AS PRETTY AS A PICTURE
Paul Ash revels in the joys of a cruise down the Li River
P UT the words “China” and “painting” together and there it is: ranks of towering, jungle-encrusted limestone karsts, marching down the Li River. It is the clichéd Chinese watercolour come to life, with all its mist and rain, water buffalo knee-deep in rice paddies, and fishermen and their cormorant slaves poling along on bamboo rafts.
We’ve all seen the paintings of that, apparently mythical, China, but this is the land made beautiful, far from the other country of tower blocks and belching factories in industrial cities, coal mines, wind-blasted deserts and smog and traffic and the blue-smoke haze from millions of scooters.
The mountains are the main attraction and rightly so, for they are a dramatic sight, not least of all from Club Med’s new resort in Guilin where they fill the horizon. (I am not surprised to discover later that along with the usual Club Med excursions, the resort also offers a chance to climb one of these outcrops, probably a decent way to experience them first hand.)
Our immersion is somewhat gentler. It is 9am and we are aboard a large flat-bottomed, triple-decker riverboat, about to push off on a half-day cruise down the Li River. Any ideas that we would have the river to ourselves evaporate as the boat’s engines rumble into life and we turn into the stream, trailed by a dozen similar vessels, hooters wailing as they weave among the tourist rafts.
It is Sunday, after all, and nothing is done by half measures in China — booming domestic tourism means there are, potentially, a billion local tourists to satisfy.
But as the boat slips along the swiftly flowing Li, the hubbub of the river traffic fades away with the sight of the mountains, streaked with green and black, rising sheer out of the riverine plain, their peaks lost in the mist and rain, and I understand why the Chinese flock to Guilin. This is a land venerated by painters and writers such as Tang Dynasty poet Han Yu, who wrote: “The river winds like a blue silk ribbon/While the hills erect like jade hairpins.”
The Lijiang River — what the brochure proudly claims is the state’s “AAAAA tourist attraction” — rises at Cat Mountain in Xing’an County in the north of Guilin and flows nearly 500km across the country to its confluence with the West River. But it is this 70km stretch — the jade ribbon of the poets — which has become a focal point of the country’s tourism, spiced with large dollops of mythology. And why not, because these secret mountains could hide any number of dragons, monkey gods and pig fairies. This is a landscape ripe for outrageous legends.
Tearing her gaze away from yet another impossibly beautiful scene — six white horses with red saddle cloths grazing on the riverbank — guide Jenny Zheng tells us the story of Sun Hou-tzu, the Monkey King, who, along with Chu Pa-chieh, a god who had been banished to earth as a pig after upsetting the Jade Emperor, accompanied the monk Tripitaka on a pilgrimage to India to bring back the Buddhist scriptures.
Despite episodes of naughtiness — which, depending on what version you hear, involve such feats as leaping to the edge of the universe in a direct challenge to Buddha — the Monkey King appears to have been a most diligent travel companion, rescuing Tripitaka from various jams including capture by seven spider women and the White Bone Lady and recovering treasure stolen by a nine-headed monster.
In another version of the pilgrimage story, the emperor gave Tripitaka a white horse for the journey but the pony was swallowed by a dragon, so he rode
I am about to ask white horses we se sounds and the top
the dragon instead. k if that explains all the e when the lunch gong deck empties like water going down a plughole as the sightseers rush below, leaving me and an Australian alone with the mountains. “The Chah-nees and food, mate,” he says by way of explanation.
As we head downriver to Yangshuo Ancient Town, the mountains climb higher and the river traffic grows heavier. Our convoy weaves through flotillas of rafts made from plastic tubes with the ends bent up to mimic the traditional bamboo rafts — old ways die hard here — and empty cruise boats heading back upstream for the next run.
At Yangshuo, the skipper turns the ship into the current and nudges the bow into a flight of old riverside stairs, where we disembark under the gaze of a cormorant fisherman offering the chance of a five yuan photo with him and his birds.
We decline and head up West Street, which anyone who has been to Bangkok would immediately recognise as a Chinese interpretation of Khao San Road: shops selling cheap T-shirts, Mao caps and paintings of mountain landscapes, old men frying tofu on push carts, a handful of restaurants of varying cleanliness, a few postcard shops, some bars, and a doughnut shop with the best egg tarts I’ve ever eaten. The smell of frying tofu mingles with the scents of rain and roasting meat. There is even a flute peddler, sweet notes burbling from one of his pipes, only it’s not some sweet Chinese melody but a perfect rendition of Scarborough Fair.
Today, though, the main attraction on the street are the two dozen fish spas where business is brisk, although judging by the screams coming from one, pedicure by river fish is not for everyone.
It is not for us either. We take five under the rows of tea chests in the Li Ping tea shop, where owner Tang Long Pin, in a deft and romantic sales pitch, soothes us with bowls of locally grown Oolong and osmanthus teas, which we drink as hot as we can bear out of tiny glasses.
“Good for the digestion,” says Jenny, as we taste green tea broken off a dark, black brick of compressed fibres — it looks more like a hefty bale of compressed hemp than tea.
“And that tea good for everything,” she says as I quaff a glass of osmanthus. Oh yes, it’s so good I hand over my credit card with trembling hand.
Afterwards, we wander up the street again, past the Holyland Outdoor Sports Club — “Climbing higher, touching more”, they promise — and the Hollywood Tattoo Bar, past the tofu vendors and the fish spas and tat stalls. I want a Chairman Mao cap. “OK,” says Jenny, “but never a green one — when a man wears a green hat, it says his wife is cheating on him.” After that we snort at all the other Westerners wearing green caps.
“You know,” says Holmes, my travel companion, “this isn’t like the tat we get at home.” So, like good tourists, we stock up like magpies on shiny stuff, notebooks and postcards and cigarettes in funky packets. I do not buy a plastic cat waving its arm. Aside from a smattering of Westerners, the tourists ambling around Yangshuo Ancient Town are Chinese and their enthusiasm is catching. So we happily join the awestruck crowds in the humid Gold Water Caves — named for the mud revered for its alleged healing properties — and the next day, too, in the beautiful Reed Flute Cave. Not for them the weary, seen-it-all cynicism of the Western traveller. No, to walk the paved highway through a garishly lit limestone cavern with a Chinese tour group is to have the scales pulled from your eyes.
So we don’t mind huddling in flimsy ponchos in the rain that night — it can bucket down in Guilin and even the scooters have umbrellas — to watch the Sanjie Liu Impression Show, an hour of lights and music and hundreds of performers crossing a watery stage on bamboo rafts and all of them lit up like a Shanghai street at night.
The audience of a thousand or more is held rapt by the red banners that wave like the sea and the dancers and the twinkling glow of hundreds of fishermen’s paraffin lanterns. But they gasp loudest when, for kilometres around, spotlights blaze through the drizzle and light up the mountains, and there it is, that craggy, mythological land. Everybody goes “Aah!” And so do I. —