Okay, my boatman is now officially freaked out and now refuses to continue with the river tour, though he does so reluctantly. According to his informant, the river police are still patrolling the Li River, so there is little chance for him to continue the river cruise. While we were waiting for the coast to clear, I was taking photos of a nearby village.
When it became clear that the river police won’t be going away anytime soon, he proposed that we walk all the way to the end. I didn’t really mind it, from a river cruise it became a hike. Besides, the surrounding land is certainly great for hiking and now, I have a guide!
There is a narrow path along the river banks that allow for hiking. This gives visitors a close up view of the wonderful scenery that is the Xingping section of the Li River. The side where the path is doesn’t have the karst mountains but they are rather on the opposite side, so it is perfect for appreciating this wonder of nature.
The walk is pretty much flat with a little scrambling through some rocks where there is no path. At the time it seemed to be low tide so we didn’t really get out feet wet. My boatman seems to be very relaxed now that he didn’t need to worry about getting caught by the river police. He just left our bamboo raft where we parked upstream. This should not be that big a problem, who would steal a bamboo raft here?
At the end of the hike was the Nine Horse Painting Mountain 九马画山 – quite a mouthful but it is much shorter in Chinese. This limestone mountain right at the bend of the river as a verticle limestone surface that supposedly looked like a Chinese painting with Nine Horses thus the name. The different shades of the rock give the appearance of horses against the rock surface.
One would have to really stretch the imagination to see the nine horses, my boatman asked me how many horses I saw. I couldn’t only see three. He can see only four. At least mine wasn’t so bad. Further upstream is the village of Yangdi 扬堤. As I would find out later, this section of the Li River is even more spectacular than the one I just went through. Unfortunately, I only paid to go up to this point. Come to think of it now I wonder why I didn’t proceed to Yangdi since I did not have a boat anyway.
As I was told, the authorities have segmented the Li River so the people crossing from one segment to another will need to pay some fees. Also it would be necessary to cross the river several times. There are ferry services to help you do this. Now that I was at the end of my journey, my boatman needed to go back to his boat to make sure that it is still there. He informed me that he had called ahead and make sure that his friend is waiting for me to send me back to Xingping town since we lost the bamboo raft. This trip really turned out to be an interesting one after all.
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