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Natural Beauty and Rural Life in Yangshuo
Down the Li River, 70 kilometers south of Guilin, is a haven for independent travelers and vacationing students on a budget called Yangshuo. Tour groups generally take the four-and-a-half-hour cruise down the Li River, spend an hour or two in town then head back to Guilin. But the natural beauty and glimpse of rural life Yangshuo has to offer can easily take up several days.
Most backpackers rent bicycles at the hotel or hostel where they're staying and hire a guide to take them around Yangshuo's popular tourist spots. Regardless of which direction cyclists leave Yangshuo, the bike rides through the countryside will invariably pass the rice paddies.
The first site local tour guides take their fares to is Moon Hill, less than 10 kilometers southwest of Yangshuo. Like Water Moon Cave in Guilin's Elephant Trunk Hill, there's a crescent hole in the middle of Moon Hill. The locals swear that the hole was formed naturally even though no one knows how it came about. It's a 40-minute hike up the stone staircase leading to the top of Moon Hill, but the view down the Li River valley makes it worth it.
One major reason why local tour guides show Moon Hill first is because most of them live on farms around Moon Hill. Most if not all the tour guides farm when they're not conducting tours or waiting for customers. As part of the tour, many tour guides take tourists back home for lunch and more than a few will rent out rooms in their brick huts to tourists, offering them a glimpse of how China's peasant farmers live.
The lasting impression tourists take away from Yangshuo isn't the hills, it's the primitive conditions the peasant farmers live under. The average annual salary of a farmer in Yangshuo is 1000 yuan. (By comparison, a one-way plane ticket from Beijing to Shanghai costs 900 yuan.) Although some of their crops is sold in nearby town markets, most of it is used to feed their family. Due to the uneven terrain around Yangshuo, using tractors and other laborsaving machines is not feasible, so all locals farm as their ancestors did centuries ago - by hand.
Not surprisingly, many peasant farmers still tend to hold traditional beliefs. Both men and women work in the fields but all the farmers who double as tour guides are women. "It's all girls selling [drinks and souvenirs to tourists visiting Moon Hill],"says Mo Linxiu, a peasant farmer, "The boys are too embarrassed."
However, since the mid-1980s, Yangshuo's tourism industry has grown by leaps and bounds and the local farmers have eagerly jumped on the opportunity. Down the road from the entrance of Moon Hill are Black Buddha Caves, New Water Caves and Dragon Caves, discovered in 1991. Today, the villagers charge 50 yuan for a one-and-a-half-hour tour of a portion of the caves and 100 yuan for a three-hour tour of all the caves. But the tours, which involve climbing up and down rocks and ladders as well as wading through muddy pools of water, guarantees that everyone will come out muddy, even if they don't go down the mud slide at the end of the full tour.
In the evenings, tourists can hire a motorboat for 60 yuan per person to watch cormorant fishermen go to work. The fishermen take their seabirds out to hunt fish at night, generally setting off at 8:00 PM and fishing until 2:00 AM. For an hour-and-a-half, the tour boats will putter along the fisherman's bamboo raft so tourists can watch cormorants dive for fish. A string is tied around the cormorant's neck to prevent them from swallowing the fish they catch but once the tour is over, the fishermen take the strings off and go out again to let the birds their belly. The cormorant fishermen of Yangshuo no longer depend on fishing to support themselves, their income is derived from tourism. "The cormorant fishermen are all old," says Mrs. Fang, who runs a tour boat with her husband, "Now, all the young people drive tour boats."
After a day of touring, foreign tourists usually head to Xi Jie Road, one of Yangshuo's main streets which caters to tourists. Xi Jie is lined with souvenir shops selling everything from Chinese calligraphy and paintings to Little Red Books in English and restaurants. Foreigners seeking something other than Chinese food have a variety of options from the western restaurants serving pizza, omelets, Mexican food, Japanese food as well as westernized Chinese food. Although the banana pancake isn't authentic western food, its become popular enough for western tourists to recommend to their friends going to Yangshuo.
At the corner of Xijie Road and Chengzhong Road, there is also an open-air market filled with food stalls where customers can choose from a selection of vegetables, poutry, fish, snakes and frogs, and have the chef cook it up in a wok. This is the cheapest and most popular dining option most Chinese tourists prefer.
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