Once and a while, I come upon a place clearly favored by nature in all regards. GuiLin is such a place. As a sheet of thick limestone that was the ocean floor, it later rose above the sea level to be sculpted into 30,000 peaks by millenniums of erosion. The result is a fairyland, a prototype of Chinese landscape ink painting. Being in GuiLin, one feels the presence of nature more acutely, simply because the landscape communicates a certain impression of being designed and manufactured, instead of occurred randomly. Perhaps, nature does have spirit and crafts the place with a poetic tenderness. With that, it is easier to explain why the landscape literally moved me.
It just so happened that in two days, I took two river cruises. one is the worst in my life and the other the best.
The worse one happened on the first night. A project was started in 1998 right after Curtis visited GuiLin (he went without me because he hasn’t met me yet). Some millions were spent to link the Li River and Peach Blossom River together with four small lakes in the city. Years of silting have made the passage non-navigatible. The idea to generate a city waterway cruise was not a bad one actually, yet the way they “crafted” it was nothing but compelling. Thousands of lights were installed to illuminate the landscape and various structures along the way, but the lights were just a bit out of ordinarily too colorful to be called good taste. I encountered a miniature Golden Gate Bridge right next to a small version of Zhaozhou bridge, the first arch bridge in China. Then a Venetian bridge accessorized with plaster nude Italian sculpture came out of the place, quickly followed by a miniature Brooklyn bridge, which was juxtaposed to one that was clearly modeled after London bridge. It seems that the person who designed this place had a tremendous fantasy on bridges and most likely considered it is so cool to have all of them built. Having those weird-looking things across the river in a landscape that is nothing but Chinese was beyond ridiculous, it was criminal. The person should be taken out to be shot. Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, it did. To add more “beauty” to it, they implanted clusters of music performances along the way. Groups of Chinese women dressed in traditional clothing would start playing Chinese traditional music when our boat approached. But then I also had a Jazz trio performance under one of the European-looking bridge, a Chinese opera performance with a large crowd, and finally the disaster ended with a Bellagio’s like fountain dancing with techno house music, with some Chinese pavilions in the back. That was a dumbfounding moment.
Then it hit me. Under the skin of the project, they were trying to create a theme park, yet when I came to think about it, there wasn’t any clear theme either. All it was there was some atrocious bad taste. One that felt more grotesque in a city like this where nature has been so generous. Humans seem to be ready to ruin it. When I got back to the hotel, I took a long shower as if it could wash away everything I had seen.
With lots of worries, I embarked on the second cruise the next day. It was to get to YangShuo, a smaller town downstream from GuiLin. I prayed that they didn’t do anything outrageous to disrupt the natural scenery. For I would not be able to survive it being on the boat for 4 and half hours.
As it turned out, it was the best river cruise I have ever taken.
The scenery was surreal and beyond words. Li River literally wanders through thousands of Lime stone peaks rising up in the countryside. The banks were often covered thick bamboo forest, called Phoenix tail bamboos here. Occasionally, a flying eve of a village would peek out of the forest, or a herd of buffalos were gazing on the bank, signaling an otherworldly utopia hidden within. .
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