Around Yangzhou, once again, cone karst at its finest – admittedly quite similar to the corresponding landscapes in northern Vietnam or southern Thailand. The best thing is to cruise through the landscape on a bicycle (if only it weren’t so brutally hot), because between the rocky limestone mountains everything is flat. I was less prepared for Chinese mass tourism, that busloads of Chinese are channeled through the caves or to the boats by group leaders with megaphones. Guilin itself is one of the more than 100 Chinese megacities and thus rather unattractive: one high-rise next to the other.
I explain the formation of cone karst in my book The Formation of Mountains.
