Today we went on a river cruise down the Li River or the Lijiang. It is a beautiful river of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region – Autonomous Regions are areas of China not run by the central government but rateher, more run by minorities nationalities.  While 95% of the Chinese population are Han, there are 92 different minority nationalities tha the goverment offeres certain tax breaks and concessions (such as a relaxation of the one child policy for minorities).  Anyway, the Li River flows 83 kilometres from Guilin to Yangshuo, (I am sure it is longer than that, but that is the section that the tourist cruises cover.  It is a very recognisable topography – very iconic from Chinese landscape painting etc, and the mountains that you see in the are are called ‘karst’ mountains.  The Li River is a highlight of the Guilin region and has recently been considered in the top 15 rivers in the world.   
The unusual karst landscape and it’s distinctive mountains.  Below is a grove of ‘phoenix tail’ bamboo planted alone the river banks to stabilise soil erosion.  Our guide, Sue, insisted that the bamboo was named for looking like a phoenix tail, but personally, I strongly doubt any one actually knows what a phoenix tail looks like, so… yeah.  It is beautiful and feathery looking though.    There are so many craft cruising on the Li River – from traditional bamboo rafts (or the not so romantic or attractive, modern PVC pipe equivalent) through to the air conditioned three level boat sightseeing boats. 
  The Li River views are so famous, they are depicted on the RMB 20 yuan note.  So we found ourselves in one section of the river trip, surrounded by people holding up money and taking photos.   
    The river is crazy busy.  Guilin sees 10,000,000 tourist a year, the bulk of which will do a Li River trip of some sort.
    Cormorant fishing is still very much a part of the rural Chinese lifestyle.  Many domesticated cormorants live out their later lives like this one, being a photo model for tourists rather than catching fish all night.  
  Upon reaching Yangshou, we went for a quick wander through the West Street Markets – also known as the Foreigner Markets… or Hello Markets.  This is tourist central, so all manner of cheap shit is for sale at vastly overinflated prices.  As it turns out, in the north – Beijing etc, foreigners are known as ‘Big nose’ people… but here in the South, the foreigner tourists are knosn as ‘Hello’ people.  This is the Hello Market because you will constantly hear the stall holders saying ‘Hello, hat?’… ‘Hello, scarf?’… ‘Hello, fan?’… ‘Hello, postcard?’ etc.  So now when I’m hearing someone saying ‘hello’, I am unsure if they are actually offering me a greeting or just calling me a foreigner to their friends.  😛   
Ginger sticky taffy… gorgeous golden coloured sweets that are stretched and pulled until flattened and cut to shapes.  After the markets, we went to visit a typical Chinese house that belonged to a Ming Dynasty General.  This house has belonged to the same family for the last four hundred years, Mr Pan and his wife and brother’s widow still live in the house.  The front entrance of the house is dressed in red paper New Year’s blessings that get replaced every year, wishing health, happiness, luck and longevity on the occupants.  Above the door is a large plague which reads, ‘Pan House’.  
A traditional millstone used for grinding soybeans and water into the curd paste that the Pan family uses to make tofu.  The water and soybeans are dropped in the top, and the wooden lever is worked back and forth to turn the grindstone.  The main court yard to the house.  Ahead is the main kitchen and dining space to the right is the main living roo which contains a family ‘shrine’.  
In the middle of the courtyard is the water pump, which goes to a well 13m underground.  The water is used for cooking, cleaning, drinking and watering plants etc.  While the water is safe for the inhabitants to drink, it would probably cause considerable gastro distress to any of us.  The water is cool and clear and comes from a natural spring.  I thought this was amazing… in many European castles and churches, you can see wear on the steps where thousands of steps of hundreds of years have worn away the stone so you can see the well trod path of people long dead.  The round divets on these stone steps are caused by the water dripping off the same roof for hundreds of years onto the same spot on the same step.  Incredibly cool.  
This is a traditional raincoat made out of thatched grass.  Worn with the hat, it would keep the workers dry enough to keep working in the rice fields even during fairly heavy rain.  Now of course, with modern rainproof materials, no one would wear one of these – they are really heavy even when dry.  The family shrine contains a picture of the General, and the Emperor and Empress.  At the top of the image you will see a dragon and phoenix also to represent the Emperor and Empress.  To the right of the blessings are the tablets with the names of the family ancestors.  And dead centre on the table you can see a bottle of rice wine (spirits) and snake wine (more spirits) that Mr Pan has some of every day.  
    The original kitchen – fire wood is still used for cooking, adn the only place for the smoke to escape is through two small windows high in the roof, but they actually wanted the smoke to accumulate in the kitchen, as they would hang meats in the rafters to cure the meats before refrigeration.  So the entire kitchen doubled as a smoke house.
  Weaving equipment – the Pan’s also grew cotton, and it is prevalent in the region.  
    
