Guilin and the Li River

Elephant Trunk Hill Park, can you see the Elephant taking a drink from the river?
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After crossing the border into China we headed to the Shenzen train station to buy our ticket to Guilin. Thinking we were organised we'd got an English speaking travel agent in Hong Kong to write, in Chinese, the ticket we wanted to buy. This would have been fine except the ticket we wanted wasn't available and here our organised method of communication fell down. We wanted a soft sleeper ticket to Guilin, staying in a 4 bed compartment, however none were available so we would have to get a hard sleeper ticket which was in a 6 bed compartment, 2 sets of 3 bunks. Easy enough except of course the language barrier made the process take a lot longer. In the end we got our tickets and boarded the train. The hard sleeper was perfectly clean and comfortable. The compartments aren't closed in, there is just a wall after every other set of bunks. Out tickets were for the lower and middle bunks. Jon slept on the lower and I slept on the middle bunk. It was quite a quiet compartment and there was no one in the upper bunk above me. I'd spent the evening sitting on Jon's lower bunk and when it came time to go to bed I went to spring up into my bunk thinking I was an old pro after all the bunk beds I'd slept in in hostel dorms. However, obviously made for slightly short people than myself it was surprisingly hard to get into my bunk as the gap between my bunk and the upper bunk wasn't very much. So after quite a lot of laughing from Jon, myself and a few of the locals I managed to throw myself in, adamant I wasn't getting out again until morning! In my defence, Jon tried to get into the middle bunk after a few of my failed attempts and he had more difficulty than me! The night however was pleasant and we arrived in Guilin on time the next morning.

Guilin from the top of Elephant Trunk Hill.
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After checking into our hotel we headed out to get the lay of the land and some lunch. The town is apparently very busy with tourists usually however we were there out of season and it seemed much more for the locals which was really interesting. Our first discovery was that when crossing the road in China you take your life in your own hands! A green man may mean cross but that doesn't mean the buses, trucks, wagons, mopeds and bikes won't carry on anyway in any direction on any side of the road. We decided to go with following the locals and that seemed to work. We walked around the city taking in the river and various bridges and pagodas. We found a restaurant where the menu was also in English as we hadn't grasped what symbols mean which meat etc so we had some lunch and then headed to the Elephant Trunk Hill Park, a park with a rock formation that supposedly looks like an elephant which it kind of does. The park had lots of people with birds and monkeys tauting for photos to be taken with them. After a walk up the elephant hill and surrounding area we headed back to the hotel for the evening as although we slept reasonably well on the train it wasn't great.

Rong Hu Lake in central Guilin.
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The next day we headed out on a tour down the Li River. The scenery was amazing  and is what Guilin is famous for. The river cruise lasted about 4 hours and encluded a chinese lunch which was nice. The landscape around the river has strange hills which rise up abruptly along the waters edge. After the tour we arrived in Yangzhuo, a much more touristy place than Guilin but still very nice. It had lots of street markets and beautiful streets. We spent the afternoon walking around Yangzhuo before catching the tour bus back to Guilin. We had a really great day and both agreed the only thing that was a little annoying was that the tour guide we had on our tour would regularly come up to us throughout the cruise and try and sell us extras to the trip and other days tours even though we made it clear we were only in Guilin for a day, however she was only doing her job.

The Li River.
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Guilin was a beautiful and interesting place to spend a couple of days. The next day we checked out the hotel and headed to the airport for a 2 hour flight to Xi'an which by land would have taken us 29 hours!

H.