Guilin. Caves, mountains and bamboo rafting

As much as I loved the traveling abroad I was glad to return to somewhere where I actually understood what was going on. No more turning up to a restaurant hoping there was an English menu or struggling with street signs, it was back to speaking Chinese!

Getting to Guilin was something of an adventure! We arrived in Shenzhen after a two hour bus at the Hong Kong/China Border and after an absolute nightmare trying to get through security headed to Shenzhen bus station (not before a cheeky McDonalds) to find a bus to Guilin. At first it looked bleak and we couldn’t find any buses heading that way until we found a slightly sketchy looking group of people who offered us a bus there. The price was incredibly cheap so we thought ‘may as well’ and took the tickets.

In the meantime, we went to KFC and were plagued by what seemed to be some sort of pickpocket syndicate. One man tried to buy Robins phone for 3yuan then others walked by the table and tried to jokingly swipe at our phones, this we think was a distraction whilst they were gonna grab at other stuff. Thankfully we had everything locked away and safe. Eventually it was time to get the bus.

The bus was mega comfy and had loads of room, much better than a sleeper train. The only issues were it had no toilet so we couldn’t really drink anything and also it broke down in the middle of the night. It was around 2am when we were awakened and told to get out the bus. The driver explained it was broken and made us walk down the motorway to a nearby police station where we waited till around 5am when they let us back on the bus to sleep until another bus arrived. Eventually we made it to Guilin, the bus even dropped us off at our hostel!

After a rocky start we began our journey in Guilin by spending the first day just exploring the area. We found a haunted house which honestly was actually pretty scary, an arcade where much of our money was spent and a ridiculous amount of toys were won, and even a cinema where we decided to relax that night.

Our hostel was by far the best we stayed in the entire time. The food there was great, they had a pool table, games room and the beds even had electric blankets which we enjoyed very much. They even helped organise a tour for us to the Li River!

The tour to the Li river was an amazing day! First we went on a bamboo boat and cruised down the river. The views were stunning and it was such an experience sitting in a bamboo boat. We even met a Chinese family who were really lovely and we took pictures with, they were on a raft next to us a lot of the time. Honestly it’s difficult to put into words how amazing the scenery was there but I guess pictures are pretty self-explanatory.

After getting out of the raft we got a tour car (with our new friends, the Chinese family) up to a village where we met our guide. We then decided to continue on to an ethnic village where we went on a cruise through a cave in the river and then were able to sing and dance with the local people. We even played a game where a girl threw a ball into the crowd and we had to catch it. Owen and Robin both caught one. Afterwards it was onwards back to our hostel.

One day we also explored the Reed Flute Cave (which even before we began travelling was my screensaver on my computer) which I was buzzing about! We only had wechat pay so when it was revealed that they didn’t take this I was in a bit of a panic. Luckily we asked a street vendor nearby to swap her cash for wechat in exchange for us all buying water from her. The street vendors outside were adorable old ladies trying their best at English shouting ‘flutey’ at passers by and telling us to be careful walking up the mountain and to drink plenty of water. We decided to get a train to the top so we could see all the nice views. Once inside, the cave features loads of stalactites and stalagmites and well as pillars and lakes as well as loads of other amazing formations I can’t name. On my return to Scotland I will be studying geology. This day out was one of the best for me. The tour was in Chinese so we were only able to understand parts of what the guide was saying but we appreciated the scenery anyway.

Another thing we did in Guilin was climb one of the mountains in the city. This was so much fun, we even paid to get a slide down the mountain! Another day we went to the beach to get a good view of elephant trunk hill and bumped into a family from Beijing (who’s children still message us with strange questions today). We also spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for twin pagodas; it turned out we had walked past them numerous times without noticing (for this we rewarded ourselves with an absolutely amazing cake from Starbucks).

Guilin was one of my favourite places by far. It’s like a little slice of city in the middle of the country and honestly it was the perfect combination. You could go to a shopping mall and be a ten minute walk from a mountain.

Anyway it was then onto Kunming!