Spirited Away

on the disneyland-ish tour (psoing like the famous Ultra-Man, who is very popular in China and Japan...my brother loves him!)
Bamboo raft cruise scenery
(the motorboat cruise, this cliff has been painted by many famous caligraphers...I forget the name)
(The small kitchen in which lunch was prepared. Many of the adults in this picture were in the group of families traveling with us)

I have safely returned from Guilin (gway-leen) probably one of the prettiest and most mysterious places I have ever been to.

1st Day


I flew to Guilin with my Chinese grandfather and the people at the gate gave me a first class ticket even though I didn't book one! Free! They probably just thought that the foreigner definitely booked a first class ticket. But the flight was only one hour so it wouldn't have been worth it to buy a first class ticket in the first place.


When we got to Guilin my Chinese father picked us up at the airport and drove us directly to a restaurant to eat. The restaurant on the outside looked like an empty, unsanitary dump...but on the inside it was clean and the food smelled good. Everyone in the group of five cars that accompanied my family to Guilin was there. Four families, each with three generations (meaning one set of grandparents, parents, and one child came). I was warmly welcomed by the adults but stared and sniggered at by all the kids except my brother! I expected this much, I thought it was funny myself.


We drove far far away to our hotel. Deep in the countryside! I didn't get a very good look at it the next morning because we woke up very early.


2nd Day


The next day we went to a disneyland-ish place. A river cruise with the native minority people doing a dance as the boat passed. Men danced in the front while the women, beguiled in "traditional" grass skirts, played with their cell phones.


The mountains were amazing though!


After that we were off for another boat cruise! This time no sideshows on the banks of the river. Just the mountains. The boats were made of bamboo shafts tied together with metal wire, and were steered by a very tan man with a long bamboo pole. Chinese people seem to look down on people with darker skin. To Chinese people dark skin means you work in the fields/do hard labor and don't have an education. My mother would say very often as we walked through the street "Oh so black, so black...." if a native Guangxi (the province of Gulin) would pass by. The reason the Chinese say black is because they have no word for "tan" or "bronzed".

During lunch we went to this little backwoods kitchen and sat on the river bank under cabannas to eat. The kitchen was so understaffed that many of the adults from our group went to make the food themselves. It was very peaceful eating by the river.

Next was a motor boat cruise on the Li River. The most famous part of the river in Guilin. It was very pretty and had many photo ops.

I was constantly transfixed by the scenery around me and was often at a loss for words.

During the trip I was a bit disappointed to notice that we never really went to "off the beaten path" places. Our group of families followed a map with the "most famous" touring sites. So we never went to any temples hidden away in the mountains or any of the caves with famous carvings of Buddha (all of which Guilin has).

Our next and final stop before the hotel was to watch a show put on by the minority population that lives in Guilin. The show is performed at night on long river boats. During the show the people ar elit up and look like they are floating on the water. The board-like boats are invisible. Except our family didn't want to pay to watch. So we found a spot on the opposite bank of the river and saw the show. It wasn't bad at all, very pretty! The people's costumes (I couldn't see them clearly enough to describe them to you) would change colors in unison while they performed certain slow waving dance moves with their entire bodies. Each group of people moved as one body on the water! It was quite a sight! Behind them there were colored search lights lighting up the mountain peaks.

Our sitting area was situated in a bamboo grove near the banks of the river.

I will write more about the other days in the next post! Now my brother must select some pictures of this vacation to put in his composition for school!