Guilin, China
This was a long (and somewhat boring) day.
In the morning we headed back to the old town and ended up picking up a few mandalas from a local shop. We barely made it back to the hotel as the group decided to leave an hour earlier than planned.
We flew from Shangri-La to Kunming then, after a 3 hour layover, flew to Guilin. Most of the group were smart and went to bed after we arrived at the hotel. Andre, Gary and I were not so smart and decided to go on a night time cruise of the Guilin river system. Our tour guide, ‘Nick’, got us onto the boat but unfortunately for him, the boat left before he could get off. It was nice to have our own personal tour guide.
Roughly 15 years ago, the Chinese government spent 1,000,000,000 Renminbi to make the waterways around Guilin look pretty. They connected several waterways (including the old city moat), built a few pretty bridges and installed lighting that would put Andrew Lloyd Weber to shame. The Dragon, Sun and Moon pagodas were beautiful but the lighting and production values of the cruise kept making me think that, at any moment, a bunch of kids were going to break out in a Mandarin version of ‘It’s a Small World After All’.
2GuysTravel 