Guilin & Yangshuo (Guangxi)
Some landscapes look almost too perfect to be real, and the karst country of Guangxi is one of them. South of Guilin, in the far south of China, thousands of limestone peaks rise straight out of the green plain in soft, rounded cones, crowding the horizon and marching away into the haze. This is the scenery that has filled Chinese scroll paintings for centuries, and to drift through it by boat, with a peak reflected in the still water at every turn, is one of the loveliest half-days of travel anywhere in the country.
The classic way to see it is the slow cruise down the Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo, a gentle four to five hours threading between the peaks as the river winds south. The boat carries you past riverside villages and water buffalo cooling in the shallows, bamboo groves leaning over the banks, and the famous bends where the hills stack one behind another into the distance. There is nothing to do but sit on the deck and watch it all slide by, and that is exactly the point.
Along the way the river still works the way it always has. Fishermen pole their narrow bamboo rafts out across the water, and on some of them you will spot a cormorant perched on the bow, the old fishing bird that the men of the Li still keep. The most famous stretch of all is the bend near the little town of Xingping, the view that was chosen for the back of the twenty-yuan note, where a row of peaks lines up above a quiet reach of the river. We love to time the cruise so you reach it with the soft light and a little morning mist still clinging to the hills.
