Final day of an amazing trip. I was so sad to leave Yangshuo and Guilin. When we were leaving the hotel, the Speed Queen Laundry guy came out and helped us with our luggage. He even waved goodbye to me! The bus ride to the rice paddies was kind of long, but it was really comfortable because almost everyone had their own pair of seats since some people left earlier. As I should have seen coming, we were met by another climb at the paddies. We climbed halfway to get to the restaurant for lunch and another halfway brought us to the top.
The rice paddies were amazing, to say the least. It was one of the most impressive things I saw in Guilin, along with the Li River. Unfortunately, we were told they didn’t have a good rice season, so it wasn’t as beautiful as it could have been. We ended up seeing a lot of the rice paddies because we trekked from one section to another. We hiked for over an hour and ended up very far from where we started. The trek down took about half an hour itself.
I felt so tiny among these rice paddies
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After spending the last three days doing what tourists would do, it was time to do something many tourists usually wouldn’t do: visit a rural village. The last time I stepped foot in a village was twelve years ago when I was last in China and visited my dad’s home village, Taishan. This time, I got to see our tour guide’s village. To get there, we took a relaxing two hour boat ride there (cue “I’m on a Boat”).
The village was what I expected. Lots of farmland, farm animals and dogs running around, etc. Of course, this village had a ton of water buffalo. We got to meet Jessie’s family, which was nice. The family runs a convenience shop (possibly the only one in the village) and it seemed strange seeing cup noodles in the village.
Water buffalo!
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After an exhausting ourselves the past two days, we sort of expected to be tired at the end of every day in Guilin. Of course, we could see that just by looking at the itinerary. Not that I’m complaining; the Guilin trip was wonderful. Of the four NYU-sponsored trips, we did name the Guilin trip the “exercise trip” (Guizhou was the “community service trip”; Gansu was the “adventurous trip”; and Hong Kong was the “metropolitan trip”).
The exhausting part of the day was rock climbing. Uhhh, rock climbing? My fear of heights certainly doesn’t sound good here…
Scaling the Great Wall
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(Note: sorry for the extremely late posts. Really haven’t had any time to write these up with all the work recently)
Another looong day in Guilin. NYU had plenty planned for us and it was possibly the most fun of all the days in Guilin. After eating breakfast at Cafe China, it was time to grab some bikes and… wait, I mean, get in a car and drive to the Lijiang River. Since I don’t know how to ride a bike, I got to ride in a car along with other people who don’t know or don’t care to ride a bike. We kept stopping to wait for the bikers, which allowed me to take pictures of them riding. When we got to the river, we boarded bamboo rafts in pairs and went on a long and relaxing ride down the river.
Rafting on the Li River
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Like with my Beijing posts, I’ll have brief daily recap for each day of the trip and then have separate posts for anything that requires more detail. (And no, I haven’t forgotten about Beijing. I’ll get to those eventually, but I’ll be drowning in work this week, so those might have to wait.)
Anyways, I had no chance of being late for our 5:30 AM meet-up because I pulled an all-nighter. Tired, but excited, I hopped onto a bus to Hong Qiao airport for our early morning flight to Guilin. At the Guilin airport, we met up with our tour guides for the trip, Jessie and Moy. Luckily, we had some time to rest on the bus during our two hour drive to Yangshuo.
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