Going to Guilin

April 26th

I woke up at 5am, fumbling around in the darkness for my pants. Zhenzhen—my Chinese friend from my old University—was coming early, and I had to go scoop her up at the station. I found her at a street vendor’s stand, slurping noodles and smiling. Zhenzhen is an awesome girl: proudly Chinese, totally uninhibited and joy-seeking, and always happy and carefree about what anyone thinks of her. We walked back to WADA where I scarfed down a Western breakfast and packed up my trampish possessions. It was a crisp morning: at 7am the streets were already bustling and we caught a bus to Yangshuo—where Zhenzhen said the real beauty of Guilin was hidden.

Rumbling along the highway, past green mountains and countryside, the bus stopped near a river that slithered between the cliffs. As we got off, elderly ladies tried to sell us wooden ducks, trinkets and squirt guns, but we marched straight past to the riverbank where we rented ourselves a bamboo boat.

Drifting off into the scenic Li River, craning my neck around at the front of our raft, I was awe-struck by the quiet beauty of this place... The mountains looked like gelatin drops frozen in place, their green and rocky brown contours dripping off them like piles of gigantic dough…the water lapped around us, rippling into millions of diamond rivulets… It was a prehistoric beauty, like floating into the set of Jurassic Park, or exploring James Cameron’s Avatar world, or sailing down choppy Amazon waters towards the secrets of a vast Incan jungle.

My fantasies were interrupted by a peasant woman scrubbing her clothes in the river, and a little girl spraying water over the reeds.  I felt so lucky to be here.

-Seb