A day in Guilin

Another call to Mr. Long and more excuses and a sense of doom on the tickets. So, we called him back and asked him to cancel the train tickets- we would make other arrangements. Since the train was actually turning out to be a 30-hour affair, with 2/3 of it in darkness, we decided that flying wasn’t such a bad option. We decided to head to the Holiday Inn to see if we could arrange forward transportation. We found a wonderful woman at the travel department who got us plane tickets and also arranged for a ½ day city tour.
Our city tour started at 2:00 with a local guide who had a great sense of humor. He told us that Guilin meets all of the criteria for scenic beauty in China:
1. Beautiful Mountains
2. Reflecting Water
3. Fantastic Caves
4. Pretty Rocks
We got to see them all in our tour. We started at the Reed Flute Cave. Although fairly jaded about seeing a Chinese cave, we decided to venture forth with all of the Chinese tour groups.

It was quite remarkable. It once served as an air-raid shelter for the WWII American Flying Tiger squadron. It was ¼ mile long and wet, and cool (which given the heat of Guilin, was a wonderful change). We set a fairly rapid pace with our guide (passing most of the tour groups who were going into excruciating detail on each formation). The Chinese love caves and the guides walk them slowly through pointing out every formation by name.
In between our sights, our guide had us amused with his jokes.

ABC = American Born Chinese and they call them bananas (yellow on the outside, white on the inside).

“Chinese eat anything with 4 legs except a table and anything that flies except a plate”.
After the caves, he tried to make a stop at the pearl factory- we nixed that idea and headed for more scenery. We stopped at Elephant Trunk Hill, the most famous peak in Guilin. I still had a hard time seeing the elephant and his trunk in the hillside. Then, we headed to Solitary Beauty Peak, in the walls of the Guangxi Provincial Teachers College. Our last stop was Wave Subduing Hill. Quite an action packed city tour….
We did get a restaurant recommendation from our guide so we opted for the first of his choices for dinner and had hot and spicy Sichuan cuisine. On the way up to our room, John insulted a group of French tourists by asking them if they were from Bulgaria or Italy…
Back in the room, we got a call from Mr. Long- who proudly told us that he had our 4 train tickets in one compartment. When we reminded him that we had cancelled the tickets with him, we had a fairly heated conversation- a shouting match- we won…