Things to Do at Li River

The Li River unspools south from Guilin like a length of green silk, winding 83 kilometres through karst country before reaching Yangshuo. You'll find the water shifts colour with the hour, jade at dawn, milky pewter when mist rolls down from the limestone pinnacles, glassy bottle-green by mid-afternoon. The peaks themselves are the real story here, several hundred of them rising in a procession of cones and fins and humped silhouettes that the Tang poets compared to bamboo shoots after rain. As it happens, the section between Yangdi and Xingping is the stretch printed on the back of the 20 yuan note, and you'll see fellow passengers holding the bill up against the view like they're checking a find map. The river smells of damp stone and diesel and, when you drift past a bend lined with osmanthus trees in autumn, something almost candied. Cormorant fishermen still work the shallows near Xingping at dusk, their bamboo rafts knocking softly against the current, the birds perched in a row like punctuation marks. Worth noting that the cormorant fishing you'll see now is largely performance, kept alive for the cameras, though the men poling the rafts learned it from fathers who learned it from grandfathers. Buffalo wade chest-deep in the shallows, egrets pick through rice stubble on the banks, and every so often a fisherman in a conical hat will glide past so silently you'll wonder how you didn't hear him coming. The Li River tends to overwhelm first-time visitors, which is part of its trick. You came expecting scenery and you got something closer to a Song dynasty scroll painting that someone forgot to roll up.

Most cruises depart from Mopanshan or Zhujiang piers, both about 40 minutes by road southeast of Guilin city centre. Your cruise ticket typically includes the transfer bus from a downtown meeting point, so confirm pick-up details when you book. To reach Yangdi for the shorter raft trip, take a public bus from Guilin's main bus station heading toward Yangshuo and ask the driver to stop at Yangdi (around 90 minutes), or hire a taxi for a reasonable mid-range fare. Coming from Yangshuo, frequent minibuses run up to Yangdi and Xingping throughout the morning. Returning from Yangshuo to Guilin after the cruise is straightforward: express buses leave every 20 minutes or so until evening and take about 90 minutes.