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Website links to
Beifan Associates
Guilin Homepage.
Places to go and see.
Beifan.com
Metcn8.com.
Beifanchina.com.
Chinadan.com
Photos of Dragons.
FREE photos: FREE search: Click for information.
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Times Remembered After Our First Visit To Guilin, China, In A Tour Starting In Hongkong.
| We left Hong Kong in the rain, so were given plastic coats with hoods while we walked from the departure lounge, across the tarmac to the plane waiting to take us to Guilin.
One of the times remembered was our first view of Guilin and its spectacular scenery, its mountain peaks and sunlit paddyfields, seen through the plane window,
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but that did not prepare us for the experience of feeling as if we had walked into a brick wall when we walked onto the Guilin runway. The heat and humidity in Guilin was something new to us Europeans, and one of the times to be remembered about our first visit to Guilin and to China.
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We were visiting Guilin as our first stop on a Group Tour to China. Members of the group were from Wales, England, Germany, France, Australia and New Zealand, 30 members travelling with a representative of the Tour Operator. At the immigration check we were required to line up in the same order as we were listed on the Group Visa, and we had to ask if we wanted to have an entry stamp put on our passports. When we eventually left China from Guangzhou, no exit stamps were put on our passports. Many years later, when travelling across the border from China to Vietnam, Chinese officials queried the lack of an exit stamp!
After all the immigration, health, and customs checks had been completed, we left the Guilin airport to board an air-conditioned luxury 'tourist' coach to take us to our hotel; our first view of the streets. During the journey to our hotel in Guilin, the National Guide introduced himself,
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and said he would be with us for the rest of our tour of China. That is certainly one of the times to be remembered, because more than twenty years after that encounter, we are still together as friends, albeit in different countries, but a friendship nurtured by regular visits to China.
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Times Remembered About China, About Guilin, And About Chinese People.
Having checked in at the Guilin hotel, showered, eaten lunch, had a rest, explored the hotel, we went out to explore the streets, by pedicab. The pedicab driver had taken up his position by the hotel entrance, so clearly was expecting a customer or two during the day. The Guilin streets were not very busy, probably because the local people worked during the coolness of the morning and coolness of the evening, only crazy tourists would want to travel about in hot humid weather.
After joining the rest of the group for dinner at the hotel and receiving details of the following day's travel plans from the Tour Guide, my friend and I again returned to the streets, now much cooler and darker, lit only by small low wattage bulbs. There was certainly more activity; stalls open, people eating at pavement tables
in front of
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restaurants, coolies moving handcarts loaded with long precast concrete beams and posts, on their way to a building site, perhaps a new hotel; one coolie pulling, two coolies pushing. This was Guilin in 1987 when most jobs were labour intensive, but it is still an image remaining in the times remembered, about a first visit to China.
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