Natural Beauty and Ethnic Culture Discovery

On arriving in Guilin, you will see your guide waiting for you in the Arrival Hall of the airport holding a welcome sign with your name on it. Then a comfortable private car will take you to the hotel in downtown.

After checking in and having a nice break, you will be escorted to start your Guilin tour with a visit to the Elephant Trunk Hill, the emblem of Guilin. It is a naturally-formed hill that vividly resembles a giant elephant drinking water from the Li River with its long trunk. The Puxian Pagoda on its back adds even more romance to the site: Samantabahdra, worshipped in the pagoda as one of the four principal Bodhisattvas in Chinese Buddhism, usually appears riding on an elephant.

Then we head to East West Street, a 1,400-year-old street that saw its best days during Ming and Qing dynasties (1368 – 1911 AD). It has become the only Ming and Qing street heritage left in Guilin now, with historical buildings in the area restored in 2016. Apart from a general tour, we will also visit Xiaoyao Tower, originally a restaurant built during Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD) and frequented by literati who gathered here to appreciate surrounding vistas, write poetry, or drink to commemorate special moments. Afterwards, we drive you back to your hotel.

► Dinner Suggestion:
Just walk about 10 minutes from East West Street to You Yi Xuan Rice Noodles Restaurant to enjoy a bowl of authentic and fresh Rice Noodles, the most representative specialty in Guilin, for around CNY 15 (USD 2). The brand was established in 1932 and can be said as the most time-honored, with its secret noodles recipe passed down for five generations. Its noodles-making techniques have been included in the fifth representative projects list of national intangible cultural heritages.

Have breakfast at your hotel before hitting the road to Longsheng to enjoy the spectacular Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces. The transfer takes around two hours from Guilin to Longsheng.

Upon arrival, your guide will lead you to hike up to the best viewpoint to appreciate the grand scene of the terraces. There are lots of steps, which may require some physical strength, but the incredible views are worth all your efforts. Along the way you will see extensive terraces stretching from foot to top on the hillsides. The terraced landscape are most beautiful during late spring, when the pond fields are full of glassy water for irrigation, and late autumn, the harvest season. The boundless terraced landscape, together with peasants working on their plots of land and native stilt houses in the distance, is what makes this place a world-famous photogenic spectacle.

With us, you will also stop by villages where those wooden stilt houses - a unique architecture of local ethnic groups - are located. You get to wander through the villages of Zhuang Minority People and learn about their distinctive ethnic culture. For instance, perhaps you may notice some women wearing a strange head wrap, which actually resembles an ox horn, symbolizing their belief in the divinity of the ox, a deity that descended from Heaven and sacrificed himself to toil for the peasants’ sake.

At the end of the trip, we will transfer you back to the hotel in Guilin.

Meals: Western buffet breakfast

No Guilin tour will be complete without taking a Li River cruise. This morning, you will be transferred to the pier to board the cruise ship. The typical karst scenery on both banks is like a Chinese landscape painting, whose ethereal beauty has made one of its perspectives – the view of Yellow Cloth Shoal - printed on the reverse side of Chinese banknotes. The shoal offers the most beautiful reflections of the landscape around along the entire length of Li River.

The Li River cruise normally takes around 4 hours. Since you disembark at 14:00 in Yangshuo, your lunch today is served onboard. On arrival in your destination, you will enjoy a relaxing countryside tour and visit a local villager's home to experience Chinese peasant’s lifestyle. To go to the countryside, there are two choices for you: by bike or by private car. We suggest you bike to tour the rural landscape, to pass by those waves of green grass, lovely karst hills, and jade green waters. But if you are not a biker, tour by car would be as fascinating, though less rewarding. In the middle of your countryside tour, pay a visit to a typical peasant family in a local village. As it might be late when finishing visiting, so you will bike or be driven back to downtown Yangshuo afterwards.

For a special evening, you can explore West Street, the most ancient street in Yangshuo. Although there are many modern features like bars, the street still emanates a charm that belongs to the past. As it is dinner time, you might taste Beer Fish in one of the restaurants, a local specialty that is loved all over China.

► Dinner suggestion:
For dinner, we recommend you to try Yangshuo’s representative food - Beer Fish. Beer Fish does not refer to a type of fish, but implies a cooking method of fish that involves the using of beer. The dish has been around for more than 40 years, and it is said that it was first introduced after a chef accidentally added beer to fish and found it to be surprisingly delicious. Since then, the dish has gradually become popular. Yangshuo Beer Fish is made by frying unscaled carp from the Li River before simmering it with Liquan Beer, tomatoes and fresh peppers. Da Shi Fu Jin Jiang Beer Fish (West Street main branch) enjoys a great popularity; if you are interested, spend around CNY 80 (USD 11) per person to have a taste of it!

Meals: Western buffet breakfast, Lunch

In the morning, your guide will pick you up at the hotel and take you back to Guilin. Along the way, you will visit a less-known ancient village with a history of over 1,000 years, called Xiong Village. You will stroll along the cobblestone-paved alleys to delve into the unspoiled traditional lifestyle of the villagers. You can see that the antique residences still maintain their original look with wooden-board doors and windows and mottled walls. While staying there, you would feel like being brought back hundreds of years.

Now, as your 4 days Guilin tour has reached its end, we will transfer you to the airport or the high speed train station and see you off there. Hope you had a great time with us!

Meals: Western buffet breakfast