Impression on Two Main Tourist Draws of Guilin

Happily we have arrived in Guilin which seems to be a very green city with all of its tree lined boulevards. Immediately we liked it. It is amazing how merely having trees can impact your first impressions.

Guilin has two main tourist draws...strangely both are not even in Guilin. The first we saw was the rice terraces of Longji and the second was the Li River.

The terraces were beautiful and it is hard to imagine the hills before the terraces ever existed. This ingenious construction makes best use of the scare arable land and water resources in the mountainous area. There are about 66 square kilometers terraced fields in southeast of Longsheng. The Terraces were first built in the Yuan dynasty and completed in the Qing dynasty by the Zhuang people.

The weather was bit windy but we enjoyed the view tremendoulsy. Many of the villages, inclduing the Zhuang village of Ping'an, have turned almost completely to the tourism industry. The villages are also known for their Long-Haired Ladies. The houses are mainly built of wood, mostly 2-3 stories high for hotels and 2 stories for individual houses.

I would like to visit the terraces again during the summer and expecially during the fall, when the rice fields turn golden and the afternoon sun paints the terraces as fields of gold.

My second day in Guilin has been all planned for a Li River cruise.

The cruise ticket costs $210 yuan per person, and all the cruise boats leave at around the same time each day at 10am. The Li River scenery was stunning. Everywhere is green, green, and more green. The mountains and hills on the river side are green, and the water is a deep green. Being there, you will feel peace and calm. Even the sky is a clear blue sky (most of the time). Of all the cities we've been to in China, the Li River is probably the only place where I've seen so much clear blue sky.