Yangshuo is an hour from Guilin - the most popular city in all of China for Chinese tourists. The landscape really is stunning, it's called karst (the word describes the effect of underground water on massive blocks of soluble limestone (I know you're thinking "I never realised Mike was a geological genius", but I can't take credit for the awesome power of google searches)) and is a series of conical forested hills rising dramatically from the otherwise flat lanscape of fields, rice paddies and rivers. One day we did a little river trip down the Li river to check out the landscape made famous by Chinese cigarettes and banknotes
The scenery was awesome for the first few minutes, but after 2 hours with 15 people crammed into the tiny juddering boat the sheen wore off. Two weeks later my teeth are still chattering from the incessant shuddering of that awful outboard motor. Alright I should really stop whinging, we were in one of the most beautiful places I'd seen but you get spoiled. The day before riding bikes around the peaks for hours made us scenery snobs: "Ffft, unless that water buffalo in from of that ancient fishing boat reflecting off the mirror-like water suface lit by the blazing sunset between the amazing peaks starts doing something cute I'm not going to bother wasting memory-card space!"
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