In this edition of my travels to famous Chinese tourist meccas, I present to you my do and don’t guide to visiting the famous Karst Limestone mountain area of Guilin/Yangshuo.

Do: tell your driver to take you on the Bamao (巴茂) highway to get from Guilin to Yangshuo. It offers endless views of the karstic mountains and lush green farmland you could eat up like a salad. Because no one else uses it, your driver will be able to see if his Santana really can make the needle hit 140km/h.

Don’t: let your driver take the provincial highway to get from Guilin to Yangshuo. It’s basically two lanes of giant trucks crawling along 40km/h that everyone else on the road is playing chicken with in order to get one position ahead. It also costs 30 kuai less than the fast highway. But takes an hour more. So if there’s 12 of you traveling together, and you do this, your time is worth a whopping 2.5 kuai an hour. That’s what I’ll pay my legions of peons, when I give them a 2.5 kuai raise.

Do: stay in one of the many chilled out resorts on the outskirts of Yangshuo. Other than being family run, having great service and food, clean rooms with internet, they’ll also remember your name every time they greet you while you reply back with an embarrassing “oh hi……you”.

Don’t: stay anywhere near downtown Yangshuo. It’s a giant swirling vortex of watch! bag! dvd!, shitty tourists, dirty hippies, “western” food and probably even some god-damned nazis. If you have to go, wear a cape and a mask to confuse the hell out of everyone, and bring some bear repellent just to be sure (I heard it works on them nazis).

Do: make sure to arrange all your transportation in advance of leaving wherever it is your staying. Best bet is to hire a driver for the times you need him, like when you’re so drunk you decide to go swimming naked in the Li river with a bunch of naked chicks, who are actually just your clothes that are floating away.

Don’t: expect to be able to hail taxis and pay a metered rate. Supply and demand rules here. Actually demand rules, and supply is its little bitch. The open air taxis are greedy blood sucking vampires. They will stop at nothing to pick you up and bring you somewhere at a grossly inflated rate given the vehicle they are transporting you in will probably break down and go out Hiroshima style on its way there.

Do: eat Guangxi style Chinese food. The chicken soup puts the chicken back in soup. Not that it ever left…well it tried to, but that’s a story for another day. A good restaurant to check out in Guilin is: 祥云居 in 鲁家村. You can find that on 桃花江路.This is a real deal local place, you won’t find it in the LP or Frommers. Once you get there you have to walk across a dam to get to it.

Don’t: bother with the western food in Yangshuo. If you want garbage save yourself the time and go straight to McDonalds. Although it might be a little hard to find.

Do: take a boat cruise down the Li river from Yangti to Xingping and have your photo taken in the famous spot that’s rendered on the 20Y bill despite it being as ridiculously cliché as throwing a penny in a fountain and wishing for world peace or eating dog meat in North Korea. Just watch out for pirates.

Don’t: take one of the big ass cuise boats down the river. They’re noisy, too fast, and akin to trying to take in Route 66 from the back of your grandpa’s Winnebago when you could be in a Cadillac drop top. I would also like to mention that almost every one I saw had a naked dude washing himself in the back of it. Ass pirates. True story.

Do: go exploring into the towns and villages along the river if you can. There’s all kinds of ancient buildings still standing, random chickens doing that thing they do, and well adjusted locals that don’t seem to mind you scoping out their hood.

Don’t: not go to Guangxi. The scenic beauty is something you should never not have the impossibility to lack the chance to see in your lifetime when you aren’t busy not trying to figure out all these double negatives.

Filed under: tourist shit