We are staying in the beautiful courtyard hostel of the Giggling Tree at Yangshuo. We are right in the heart of the beautiful Karst mountains and nestled between the Li and Yulong rivers. Here bamboo rafts drift up and down past paddy fields and water buffalo grazing in pastures.
We have a spent a couple of days walking around and exploring these beautiful limestone hills that rise up and look like all sorts of shapes, camels, elephants tortoises and so on. One of the hills is called Moon Hill, as it has a crescent shaped hole through it like the moon. This used to be a cave. We have also been to explore Silver Cave. This huge twisting, turning cavern is full of stalactites and stalacmites, pillars and folds of sparkly rock. There were pools with amazing reflections and light highlighting the beautiful formations.
We had an exciting adventure in the evening, we went to see the cormorant fishermen on the Li river. We sat on a raft next to the cormorant fisherman on his bamboo raft with his 5 cormorants. We travelled up the river, and the fisherman let his birds dive and glide under the water to catch the fish. His raft had a light on the front so we could see the birds as they swam under the water. The birds have a tie around their necks so that they couldn’t swallow the big fish. We stopped by the river bank so the fisherman could open the birds beaks and take the fish out into a basket…..he had to be quick because once he had untied their nooses, they were a bit cheeky and tried to eat the fish out of the basket!!!! While we were on the bank, the fisherman put a bamboo hat on Ellie’s head and then plonked a cormorant on her arm, much to her surprise! Will also had a go but found the cormorant rather heavy on his arm!!!!
13 Responses to Cor.. what a way to catch fish!