I’ve just added guides to Guilin and Yangshuo to the site, continuing its slow progress towards up-to-dateness. I visited Guangxi Province way back in January with my parents and younger brother. The winter weather definitely doesn’t make the place look any better in our photographs, but it was actually quite temperate, temperature-wise.
Outside of Yangshuo, Guangxi Province
Guilin and Yangshuo are somewhat controversial topics among China travelers, some of whom find them stunningly beautiful, others of whom find them overrun with tourists. To some extent, both of these statements are true. The karsts are awe-inspiring, and because of that, Yangshuo is now completely dominated by the tourist trade. Guilin has its own share of tourists and is additionally blighted by the ugly architecture and bad traffic endemic to Chinese cities. On the other hand, when you take a short walk outside of Yangshuo town, you are in “real” rural China, which may be hard to find to elsewhere if you don’t speak Mandarin. A “tourist town” also has useful amenities: plenty of English-speaking guides, bike rentals and classes in cooking and rock climbing.
For most travelers, I would say skip Guilin entirely (except as a point of transit to Yangshuo) and book a room in a guesthouse outside of the town of Yangshuo. If you speak Mandarin and are determined to get “off the beaten path,” you might be better off elsewhere in southwest China — I loved Dehang, which has a similar geography but does not (yet) get too many tourists.
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