Yangshuo – The Most Beautiful County in Guilin

Yangshuo County (阳朔) is a county in Guilin. It is one of the most famous tourist destinations of China with breath-taking natural sceneries, mysterious ancient local dwelling houses and an insight into a diverse range of cultures.

One of the most beautiful attraction is waterway cruising along the Li River  (漓江). But you must go at the right time. When we were there, it was raining so heavily those few days causing a deluge, hence the water wasn’t as clear as it should be.

But it was a very lovely cruise because we sail past limestone rock formations like those we have seen in Chinese landscape painting. It was a quiet moment to myself away from the complex pragmatic world.

Because it was raining too heavily those few days, we were supposed to watch the famous musical of “Impression – Liu Sanjie” choreographed by Zhang Yimou. But the musical was cancelled. So we went to Shangri-la instead.

In Chinese, “Shangri-la” (世外桃源) is like the Garden of Eden or heaven. This is a beautiful place with charming rural location, folk customs and fascinating minority buildings and architecture. You can choose to walk or go on boat, and we chose the latter.

Through the boat ride, we can admire beautiful landscape of silent waterways, natural caves, primitive tribes greeting guests and folks performances of Miao, Yao, Dong and Zhuang minorities.

When you walk through the village, you can see old ladies doing crafts, people dancing and singing.

The third must visit destination is the Silver Cave (银子岩) which is one of the most beautiful karst caves in China. There were many glamorous stalactites, stalagmites, stone curtains, stone flowers and stone pillars formed in different geological periods.

Some are as tall as 10m, when radiated under spotlight, they look like silver and diamond, hence the name is created. Amazing isn’t it?

Coming to Yangshuo is not all about looking at scenery lah, we visited West Street (西街) and did some shopping too! West Street is the most popular foreigners’ street because there were many restaurants and bars. Don’t be shocked when you see old chinese woman speaking english to foreigners!

This place sure alot of girls like. And their things are cheap, as compared to the ones in Singapore.

Everything about matchboxes!

They cut the chilli LIVE and trust me, it was very choking but smells very good!

My greatest find is this young and handsome chap who sells frogs biscuit (青蛙饼)! I thought they add frogs inside, but the stall front was written:『没有青蛙的青蛙饼，不好吃不要钱』.

So this is the so called frog biscuit. It’s crispy on the outside, and inside I have beef with mild spiciness which costs only RMB10!

Ok, so this more or less concludes my 8 days Bama / Guilin / Yangshuo trip. My last day was at Qingxiu Mountain (or Green Mountain) which is the “green lung” of Nanning.

When you climb up the pagoda, you can see the majestic hills and peaks and beautiful city scenes.

You can feed the fishes too!

I didn’t took much photos this trip because I travelled alone and was quite shy to ask someone to take a photo for me. Anyway, here is a photo with the tour guide (the guy beside me) and my tour mates. The tour guide is very effectively bilingual!

A group shot with my other tour mates who took great care of me during this trip!

To read my Bama Longevity Village post, click here. 

To read my Guilin post, click here.