WEDNESDAY, MAY 20TH - GUILIN - DAY TWO

Tea service at tea farm


Tea farm

Tea farm

Tea Farm near Guilin


Tea farm

Drying tea leaves

Tea service

Guilin at night Pagoda

Guilin at night Pagoda

Guilin at night Pagoda

Views from an old village

eggs cooking


Chili for sale

Old village

Old village

Old village

Tee shirt artist

Nixon visits tee shirt artist

Tea in old village

Cable car ride up mountain

Mountains of Guilin

Mountains of Guilin

Mountains of Guilin

Mountains of Guilin

Mountains of Guilin

Mountains of Guilin

Mountains of Guilin

Mountains of Guilin

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20TH - GUILIN - DAY TWO

One of the highlights of each city has been watching the people in town located just outside of Guilin. Life here for the people has simply just stopped, except of course, everyone seems to have a TV and a cell phone. This area was on the silk road to Tibet. We walked through the streets as a group over uneven roads. Many of the houses have shops or stalls in front of them where the people try to sell the typical tourist trinkets and there are several art galleries where the local artists sell their paintings of the area and also have their house behind the gallery. Once creative couple installed a clean modern western style toilet, put up a sign inviting tourists to use it, to stop by and have some tea and see their paintings. we bought a very nice teeshirt for Lenny hand painted by the owner of the shop. We'll see how it does after the first hand washing. Along the streets, people were mostly sitting outside their homes and their doors were open. They did not want to have their pictures taken but we could clearly see inside. Their lifestyle is very primitive. We also passed a local cemetary here and our guide described it as a "good place for the passed away people living" - A little more Chinglish! When we commented to one of the locals about the misty weather he said: "up too long time raining".YAO XHIN MOUNTAIN was our next stop where we took a wonderful cable car up almost 1000 meters. At the top there is a breathtaking view of the awesome mountain landscape with all of the "crazy" rocks with mist hanging over the peaks. It is very easy to see how this area attracts artists from all over the country. We then visited the TEA RESEARCH INSTITUE which is also outside of Guilin near the cable car. This was so interesting We really had no idea how tea leaves were grown. They grow on a bush and here they are only hand picked. The soil has a very high Ph. The earliest and therefore the most tender leaves are picked for green tea. Oolong tea is made from the medium sized leaves and black tea is made from the largest leaves. Green tea has the most antioxidents. Jasmine tea is made from green tea leaves that is dried with jasmine flowers and this is how it acquires its fragrance. All of these teas are produced from the same plant. We had a wonderful tea tasting and a demonstration of how each of the teas are brewed, each in a little different way. From the tea institute, we then had a local lunch which was much better than our usual government mandated tourist fare and then walked through a street market and then back to the hotel for a rest. We ate dinner at the hotel western buffet and then tood a boat ride on four lakes. There were multi-colored lights, local concerts on the water, many lovely bridges all lit up, a huge manmade waterfall and a fishing show using cormorand birds. They restrict the size of the bird's throat so that when they catch a fish, the bird cannot swallow it and the fisherman then forces the fish out of the bird's mouth. Lenny and I both felt that this was a cruel way to treat these birds and couldn't watch it as entertainment. We have these birds at home and I am going to inform them that they too are lucky to have US citizenship. We are continually amazed at how inventive the Chinese are in figuring out how to develop their tourism industry. China is definitely "booming up"!