A different world

When I left the UK, I wanted to do something "different". Well, it doesn't get much more different than Guilin in Guangxi province.

It also feels refreshingly 'different' spending a Wednesday on a bamboo raft being punted down the Yulong River.

Or simply doing nothing on a Thursday but drink tea on the terrace of a cafe in a village that's not changed much for a thousand years.

The region is one of those 'must see' spots in China with its crazy pointy hills rising eerily above the lazy green waters of the Li River. And the boat trip up the river is one of those 'must do' things (sadly it was a pretty hazy day so my photos don't really do the landscape justice).

I'd met a girl on the train from Kunming called Apple who advised against stopping in Guilin itself; she recommended heading straight for the downstream town of Yangshuo. She turned out to work there in one of the many tourist offices and looked after me very well during my stay!

The guide books describe Yangshuo as a sleepy place, somewhere to chill out. But this is one of the problems with guide books: with the lead times involved in putting one together (and perhaps you don't have the latest edition either) what you read might have been written two or three years ago. Yangshuo is no longer sleepy although it's still a pretty cool place albeit one hundred percent geared to tourism. There are no end of hostels and guesthouses and pretty streets stuffed with souvenirs. (Bar 98, by the way, is a great place for a few beers and one of the few proper, decent bars I've come across in China!)

The new 'sleepy place' is an hour's bumpy bus ride north east to the village of Xingping whose shambolic buildings and muddy lanes date back to Qing times. A great place to chill out for the day, I guess that in a couple of years this'll will be as busy as Yangshuo. If I was a property developer I'd be salivating.