Li River Cruise

One morning, I think that it was the day after the terraces, we jumped in our van with the guide and took a short drive to a long pier. Once there, we loaded on one of the many flat topped short duration passenger boats for a cruise on the Li River.


Other than simply enjoying the sunny day while on a body of water, the other purpose of this trip was to get us to Yangshuo for the night and enjoy the karst mountains on the way.Now many of you who will have seen traditional ink paintings of China ( or the movie the Painted Veil with Edward Norton - and I will never see him in the same way again), will recognize the distinctive shapes of these mountains.



Karst mountains- essentially weathered limestone formations, are a predominant feature of Soutwestern China. This is what one of the book says (and this is for all of the geology fans out there)In China, limestone has been created from fossilized prehistoric sea floor sediments, brought to the surface by geological upheavals. The exposed alkaline limestone is then eroded by naturally occurring acidic rain" which produces a forest of conical hills/mountains. Another feature found with these mountains are long interlinked caverns and subterranean rivers. Even without knowing this when we went, this area feels special. No surprise that we took lots of photos that day, and so I provide a few for you now.

All along and at intermittent intervals, the loudspeaker would announce a peculiar, yet famous shaped mountain, and our guide would appear at our elbow to translate for us and try to explain the significance.

While it was a terrific day outing, it ended up being kind of touristy. We were joined by at least another 12 boats doing the same thing. I continue to be naive and expect that we will be unique in our traveling choices and will be nearly the only ones there. I'm working on it. Since the boats are also quite predictable, the locals have taken to paddling out with the flimsiest of rafts to attach themselves to the tour boats and try and sell us some of the ugliest and cheapest crap that I have seen. I don't use the term lightly- there were some carved purple rocks and other stuff that made me wonder who would buy them, when hands with money reached out of the tour boat windows and handed them to the hawkers. I now know why they do it, but why do the tourists buy this stuff??