Guilin Travel - What is the BEST way to appreciate Guilin's Limestone Karst Landscape?

Some travel guide books say that " ... GUILIN is one of China's most terrible traveler traps, totally dependent on visitors for its earnings and flaunting an luxurious service industry tailored to the well-heeled tour groups that are without end passing through...."

It is, nevertheless, a good-looking city, with abundance of elegant landscaping, shady avenues and rocky parkland to discover– not to talk about the opportunity to go aboard on the well-known Li River cruise downstream past the host of bizarrely formed, legend-ridden outcrops which line the river banks. Budget travelers might struggle in Guilin's mercenary feeling, but in that case it's easy to choose Yangshuo as your starting point., just ninety minutes away to the south, and travel here on an excursion.

The capital of Guangxi from the Ming dynasty until 1914, Guilin just in progress to play any important role in the past after losing that grade to Nanning. Sun Yatsen designed the Nationalists' "Northern Expedition" here in 1925, the Long Marchers were thoroughly trounced by Guomindang factions outside the city nine years later, and the war with Japan saw over a million refugees hiding out in Guilin, until the city was engaged by the invaders – events harrowingly recounted in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club. Wartime violence spared the city's natural monuments except turned the center into a ragged provincial shell, neatened up since the late 1980s by a self-conscious decoration plan involving planting every available open space with flora, and lining streets with sweet-scented osmanthus trees. All this lightens the contemporary, high-density building and serious pedestrian and motor traffic, but it's the well-known hills that are Guilin's spotlight of attention, not the city itself.

Take a look at the picture below, the Li River scenery is printed on Chinese currency, the 20 RMB banknotes.

Many of you have watched the American TV show Survivor, in which contestants are isolated in very extreme wild environment, and they compete with each other for the ONE MILLION USD cash award. At each single competitions, "survivors" will be awarded prizes such as a great meal, a wonderful trip. 

The season 15 was hosted in CHINA! And the Li River Cruise was awarded as one of the prizes. Spectacular is what "survivors" describe the cruising experience on the Li River.  Check the video clip below.