Day 4 – Guilin

The evening fishing demonstration was fantastic, but difficult to take pictures! Here is a man in traditional gear (The grass 'coat' keeps the rain off.) about to go fishing with his birds.

" The Reed Flute Cave was cool" says Lianne


Almost everyone in our travel group made the climb.

The view from the top of Piled Silk Hill.

2 choices of how to get up to the top of Piled Silk Hill.

Our friend, Leo, chose the more expensive route :-)

We climbed!

The park at Elephant Trunk Hill was fun.

Elephant Trunk Hill

This morning we walked out of the hotel and walked around a beautiful lake before breakfast. The mountains are even more beautiful than the pictures and surround the whole city of Guilin (population 700,000). This morning we toured Elephant Trunk Hill and Piled Silk Hill which are very popular tourist destinations. Everything has a wonderful tale attached to describe how it came to be. Elephant Trunk Hill is an elephant that originally came down from the heavens with the emperor. He became ill so the emperor left him behind and the elephant recovered and fell in love with the kind people of Guilin. The emperor became angry when the elephant didn’t return, and after a 7 day battle, he was killed when he went to drink from the lake (there is even a pagoda built on top of the hill that resembles a sword handle)

Piled Silk Hill is named because the rock formation almost looks like folded fabric.

We had a wonderful authentic Chinese lunch back at the hotel, and then headed to Reed Flute Cave. The cave was enormous with many sections lit up to show what the rocks might resemble if you have a fantastic imagination (vegetables, mushrooms, old men with beards). It was absolutely beautiful.

There are reeds outside of the cave that they use to make flutes and whistles. Of course, every child in our group had to have one, so needless to say, the bus ride home was not a peaceful one :-)

Most of the group went out to a nearby restaurant for supper. Food was plentiful, and worked out to a whopping $2 per person.

In the evening, we went out on a barge into the middle of the Li River, and watched men on bamboo rafts fishing with Comorant birds. The kids were fascinated with the show, as the men demonstrated the ancient art of fishing with the birds. The birds had strings around their necks to prevent them from swallowing the fish they caught, but they still tried hard to swallow the fish before the fishermen squeezed the fish out and into their baskets. The children were reassured that these birds are very precious to the fishermen, and at the end of the evening would have the string removed and they’d be able to catch fish. We were also told that the birds were so important to the fishermen that when the bird died, they would be buried – not eaten.