Guilin 2 - Li River Cruise on a Rainy Day...

Sorry i've been falling behind! things have been pretty busy and it looks like i'll be out of town all weekend AGAIN, so let me rush to get this out there for you guys to enjoy...

My pictures from last Saturday - my mom and I took a cruise down Guilin's Li River, all the way down to the town of Yangshuo... along the way passing some of the world's best scenery... except we picked the worst possible weekend to go,  cause it was raining and cloudy most of the time! :-(

先週末に中国の 桂林で撮ったの写真。

桂林の漓江で船旅した。漓江は世界の一番綺麗所たんですが、その時天気が悪かった。これは僕の写真とビデオ：

We took Here's some pictures to set the scene, then I'll put my youtube vid in, and then you can see some more pics. :-P

we took the standard boat tour... they picked us up from our hotel at an ungodly hour and drove about 45 minutes to a pier (nowadays the water level is too low to take a big boat all the way down from the city of Guilin).

These are the typical sightseeing boats they have here... shallow draft:

You'll notice they have a kitchen built into the backend of these things... hmm... more on that later...

After a few minutes of cruising down from the docks, the amazing scenery started popping out from the rainy mist:

Here's my video, check it out!  桂林の船旅ビデオ見て！

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UJQriEkIz4&fmt=18

Despite the clouds and rain, you could still see a lot of scenery. Here are some of my better pics,  I didn't bother to try to correct them in photoshop, no point in trying to dress it up!

actually the mist makes it look more like those famous shanshui (山水) watercolor paintings...

i'm not sure if its because of the rain or not , but there were a few nice waterfalls (see the video if you missed it!)

It got better (and clearer) the further down we went:

I tried the stitch function on my camera... it doesn't actually stitch the files though...  weird. :-P

In case you've never been,  one thing funny about China is that they like to find things in nature that look like something else and then come up with a name.  here's a few i could remember which they were:

this one was kind of creepy,  its just a random outcropping on a ridge - if you look at it from the side, as in the 2nd picture, it looks a bit like a person standing alone holding something in front of them in their arms....   so the name for this is 'Yearning for Husband Rock' (望夫石).

This is the really famous one,  featured in the video (go back and watch it!)  its poetically called 'Nine Horses Painted Mountain' in English... basically its a rock face w/ a bunch of white rock cliff faces showing,  which sort of look like they could be horses drawn in some sort of action scene (if you're hallucinating from drinking maotai maybe?) 

either way, horses or not, its a really big cliff face that towers over the river bank...

This one is simple... 'Five fingers Mountains' 

Along the way we passed 'Yellow Cloth Shoals',  which I think was this place:

no yellow here... but its actually quite famous, its on the back of the 20 RMB bill!

you know how hard it is to find a RMB bill that looks this nice and new in China?!?  took a lot of work!

Here's some pics of what we passed along the way too:

Since this place is heavily frequented by tour boats,  they do a better job of keeping the unsightly rural poor out of view in some ways... (compared to what I've seen on other river boat rides in China... )  

In this case I only saw one family doing their laundry in the river...

Mostly there were people riding in small motorboats, but occasionally you still see some guys doing it old school:

I should note that this guy was going UPRIVER...  those aren't flesh colored waterproof boots he's wearing btw... he was barefoot despite the chilly water!  

These three guys were just hanging out and smoking and watching the tour boats go by...

not all boats are created equal of course...

we were on an english language boat for foreign tourists,  we passed by a bunch of 'domestic tourist' boats that were a lot more crowded... 

All the boats, including ours was a target of locals in smaller bambo rafts or motorboats that would come out and hook onto the larger tourist boats as they passed...  some were selling fish to the boats, some were trying to sell souvenir junk:

these two guys hooked their bamboo raft to our boat w/ a big metal hook around one of the tires... they then tried to convince people sitting on the lower deck to buy it by tapping on the glass and waving...  (one guy never stopped talking on his cell phone the entire time though!)

Oh snap! he's got the cabbage!  you know about the cabbage right?

Read about the Jadeite Cabbage here

The Nationalists may have stolen it,  but that won't stop them from trying to get a little piece of Chinese Emperor's art collection into your hands....

Anyway, i mentioned that they cook the lunch on the back of the boat... and some of the locals sell fresh (living) seafood to the boat while we're underway...  i snuck a shot of what happens next on a boat we were passing:

oh yes, the butcher stuff (and the dish washing too) are all done right there...  and guess what water they use to wash everything in too? 

Needless to say, I didn't eat much for lunch...

neither did my mother. 

There were 4 older Thai people sharing our table, they paid extra for the eel... none of us wanted to try it. :-P

this boat was worth taking a picture of:

I'd be embarrassed to be the captain of this thing... but thats just me.

Next thing you know, we get to Yangshuo( 陽朔), a small town about downriver 80km from Guilin:

Nearby, some of those birds that they use to catch fish (by tying a string around its neck so it can't swallow the fish):

Fishing Cormorants of Guilin....

Our boat trip ended here.  we decided to pass on the extra tours around Yangshuo... the weather was not cooperating enough to make it worth it... but we had a few minutes in the tourist trap area that pops up at any area like this in China...

actually compared to when i was here 5 years ago, it looks like its gotten worse... they're also building more big hotels near the banks... doh.

Only one place did they seem to try to do some 'renewal' for tourists that wasn't all about making money...    too bad their english kinda sucked... :-P

and because you're going to ask,  i did try to get my mom to take a few pictures of me in front of the scenery,  she's not so good w/ the concept of pressing the button down halfway to set the white balance....  so results are mixed:

Doh...

Actually this one is probably the best... :-P

ok, plenty more from Guilin coming... when i get some time! :-P

まだ

桂林の写真一杯が有る！一寸待って下さい！