Guilin, Day 1

Last Saturday, I left to go to Guilin for our midterm teaching break with a few other teachers at my school. I was actually a little disappointed, because I had really wanted to go to Chengdu, but it ended up being an AMAZING trip, and it was definitely the most beautiful place I've ever seen. It was so wonderful and fun that I'm going to have to blog about it in several parts.

Day 1:

We got to our hostel, which was on the Li River, Saturday night and decided to go on a cruise up the Li River to Yangshuo, a mountain village about 5 hours away via a slow boat cruise. The scenery was amazing - the boat went down the river through beautiful limestone peaks.





Our boat was an English guide boat, and was full of great, interesting people from all over the world. We met a guy from Ireland, two people from Brazil, a crazy guy from Quebec, 2 people from Ontario, a Russian guy, an Australian, and several people from India ... We also met a guy from California who had quit school, backpacked through Nepal for several months, and is now working in a leather factory in China, and his mom, who was totally awesome and had come to visit him.




Once we got to Yangshuo, we took a bus to a rural farming village. It looked like how you might imagine China would look, with soaring limestone peaks, rice fields, and farmers in straw hats plowing their fields behind an ox.




Then we went to the Yulong River, where we rode on a bamboo raft. We also saw cormorant fisherman, who use trained birds which dive into the water to catch the fish. I got to take a turn guiding the bamboo raft, and I also let one of the fishing birds sit on my arm!!





After our fishing trip, we shopped a little in Yangshuo, then took a bus back to Guilin.