Ian in China – Living in China content, Asia food and travel videos!

Cruising down the Li River in Guilin, China

Posted on September 1, 2016

I have been posting about Guilin for the last few weeks, and the main reason we came to Guilin in the first place was to take a boat ride down the famous Lijiang River. When we were at Yao Mountain the previous day (Check out this blog post: Guilin Day 2: Annoying local fishermen, and riding the Yao Mountain Cable Car Ride) we met this interesting tour guide named Claude who, surprisingly, spoke pretty decent English. We had already purchased Li River boat ride tickets on a large 100 person vessel – but Claude told us for about half the price he could get us our own individual raft without a million tourists in our faces every time there is a photo opportunity. So, reluctantly we said yes! Here is the video I made of our journey below, but don’t forget to read on for some unforgettable pictures!

The next morning, we ate some Burger King  (Because there was literally no good breakfast in the area…) and took the one hour bus ride to Caoping, which is where the boats were docked.

Once we got to Caoping, I bought 5 or 6 Liquan river beers (The only beer that they seem to sell in this region of China…) and we hopped on our vessel and began our beautiful journey.

As the boat took off and we sailed down the river, I was beyond amazed. This had to be one of the most peaceful awesome rides of my life. While sipping beers and getting a nice buzz going was also cool, the unique curves of these mountains and the green tinge of the river were absolute eye candy.

We even saw a fair share of wildlife in the river. We saw plenty of ducks, and we also saw some water buffalo! We tried to approach the water buffalo on land too, but they were very hesitant and of course walked away very fast.

As we continued our trek down, we saw a number of memorable peaks and mountains. We also saw a very famous cave as well, that was clearly famous due to the number of tourists outside it.

Of course during that boat ride I was busy filming the whole time and I produced a great YouTube video for this day, which can be seen at the top of this page. Don’t forget to check out  my YouTube channel, and make sure to like and subscribe if you enjoyed the content!