Guilin lies in southern China and is famous for its karst topography (ie limestone hills). It has the classic sorts of terrain that one sees so often in those Chinese brush paintings. The hills rise like columns from the river plain. It is part of a karst formation that runs down to northern Vietnam, so there is a huge area of this topography, but our photographic tour centered on the areas around Guilin.

2018-07-08 Guilin 7-8 July

China Southern are not in our good books. First they cancelled all direct Guangzhou to Guilin flights, so we had to be redirected via Chongqing, making a 1 hr direct flight into a 6 h dogleg. Then, they lost one of our bags. Unfortunately, the bag contained our tripods, which we needed for the sunset and sunrises at our first destination (see next post). We were finally reunited with the lost bag 2 days later. Better late than never.

We arrived the day before the rest of the photo tour people, so we had booked a nice hotel in a village just outside the central Guilin city area with views over the karst hills. The room had huge windows, so it was lovely to lie in bed and watch the mist play around the rocks. We had time for a short walk around the village in search of dinner. Most had only Chinese menus, so we ate at one that had pictures and some English. We got what turned out to be a huge meal for under AU$5 each.

As we walked around it was clear that most of the motor-scooters, tuktuks etc were electric powered. Very silent.  In the morning we took a walk along the river bank to reed flute cave, but we had too little time to do a cave tour. Still, the walk was very nice.

Then we headed to the airport, met up with the others and headed off in the bus to our first destination, the famous LongJi Rice terraces.

For more photos go to a gallery at https://photos.app.goo.gl/pccC6RsoAWzdz2j9A