China has large rural farming communities – about 64% of the population are farmers. In the past, the farmers used to work for the landlords, and about 80% of the land was owned by these landlords, meaning the bulk of the profits from the farmers hard work went straight into the weathy landlord’s pockets.  In 1958, as part of the cultural revolution, all land became owned by the Chinese governement, and was re-distributed to each farmer, so they could gain a bigger portion of their work.  Now, farmers can choose what they grow, and they only have to give a portion of their profits to the goverment – it used to be that the bulk of their money went in agriculture taxes (a system that was in place for 2600 years) – but now they are required to sell a portion of their produce to the government, contribution another portion to the local provincial stock piles, and the bulk of it now belongs to the family.  So farmers in China are seeing more wealth over recent generations, which is allowing them to buy and build decent housing and improve their standar of living.  Rice fields, this one about a month from harvest:     
    A farmer can apply to be allocated a ‘mu’ of land – which is a parcel of about 20x30m.  If there are four people in the family that are farmers, they can have one mu each.  One mu can yield about 400-500kg of rice per harvest, adn there are two harvests each year.
  

Farmers in this region also use their mu to grow, watermelon, oranges, tangerines, pomellos, grapes, passionfruit, lotus flowers (seeds, roots etc) peanuts, cabbage and all sorts of things.  They can also choose to enclose their mu and turn it into fish farming.  Many rice farmers also grow small fish, shrimps, snails and other aquatic animals to suplement their income while waiting for the rice harvest.  Even the rice stalks are well used after the harvest – either as feed for water buffalo (local beast of burden during plowing and harvest times), as raw materials for rice paper and some even burn it to return nitrogens to the soil for the next planting.  This is the Luyoung RIver, which connects to the Li River.  It is a very popular spot for Chinese tourists (domestic tourist) to go rafting.  When our guide mentioned rafting, I immediately thought… white water rafting, but it turns out she meant, going out for an afternoon spin on a bamboo raft.  People are ferried up and down a section of the river for 180Y each (about AU$33 each) with water guns to squirt at each other.  It’s a bit like a gondala ride in Venice, only nothing like it at all!
    And there were thousands of peopel out rafting this afternoon… and I can’t for the life of me understand why – because nearly every Chinese person I have met so far CAN NOT SWIM. In fact they are petrified of putting their heads under water.  Go figure.
   Tonight, we are off to a local show, so I will have to update on that later.  🙂 

Update:

We went to see the Impression Sanjie Liu show this evening, knowing very little about it except that it was directed by Yimou Zhang, who directed several films – Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower – and the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony.  The show is set in a purpose built ampitheatre that seats approximately 3,000 people (three shows a night in peak season) and utilizes the Li River as the stage and has a spectacular natural backdrop of twelve karst mountains.  

The show includes modern and classical music composed by famous Chinese musicians and is designed to give impressions of the daily life of the people who live on and around the Li River. It also gives insight into the ethnic minorities of the area and their dress and music styles.  The aspects of local living in Yangshou were quite prominently featured with water buffalo, cormorants, fisherman, bicycles, markets etc, included in the activities depicted.  Oh, and there are over 600 performers in the show, many of whom are amateurs and whose real professionas are as local fishermen and farmers… which represents about 1/60th of Yangshou’s entire population of 30,000.  I was unable to get any decent photos given the dark lighting and moving performers, but have hunted down what I could find to give an idea…   

   
   
