Quit and Travel

Hey there all! Kellie here.

We started out our day today with a hearty breakfast of jam and toast at the rooftop bar of our hostel. I’m not sure if the boys have detailed quite how magnificent the view is from this thing, but it’s breathtaking. A wonderful way to start the morning, eh?

Afterwards, the hostel keeper walked us to the bus station to get us onto a bus that would take us to YangDi. This small town was about an hour north of Yangshuo on the Li River. Our mission for the day: hop onto a bamboo raft and float for several hours down the river and surround ourselves with some of the most incredible natural landscaping available in the modern world.

After a jostling bus ride that made several unmarked stops, impossible passing maneuvers, and treacherous turnarounds, we were dropped off at a bank of the river where at least a dozen of these “rafts” were waiting. Now, by bamboo, they meant six-inch PVC piping with ridges to look like bamboo, powered by motors, as seen below.

However, we quickly learned that there simply was no better way to enjoy the river. We had the option of take a large, two-decker tour boat that would provide us with freshly made lunch and offer indoor solace if the weather turned nasty. But seeing these boats from our tiny-in-comparison raft made us glad for our choice. These ginormous entities careened down the river at a pace that wouldn’t allow even the fastest shutter speeds to capture the astounding surroundings. In addition, there were so many people packed onto the top open-air story, it would have been difficult to breathe, let alone take a decent picture. So we sat back on our raft and enjoyed our peaceful stroll down the stream.

While pictures do better justice than words could ever hope to, even photographic comparison is simply inferior to actually seeing this landscape for yourself. The river is nestled amongst what appears to be mountains, withered and weathered by seemingly multiple millennia, enrobed in a delicate mist that simply enhances their mystery and magnificence, utterly unparalleled by our smoky Appalachians. These, however, are not really mountains, rather they are Karst mountains, rock pockets left over after the limestone that once surrounded them had dissolved away over time by the groundwater passing through it. While Karst topography can be seen in almost any area of the world, the extent of its size here is almost exclusive to this part of China. Needless to say, the sheer organic loveliness of these formations is enough to make a trek to the Guangzhou region alone.