This is the view from our hotel room in Guilin on our first night in mainland China. The promenade along the river that runs through town is done up with colorful lights.
Here's us at a highway rest stop just outside of Guilin, about to get underway on our bike tour.
Owen rides very carefully across a narrow stone bridge with no railing and river on either side.
The roadsides around Guilin are covered in citrus fruit stands, especially those selling pomellos, which look like big overgrown grapefruit.
See? Look at all them pomellos.
A key element in the majestic scenic beauty of this part of China is the vast yellow-green dry rice fields that seem to extend off into infinity.
See what I mean?
Rice drying on mats.
Another key scenic element here is the rice terraces: hills that have been flattened out in a stairstep pattern for rice cultivation.
All the buildings in the village have a traditional look; a more typical village has a mix of those and more modern concrete structures.
We stopped at many, many scenic vistas like this one.
Caution: A bolt of lightning may come out of the sky.
The Dragon Terraces are a very expansive set of rice terraces that are best viewed from above; plebian tourists need to hoof it up a set of steep stairs from the entrance but the more well-heeled can be carried there in style in one of these.
The yellow-and-green fields shown above are dry rice; this is the wet kind. The extent of my knowledge of the differences between the two is that, duh, one of them grows in a big puddle.
Cathy at the Dragon Terraces; rice farmers, knee-deep in water, look on.
Another view of the Dragon Terraces. We took a lot of photos here.
And I mean a lot.
Us at the Dragon Terraces
Corn hanging out to dry at a home in a village of Dong minority people. Dried corn is ground into a flour that is used to make pancakes, kind of like tortillas, but thicker.
We were there at the right time of year during relatively sunny weather, so lots of rice farmers were spreading their rice out in the sun to dry, like this. The lady crouching to the right is 183 years old.