but luckily we had our guide, Linda with us (who was fluent in English). She was so passionate about her job and showing us the true Guilin and its history, she sourced all the restaurants with English menus for us, although she had to order for us most of the time and warned us to stay away from the back alley restaurants, just because our stomachs will not be able to handle the “traditional” Chinese dishes but we tried all the local specialities including beer fish which is a beer battered fish in a sweet, lemon sauce. Also many fresh fruits, some of what I have never even seen so the culinary experiences. Linda was a big part of our trip and I still keep contact with her!
We started our holiday with a 2 night stay in Guilin, which is a city on the Li river amongst karst lime stone mountains. This is quite a busy city with a number of lakes, our hotel was situated just across the road to one of the main lakes overlooking the sun and moon pagodas. We often went for early morning and late evening walks here. Walking street was just next to our hotel, this is the main shopping street with many restaurants and bars, also with the night market that starts up later in the afternoon. We spend our first day of sightseeing in Seven Star National park where you learn more about the history of china (all captured on one long wall) saw panda’s for the first time and just took in the natural beauty of the area. We then moved onto Elephant Trunk Hill which is one of the more famous hills around Guilin (shaped in the form of an elephant drinking from the river), here we also learned more about Sanhua Wine which is a savoury rice wine famous from the area we also got to taste this very “strong” speciality of the area…
We spend the rest of the day just walking round town and in anticipation for the following day. This was the day we would take the 4 hour boat cruise down the Li River to a little town called Yangshou. As we drove out of Guilin the karsts became more but nothing compared to what it became down the river. It was so beautiful! And then we got to Yangshou, this town was really in the middle of deep China. But it has a lot of western restaurants (which by this time you are very excited to have a pizza) and also more locals speak English. This was my absolute favourite part of the trip and wish I could have spent more time here! We spent the entire following day, taking bicycles into the countryside to explore. It took some courage as the little town is very busy but when I finally got into it all the motorists were so considerate to the cyclists. It took about 10 min cycle untill we were out of town and into the most beautiful countryside! Along the way you can stop at various tourists spots such as Butterfly Hill, take a bamboo raft down Yulong river but we decided to do the hike up Moon Hill as I read you get the most beautiful view from up here. So we did, it was incredibly hot and humid, a lot of mozzies but when we finally got to the top the view was well worth it!
We also watched the Impression Sanjie Liu which is a theatre performance ON the Li river and they use the natural surrounding and 7 of the mountains as the back drop the show is performed every night by 600 locals to at least 3000 guests. Truly gave me goose bumps, it was so amazing. There is some more info on this on the attached.
It was such an experience to be so far away from home, it makes you realise there is so much out there we don’t know about.
We stayed in “5*” hotels but I would say it was higher end 3* or 4* at the least so bear this in mind should you plan a trip to China.
This is pretty much in a nutshell my biggest travel adventure to date!