greenatopia: The town of Guilin

The town of Guilin was, hmm, how to say this, weird. There is this lovely park in the middle of town with two temples in the middle of the lake; and this lovely park was free. Then there are all these other parks around town that you have to pay to enter. I'm pretty sure paying to get into green space is anti-communist.

I tried to bike to what was supposedly a quaint old village. There was great signage in Latin letters all the way until I actually needed to turn. That was when the signage went Mandarin only. Oh well. I tried a couple of turns, but since I still had another 15 km to go (I had already gone about 20) without clear assurances that I was going the right way, well, the gamble was a little too high. So I turned back. Thus, I biked about 40 km in awful smog to see the sprawling edge of Guilin. At least I had a fairly nice bike lane for almost the entire way. Odd note about Guilin: the main road out of town seems to have more auto parts stores than I've seen over the course of my entire life, and I am not young!