In season, ancient osmanthus shrubs as tall as trees deodorize the air above the Lijiang River as it meanders through the Guilin city center.
We were fortunate to stay at the oldest international five-star hotel in town, the Guilin Sheraton, and we made it our base to explore the river and trawl the food streets just behind the hotel. There is also a convenient traditional Chinese massage center across the street where we sought much needed relief after a day clambering up and down steep slopes.
It is probably also the only hotel where you can gaze upon the Lijiang out of your window and watch its changing mood as it turns clear when the weather is fine, or murky and angry as heavy rains whip up little waves on its surface.
The famous Elephant Trunk Hill is also mere minutes away.
In the early hours, you can see Guilin residents out in full force by the banks, waving lethal-looking swords and huge red fans or little ping-pong bats, intent on practicing their martial arts or dance sequences.
You can tell they are a healthy lot, unlike the sedentary lazybones from Beijing exercising vicariously from hotel windows.
But we were roused from our osmanthus tea-fuelled comfort by the offer of a trip up the Lijiang to the tourist town of Yangshuo, where Chinese director Zhang Yimou had invested his first major song-and-dance-and-light spectacle, Impression Liu Sanjie.
In case you are wondering, Liu Sanjie or Third Sister Liu is a local legend, a peasant girl with the voice of an angel and the quick wit of a vixen who had outwitted and out sung the local tyrant, an evil landlord and his cowardly scholar henchmen. This is all according to a 1960 film, of course.
The river is beautiful, and all we needed for that long, leisurely cruise down to Yangshuo were earplugs.
Guilin and Yangshuo are the twin attractions on every Chinese tourist's must-do travel list, and it did seem that every Chinese tourist and his uncle, aunt, second cousins twice removed were on our boat that day.
The excited cacophony became so overwhelming that we forked out an extra 600 yuan ($98) for a private cabin. Even so, it was in need of better soundproofing because the noise was dimmed but still intrusive as we gazed pensively out at the calm of the hills and fervently wished it were the hill songs that were echoing in our ears.
But the scenery was worth the trip, above all else. The karst hills were awe-inspiring, fringed on the water's edge by phoenix-tail bamboo, which veiled little hamlets of small holdings.
The cruise guide's commentary also allowed our imagination to take flight.
"Here is the five-horses mural which nature painted on the hillside ... This is the Goddess of Mercy, flanked by her two child attendants This is the hill that looks like a three-pronged pen-holder"
And then his voice was drowned out by a burst of excited chatter as everyone whipped out their 20-yuan bank note and tried to identify the scenery that inspired the design.
It was long past lunchtime when we finally reached the Yangshuo jetty where a fisherman and his cormorants were waiting.
Be careful, though.
Every time you snapped a photograph of the birds, you have to pay their owner 5 yuan. Some enterprising tourists foiled his mercenary attempts with a number of surreptitious under-arm shots.
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