middle kingdom's middle-earth

Prepare yourselves. This is to be a blog post of epic length.

Guilin slash Yangshuo. There are no words. Or pictures, even. (See my
Hong Kong complaint about cameras not doing things justice.) It is SO
BEAUTIFUL there.

Too beautiful, in fact. You look and look and look at the burial mounds
and orange groves and rice paddies hewn out of the hills and TREES
and those famous mountains until it's just too much and you can't take
it anymore and you have to shut your eyes or read or something because
you are beautied out.

They have fully embraced their mountains there. They make money
with them. They put them on the money. They grow rice on them. They
build houses on/in/with them. They tunnel and then drive smack through
them. They light them up at night. The only other possible utilization I can
think of would be rock-climbing them, but considering the quality of both
Chinese locks and fabric in general, perhaps it's for the best.

Our Stairmaster of a hostel was even built into a mountain! Xi Jie's owner,
Thomas, was a Lawrence Fishburne lookalike who treated us like family
with his 7:30 AM walk-ins and bike and purse rescues. He also arranged
for our activities...

We played bumper bamboo boats down the Li River, goggling all the
while at what amounted to Guilin's Argonath.

We visited the rice terraces at Dragon's Backbone, sharing winding stony
steps with chickens, certifiably long-haired women, and tourists from all
over the world to see--

A really, really big cloud. Fortunately, after some bamboo rice and a hike,
it cleared up a bit.


Well worth both the four-hour bus ride and the photo space.

Finally, Thomas hooked us up with a fleet of Chinese bicycles with which
we invaded the Yangshuo countryside.

Eventually, after breaking a series of bike chains, we made our way to
both Moon Hill...

(Ta-da!)

...and The Water Cave, Guilin's Moria. There is a sad lack of pictures on
the Cave's behalf, but for one it was very dark and two there was a
naked Canadian lurking in the background rendering any mud cave
snapshots inappropriate. Not kidding.

Anyway, led by a tour guide who shared a sordid history with our head
teach, we trodded through the darkness for hours, stopping to have him
point out notable features of the cave to us, such as rocks. We also took
time in our trek to jump into icy waters, stand in a sandstone waterfall,
and sink into rock-sculpted hot springs. And lose shoes. I dubbed it the
Cinderella Cave.

Fantastic trip. Every night we bartered our brains out on West Street,

and I set a new personal record of 41 hours on a bus in a mere 5 days.
I've decided that Guilin/Yangshuo is the most beautiful place in the world,
but I'm no judge. Guess I'll have to see the rest of the world and get back
to you on that.

Miss you!