The first panoramic view of the Li River stopped us in our tracks. Looking
down, we saw a broad swath of inky-black water meandering past the town of
Chaoping, through ranks of giant limestone towers and sparkling paddy
fields. It was enough to stop a division of tanks let alone a small peloton
of bicycles, and one by one we swept over the top of the hill and skidded to
a halt on the gravel road.
In the fading, pinkish light the spectacle seemed inimitable, and oddly
intimate. Miranda, our tour leader, sensed the confusion: “This landscape
has been an inspiration to Chinese artists for centuries,” she said. “It may
feel familiar because it has been reproduced so often on silk scrolls,
prints and in photographs.”
With a timely sense of bathos, Paul McKiernan, a 32-year-old corporate
financier, leant on his handlebars and added: “Yes, I think I’ve seen it on
the wall of my Chinese takeaway in Tooting.” No replication, though, could
prepare you for the real thing. Like Uluru, Cappadocia or the Ngorongoro
Crater, the Li River is an emblematic landscape that has to be seen with
your own eyes.
It is the exquisite symmetry of the river and the hundreds of uniquely shaped,
isolated limestone hills that resonates in the imagination. The Chinese word
for landscape, shanshui, literally means mountains and water, and the
Li River region is a national symbol. As we were preparing to descend the
hill, Sam, our bubbly local guide and bicycle mechanic, grasped my arm.
“Look,” he said, snapping straight a 20-y uan note and pointing to the
image. “The Li River. Beautiful. Now, let’s go.”
We had arrived the day before in Guilin, the capital of Guangxi province, to
find it teeming with domestic tourists. It was the first night of “Golden
Week”, a national holiday, and the open-air restaurants bulged with
middle-class Chinese dining enthusiastically on snakes, eels, turtles, palm
civets and other exotica for which the town is famous.
We felt smug in the morning, pedalling away from the madding crowd on the
docks near Elephant Trunk Hill. We followed the highway for an hour before
ducking on to a gravel road that snaked into the midst of the limestone
towers to reach the glorious viewpoint above Chaoping.
There was little traffic on this route. The only vehicle was our support bus.
Occasionally it pulled up to assist one of our team of ten men and six women
as we laboured steeply up, away from the river and into the mountains.
The views improved as we wiggled our way into a thick cluster of 300m peaks.
At the top of the climb, we slipped through a notch in the rock and the
river disappeared. Every square foot of flat land had been terraced for
agriculture and the women were out tilling the fields in broad-brimmed straw
hats. The heat induced a mid-morning reverie and I pedalled gently along the
next section, passed a turquoise lake and the village of Xi Tang before the
long descent back towards the river.
We were filthy and tired when we arrived in Xing Ping, but the 35km (22 miles)
had taken only five hours. In the afternoon there was time for a walk
through the town’s rambling, cobbled streets before we clambered on to the
roof of the hotel to watch the armada of tourist boats chug back towards
Guilin as the sun set over the river.
At dawn the following morning we were on the river for a short cruise around
the reach featured on the 20-yuan note. Then we were back on the road again,
to Fuli, where we caught a small ferry to reach a riverside gravel road that
brought us all the way to Yangshuo.
Backpackers discovered Yangshuo, squeezed in among a thicket of limestone
hills and overlooking the Li, in the mid-1980s. It has grown from tiny
market town to major tourist hub and is now an excellent place to hole up
for a few days. There are dozens of restaurants, courses in everything from
t’ai chi to rock climbing and shops catering for foreigners as well as the
growing number of Chinese tourists.
Yangshuo, like much of China, is changing fast. The following morning we heard
a series of booms, like distant artillery. “They are blasting to make the
new highway,” Sam cheerily explained when we arrived at his own village. “In
two years’ time, it will take only four hours to drive to Guangzhou.”
Guangzhou, formerly Canton, is a big city and Yangs huo is destined to be
its weekend playground.
In the village of Hebaoshan we stayed in a small guesthouse run by a family
who cooked supper, plied us with beer and then dragged us out of bed at 4am
to see the sunrise from a nearby peak. The serpentine river and the tips of
the mountains appeared out of the darkness. Light turned the ribbon of water
purple, then pink and, finally, orange as the sun came up. We still had a
whole day’s cycling ahead of us to reach Guilin, but we had seen the Li in
every light now and it had become an old friend.
Need to know
Rob Penn travelled with Explore (0870 3334001, www.explore.co.uk), which has
15-day cycling tours to the Great Wall and Guilin. The cost is from £1,594pp
and includes flights from Heathrow, bike hire, B&B in hotels and
guesthouses, local guides and support vehicle.
Reading: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by
Peter Hessler (John Murray, £9.99).