The show was quite the spectacle and I would highly recommend it to anyone coming to the Guilin/Yangshou area… though I have to say, I am not getting used to Chinese crowds.  Even when at a considerably pricey show (tickets were about AU$55 each), the Chinese people in the crowd show a distinct lack of consideration for their neighbours, in this case fellow theatre goers.  They talked throughout – and I don’t mean whispering, I mean held loud conversations and laughed while performers were singing and dancing.  They took useless flash photos with tablets constantly ruining the view for everyone behind them.  They didn’t applaud at the end of various acts, and I was astounded when the show finished and the crowd showed no signs of appreciation at all – no applause, no other acknowlegement that they had even been watching a performance.  In fact many got up to leave 5-10 minutes before the final acts of the show occured.  There were even people taking phone calls and blocking one ear to try and hear the person on the phone and talking loudly over the music, during the performance.  I will never get used to the people here, and their complete lack of awareness or care for the comfort of the people around them.  :/ 

The Reed Flute Cave was something I was really looking forward to in Guilin.  It is a natural limestone cave, and a world heritage listed area, with multicolored lighting all through it.  According to Sue, our guide, it has been one of Guilin’s best kept secrets and local never told outsiders about the cave until the 60s.  But according to everyting I’ve read on the internet, it has been one of and has been one of Guilin’s most interesting attractions for ages and has been attracting visitors for over 1200 years – inside, there are supposed to be more than 70 inscriptions written in ink, which can be dated back as far as 792 AD in the Tang Dynasty and these aged inscriptions are supposed to be evidence of its long standing history as an attraction in Guilin ever since.  But Sue didn’t mention them, and the cave formations are remarkably well presereved if it has been having visitors for over a millenia.

  
  Anyway, the cave itself is over 180 million years old and formed in the same way limestone caves the world over are formed -harder rock, softer rock, water seeping through, limestone hanging onto the ceiling, limestone crowing up from the floor, columns grow… 20cms every 100 years and, Ta-da!  Pretty cave.  This cave got its name from the type of reed that used to grow outside the primarly entrance, which was used to made melodious local flute instruments. The Reed Flute Cave is filled with a large number of stalactites, stalagmites and large rock formations in weird and wonderful shapes – lions, owls, christmas trees, veggie cardes, and all sorts of things.  The cave is much like many other limestone caves that I’ve visited, only the multicolored lightning artificially illuminates the cave and makes it look really rainbow coloured ‘ooh, aah, pretty’.  
    
The Christmas tree: The fruiit and veggie patch- beans, peanuts, string beans, broccoli etc.   
  The two towers – amost joined up:  
    
This section is believed to be a cityscape of Guilin:I thought this section of the cave was really pretty – it is is about 18m high and about 30m across, so it is a large cavern, so the management of the cave, felt for some reason this is a great place to put on a show.  The show consisted of a video projected onto the roof ceiling of the cave in the one flat spot available, and then a projection of two people doing ballet to Swan Lake beside the pond in the above picture.  Bizarre.  The cave is quite interesting enough, but for some reason the Chinese have decided to add value to the ticket entrance with these strange ‘shows’.

The ‘chandelier’ of the largest cavern known as the Crystal Palace: 
    
A lion: 
As far as we could see the only thing living down in the cave were tiny bats that kept flapping around.  Very cute.  It was also lovely and cool down underground – around 20 to 22C, which was much preferred to the 35C and 75% humidity up top.

After the lovely cool of the caves we ventured back out into the heat to visit nearby Elephant Hill.  Guilin is a city of only 700,000 people (only!) so it is a lot less hectic and easier to get around.  Far fewer tourists and far less crush – though we have discovered that in an enclosed space like the caves, one Chinese family of three on holiday can make as much noise as an entire air craft’s passenger manifest.  O.o

Nest stop – Elephant Trunk Hill, which is considered the main symbol of the city of Guilin. The small mountain got its name because it looks like an elephant drinking water.  As the legend would have it the Jade Emperor came down from Heaven with the elephant and the poor elephant got sick.  When the Jade Emperor went back to Heaven, he left the sick elephant behind.  The people of the area nursed the poor elephant back to health and when he was well, he decided he wanted to stay – but the Jade Emperor wanted him to come back to Heaven, so he sent troops to come and bring the elephant back.  The elephant fought the Emperor’s troops for seven days and seven nights and then one of the Generals from the Emporer’s troops stabbed him in the back with a sword while he was drinking from the LIjang River.  The elephant died, but did not fall over, and now there is a pagoda named, Sword Hilt Pagoda up high on the elephant’s back and the elephant stays here on earth forever.

