China, the Guilin Post

[przed]

From Chengdu we flew in to Guilin. If you've seen photos of rounded, tree-covered mountains in China, that's the landscape around Guilin. It's quite beautiful, and we loved the city.

Instead of a hotel, we stayed in an apartment complex. The building wasn't too impressive from the outside, but the apartment was lovely, decorated with Ming dynasty details. This was the bedroom area.


Here's Ros posing in front of the bookcase that divided the bedroom from the living area.


We visited a tea farm just outside of the city. This is the tea field, with the mountains in the background. I had no idea that all tea, white, green and black, comes from the same plant, but the type of tea depends on when the leaves are picked and how they're processed. This farm used organic techniques, and the tea was delicious. We came home with several boxes of it.


Here's Ros with a hat worn by tea pickers.


The mountains in this area are all limestone, and many of them have extensive cave systems inside. This was inside the Reed Flute Caves. The colours are from lighting, but the rock formations are entirely natural.


Another shot from inside the cave.


Guilin is built around several lakes, and there's a large public park around the lakes. This is us in the park.


One of the bridges in the park. There were bridges spanning the lakes all through the park, leading to a number of islets.


A stone barge in one of the lakes.


This is all that's left of the old city wall. Quite different from the massive city wall in Xi'an.


Another view of the bridge.


Ros climbing one of the gates on an island in the park.


Ros and Don in a moon gate.


Me and Ros in the same moon gate.


The two pagodas built in another of the lakes in the park.

Comments

[halotolerant.livejournal.com]

Do Want that bed *g* What a gorgeous place. It's really interesting seeing how different the architectural language is to that that one is used to in old sites in Europe - the curves seem so unexpected and yet so impressive!

Mmmmmmmmmmm, tea *g* And those caves are utterly amazing, Wow, what a lot of wonderful things that you saw!

[przed.livejournal.com]

I loved the whole apartment. What was interesting was that when you looked closely, a lot of the architectural details were pre-fab. I want to have a DIY shop where you can get stuff like that. (We considered having a moon gate built on our porch, but on our little house it would have been a bit ostentatious. We've settled for Don's carpenter dad building us a Chinese-style railing.)