Day 14

Yangshuo to Fuli Village to Guilin 

Date - 16 May

Weather - Sunny and warm

Accommodation - Grand Link Hotel, Guilin


We continued our sightseeing around Yangshuo first starting with a fifteen minute coach ride to a small river-side village called Fuli on the Li River. This village is known as the hometown of painted fans. We watched a short demonstration on the making of the traditional fan and this involved a lot of pasting. 




From the village we took a very pleasant  and peaceful hour's raft ride on the river. It was advertised as "White Water Drifting". Each raft which took four people was made of eight wide PVC pipes bound together and on top was a light-weight aluminium structure with a covered hood. 



They were powered by small outboard motors. They were simple but effective. We saw many river birds, water buffaloes and a lot of very tall, thick bamboo along the edge of the river. Apparently when Chairman Zhour Enlai visited many years ago he said the area was very beautiful but it needed bamboo! And so bamboo was planted on the banks of the river and it is flourishing. 



After a tasty lunch with incredibly hot chilli (optional!) we headed back to Guilin for a tour of a pearl factory and an afternoon rest. Quite a number of the tour group took advantage of the free afternoon and had foot and body massages. The return trip took one and a quarter hours through the same beautiful scenery as the day before. Once again we passed the hundreds and hundreds of tall limestone outcrops which were originally under water and feature on many Chinese artworks. There were also many small vegetable farms. As with other areas of China there were a lot of roadworks and tree planting taking place. 


Lilly, our Guilin guide, has a mother who practises traditional Chinese medicine. She showed us hand exercises to keep us healthy and alert. 


The South China Pearl Museum was a good place to visit. They had a small coffee area selling Western-style coffee so all the men took themselves there to give the women more time to shop. It was a very clever idea. 



Unlike the other pearl factory this one had a stylish fashion parade with beautiful women wearing traditional Chinese dress and of course, pearls! The prices were very reasonable and many purchases were made again.



At 3.00pm we headed to our hotel. We passed quite a number of bridal shops with mannequins wearing the ubiquitous Western-style fluffy, meringue style of dress. 


Dinner was at the hotel and it was different tonight as it came out on a huge round ceramic platter almost the size of our tabletop. It took four people to deliver it. We had a great time at dinner enjoying each other's Aussie sense of humour! 



Tomorrow is the bullet train. 

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