The round opening under the elephant’s trunk is known as Water-Moon Cave – at night the reflection of the moon can be seen through the arch and it looks as if it is under the water and floating on the surface of the water at the same time.   

    We also happend to see this woman fishing with her cormorants.  I have seen many documentaries on China showing how efficient the cormorants are at catching fish, but it was lovely to see them here.  The cormorants are pretty much domesticated birds, not like the shags we have back home, and they have been hand raised, have clipped wings so they can not fly off, and when they are fishing, they have a string around their throat so they can not swallow the fish they catch.  Only once their work is done, do their owners feed them.
    

This stone is on Lover’s Island.  Near to Elephant Trunk Hill is the questionably romantic place of Lover’s Island where couples like to meet up for courting.  The little island itself was quite quaint.  It was lined by floating restaurants selling mostly meat-on-a-stick, and lots of lovely shady spots to hang out…
    
    
…but it was also full of these complete weird, and not a little bit tacky sculptures that apparently light up at night.  Perhaps this was another weird example of ‘value adding’, as the park is not free to enter during the day time.  But it is at night and early morning for locals only.  Anyway, it is full of ‘famous couples’ – Romeo and Juliet, Adam and Eve, Mickey and Minnie Mouses, Donald and Daisy, Rose and Jack from the Titanic!   😀    
    
Next we made our way to Seven Start Park.  Which at first was a little confusing, as the locals here tend to give the toilet facilities ‘star ratings’… “This one only 2 star Happy Room, not very good.  4 star Happy Room just around next stop in Palace”.  So we were expecting a park with excellent bathroom facilities!!  😛  The Seven Star Park is lined up from the air with the seven star shape of the Big Dipper, and it is a truly impressive public garden.  There are lots of lovely open spaces, ponds, a zoo, amusements, wide open spaces for public events and another small cave system.

I became enamoured of this 1997 sculpture that was designed to mark the occasion of Hong Kong coming back under Chinese rule.  It depicts many famous things in Chinese history.  China and the birth through the mountains 5000 years ago, and the building of canals:
  A depiction of the one artefact that carbon dates China’s history to 7000 years – the large pottery trough with the pig motif on it.  It also shows on this panel, the use of water wheels to move things and generate energy to save labour.   Traders from the West, and the use of water wheels to lift heavy objects in construction and bridge building:
  The invention of paper, and Chinese characters, also the constellations.  In the centre right of this picture is an urn with dragons heads hanging off the top, each dragon head is holding a marble – this was an early earthquake warning system.  If a tremor was felt, the dragon would drop his marble and it would show which direction the eathquake was coming from.   The pillar at the Forbidden City, depicting the symbols of the Emperor and the Hau animal that protected the Imperial Family.. 

  Buddha showing that Buddhism came to China 1800 years ago.  Taoist symbols to represent the balance of the universe.  

The building of the Great Wall of China, and the construction of the Heavenly pagodas.
    The Terracotta Army and a flying horse which represents ‘tourist’s in China (not sure why, she didn’t elaborate on that one).  
  It is a very impressive piece of mixed stonework, probably about 70m long.   The Seven Star Park is also home to many wild monkeys, and there are many many warnings telling people not to interact with them, as they are not very friendly, and potentially not very clean. But apparently people insist on feeding them anyway.
    Lovely lakes and cool spots to enjoy the park – somewhere for everyone, many people had their own  hammocks up for the day, or were out in little rentable boats, or were jumping around in the inflatable pools etc that were up for the summer holidays.
    Also inside the park is Camel Hill – so call because, well… hello?  Apparently Bill Clinton made a large speech on this site about the importance of protecting the environment, so it has become another very famous spot. 
   

Then, a late lunch and crashing back at the hotel.  We need to recharge before we hit the rivers tomorrow, and the Yangtze River Cruise later in the week.