Going to Guilin

April 26th

We continued drifting…tickled by a slight breeze, alongside the green bush, and stone huts, and sun-beaten rice farmers standing on the river banks. We had lunch on a rustic patio overlooking the ravine…the food was great: Li River fish with a pork-veggie salad. Hunchbacked women with earnest faces tried to sell us oranges; stray dogs roamed around, all foamy and mangy and cute. Zhenzhen and I went for a walk into the mountainside…up stone trails, with jungly underbrush on either side, past gardens and lonely wooden houses—hidden amid that labyrinth of deep emerald green. We stumbled onto a farm house that seemed abandoned, except a cow was still tethered to a tree. I pet it, and the beast nuzzled me thankfully. I imagined buying a house here someday, disappearing from the world and just writing, and wandering…dying a happy man.

We re-boarded our bamboo vessel and were crisscrossing the Li River again. There were farmers and oxen, toiling in the sun, feet and hooves splashing in the marshy wetlands. We saw the ‘Rock of the 9 Horses’—a cliff-face where Zhou Enlai (The Republic of China’s 1^st Prime Minister) famously discerned 9 stallions from the rocky splotches… but they just looked like splotches to me. We reached a view of the river that was replicated on the packaging of a local Guilin cigarette brand… Then we surveyed the river from an angle that was exactly replicated on every 20 Yuan bill… I had been looking at this place for months without even knowing it. Guilin scenery is nestled deep into the subconscious of, and used by, each of the 1.3 billion people in China. It was impressive…

We finally scraped onto a distant bank, said goodbye to our charming boat driver, and took a car to a nearby ancient town that Zhenzhen knew about. The town was old and beautiful…roofs splintered and dilapidated, leaning houses made of stone and wood, humble Buddhist enclaves inviting in devout rural farmers. I imagined the place was the scene of some traditional ceremony, or age-old feud, or epic Kung Fu battle. Zhenzhen and I took a path into the woods, and now I felt like I was truly in the countryside. We greeted a few men swinging pitchforks into the dirt, saw orange peels being dried in the sun for medicinal uses, and walked by a dingy hovel with a pack of old men playing cards—“Hello!” one said, welcoming me to his town.

It was all very touching, and beautiful…and disgustingly hot. Beneath my load of backpacks I was sweating profusely. We walked out of the ancient town, through a more modern bit, and hopped onto a bus that would take us to the center of Yangshuo.

-Seb