Asian backpacker

We arrived in Guilin a little past midnight so we had to take a taxi out to our hotel in the city center. It took us roughly 30-40 minutes and cost about 100RMB, not too bad to be honest. I did notice that at night it is fairly dangerous to drive fast on the highways. There are still people driving around on their electric scooters without their lights on and turning at big crossroads. People don’t exactly use their common sense here in traffic it seems…. Anyway, I picked a hotel right in the center close to where the action was and close to the bus station. As we arrived the people there were just about to close down the night market. we were looking for something to eat and managed to catch a quick glimpse of it. We just quickly grabbed something to eat and went back to the hotel to plan the next day.

We only had 1 full day to explore Guilin really, but since our main goal was to see the limestones around the river we figured we didn’t need that much time in Guilin. We basically just went around the main island along the Lijiang river and just looked at whatever there was to see along the way. But first we stopped by at the bus station to pick up our ticket to Yangshuo for the next day. It was fairly easy since I could speak a bit of Mandarin, which made it easier to communicate with the lady at the counter. I would expect that hotels or other travel agencies in town could provide the same service if you don’t know how to get the tickets. Here’s an example of our ticket. We paid 22RMB for our ticket.

After we got our ticket we continued our little sightseeing tour. We saw a glimpse of the Elephant Trunk Hill and stopped by the lake where the Moon and Sun Pagoda was. It was nice change from the busy center and we took a breather here to rest in the shade and enjoy the view.

I think if you do have the time you could spend a day or 2 here to visit all the sights in and around town, which includes some caves and hiking, but for us it seemed too commercial to look at colorful lightshows inside a cave so we passed on that.

At night we asked our hotel where we could get some decent local food and they pointed us towards the Yiren pedestrian street nearby the Guilin Central Square.

We didn’t really know what to expect as we were thinking bout trying out a local restaurant where they serve some local dishes, but what we ended up doing was more like trying out different food stalls and street food. We didn’t regret our choice though! 🙂 We walked around the area and there were different food stalls on each corner until we found a side street with tons of streetfood vendors all lined up one next to the other offering a variety of Asian food. That’s one of the reasons why I love Asia when it comes to food, there’s so much variety here and all next to eachother so you can have a taste of whatever you liked without filling up too much. We grabbed some meat on a skewer, takoyaki, chestnuts, spicy (!) noodles, buns, some dumplings and finished up with a cup of fresh squeezed juice. Pictures say more than words so enjoy!