The landscape around Guilin is quite impressive, here are a couple of shots of the cityscape:
The hills are limestone, and the nearby cities of Yangshou and Zhangjiajie (inspiration for the landscapes in Avatar) are quite famous, but Guilin itself is very beautiful. There are many of these hills within the city that just seem to erupt out of the ground. Seven Star Park is the area around 7 of them. Gulin is also famous for its limestone caves, of which Seven Star Cave is one.
Here are a few shots of the scenery in the park:
Above is "Glory of China Square". Of course there are Buddhist sites everywhere:
And since it's China they take every opportunity to extract money out of you:
Pretty much every Chinese park is like this. I've had a couple of interesting conversations with the locals about this. One girl was asking me about Niagra falls (she's seen it in pictures and movies) and asked me how much it was to see it. "It's free, you just go and look." I'm not sure she believed me. Another time I was explaining to one of my teachers the differences between parks in Victoria and China, and I said there are no paved trails and stairs (at least not up the mountains the way there are here) and parks don't have the same kind of "carnival" atmosphere. "No paths and steps? How do people know where to go?" I explained that there are trails, but usually not paved. And sometimes people mark trails by tying ribbons in trees. I don't know how the Chinese would react to that kind of "trail".
Here are some pictures from the cave. As you can see it has a nice inlaid marble floor:
The limestone formations were illuminated with an impressive collection of coloured lights, and in some sections there was dramatic music in the background. We had to follow a tour guide, who explained everything to us (in Chinese) and they turned on the lights as we entered each section of the cave. If we wandered off we would be in darkness :-( The formations had different names, for example above is "A Frontier Scene".
There were some shops in the cave, and we were given lots of time to shop! (And like I mentioned we couldn't wander off.) All the best photo ops were co-opted by professional photographers who offered to take our picture for 20 RMB. We had to stop about 6 or 7 times to listen to their pitch.
"A Natural fresco".
A real waterfall underground!
There were wild monkeys in the park, and lots of signs warning us to not feed them. Of course people were feeding them anyways. I admit, I was just waiting for a monkey to attack someone!
I'll just leave you with this. Isn't it cute?
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