Guilin was a very picturesque city and seemed to be the inspiration for many Chinese paintings. You know the ones where there are n-shaped hills growing out of the clouds? The surrounding limestone hills seemed to be the natural image of those. The city itself was pretty small, and seemed to be centered around tourism. There were hills, hotels, and shopping. Also, another defining feature for this place was the humidity! Wow, was it every bad. Don’t go in the summer!

The main selling feature of this city was scenary, so we did a lot of scenic stuff. We visited two hills, Fubo Hill, Elephant Trunk Hill and one more whose name I don’t know (it was in the middle of a teacher’s univeristy though). I climbed the first and the last, but the view was kind of the same so skipped the Elephant Trunk Hill.

The next day, we along with seemingly all the other tourists in Guilin took a cruise down the Li river in boats. There were I would guess 20 or so boats which progressed in single file down the river. From this view, we saw some nice scenery. The interesting thing about this ride was that vendors on rafts would float up and latch on to the boats to peddle souvenirs to the tourists!

I haven’t mentioned the street vendors yet and boy are they annoying. If they identify (fortunately I am slightly protected, but my backpack generally gives it away) that you are white a tourist, they (the same one vendor) will harass you constantly to buy postcards, or other Chinese items. There was one time in Beijing when we were waiting for the light. There were a line of vendors on the other side of road that looked like sprinters preparing to race in the 2010 Olympics. Once the light turned, they raced to be the first to offer you something to buy (for $1USD)! It was very surreal.

The gripe that I had with Guilin (aside from the humidity) was the humongous waste of energy. At night, the city, including the hills and bridges are lit up with bright lights. Of course, this makes the city look gorgeous but it is a major cause of pollution (just think how strong a light has to be to light up a hill)! China only has 2 nuclear reactors so most of the power is generated by burning coal; cities like Guilin and the forthcoming Shanghai (which is much worse than Guilin) are causing the pollution to get out of hand. If you look at old pictures of the Forbidden City, you’ll notice that the sky is nice and blue. Now, from across the street, I can see the haze in front of the Forbidden City! In Beijing, they spoke of sandstorms to explain the pollution, and if you asked a question about the smog they will just trail off. The government is trying to reduce the problem by planting trees everywhere (Beijing was one of the greenest cities I have ever seen), but cities like Guilin need to ration their use of energy or trees won’t matter.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: china06, diary, rant, travelling