The first panoramic view of the Li River stopped us in our tracks. Looking down, we saw a broad swath of inky-black water meandering past the town of Chaoping, through ranks of giant limestone towers and sparkling paddy fields. It was enough to stop a division of tanks let alone a small peloton of bicycles, and one by one we swept over the top of the hill and skidded to a halt on the gravel road.

In the fading, pinkish light the spectacle seemed inimitable, and oddly intimate. Miranda, our tour leader, sensed the confusion: “This landscape has been an inspiration to Chinese artists for centuries,” she said. “It may feel familiar because it has been reproduced so often on silk scrolls, prints and in photographs.”

With a timely sense of bathos, Paul McKiernan, a 32-year-old corporate financier, leant on his handlebars and added: “Yes, I think I’ve seen it on the wall of my Chinese takeaway in Tooting.” No replication, though, could prepare you for the real thing. Like Uluru, Cappadocia or the Ngorongoro Crater, the Li River is an emblematic landscape that has to be seen with your own eyes.

It is the exquisite symmetry of the river and the hundreds of uniquely shaped, isolated limestone hills that resonates in the imagination. The Chinese word for landscape, shanshui, literally means mountains and water, and the Li River region is a national symbol. As we were preparing to descend the hill, Sam, our bubbly local guide and bicycle mechanic, grasped my arm. “Look,” he said, snapping straight a 20-y uan note and pointing to the image. “The Li River. Beautiful. Now, let’s go.”

We had arrived the day before in Guilin, the capital of Guangxi province, to find it teeming with domestic tourists. It was the first night of “Golden Week”, a national holiday, and the open-air restaurants bulged with middle-class Chinese dining enthusiastically on snakes, eels, turtles, palm civets and other exotica for which the town is famous.

We felt smug in the morning, pedalling away from the madding crowd on the docks near Elephant Trunk Hill. We followed the highway for an hour before ducking on to a gravel road that snaked into the midst of the limestone towers to reach the glorious viewpoint above Chaoping.

There was little traffic on this route. The only vehicle was our support bus. Occasionally it pulled up to assist one of our team of ten men and six women as we laboured steeply up, away from the river and into the mountains.

The views improved as we wiggled our way into a thick cluster of 300m peaks. At the top of the climb, we slipped through a notch in the rock and the river disappeared. Every square foot of flat land had been terraced for agriculture and the women were out tilling the fields in broad-brimmed straw hats. The heat induced a mid-morning reverie and I pedalled gently along the next section, passed a turquoise lake and the village of Xi Tang before the long descent back towards the river.

We were filthy and tired when we arrived in Xing Ping, but the 35km (22 miles) had taken only five hours. In the afternoon there was time for a walk through the town’s rambling, cobbled streets before we clambered on to the roof of the hotel to watch the armada of tourist boats chug back towards Guilin as the sun set over the river.

At dawn the following morning we were on the river for a short cruise around the reach featured on the 20-yuan note. Then we were back on the road again, to Fuli, where we caught a small ferry to reach a riverside gravel road that brought us all the way to Yangshuo.

Backpackers discovered Yangshuo, squeezed in among a thicket of limestone hills and overlooking the Li, in the mid-1980s. It has grown from tiny market town to major tourist hub and is now an excellent place to hole up for a few days. There are dozens of restaurants, courses in everything from t’ai chi to rock climbing and shops catering for foreigners as well as the growing number of Chinese tourists.

Yangshuo, like much of China, is changing fast. The following morning we heard a series of booms, like distant artillery. “They are blasting to make the new highway,” Sam cheerily explained when we arrived at his own village. “In two years’ time, it will take only four hours to drive to Guangzhou.” Guangzhou, formerly Canton, is a big city and Yangs huo is destined to be its weekend playground.

In the village of Hebaoshan we stayed in a small guesthouse run by a family who cooked supper, plied us with beer and then dragged us out of bed at 4am to see the sunrise from a nearby peak. The serpentine river and the tips of the mountains appeared out of the darkness. Light turned the ribbon of water purple, then pink and, finally, orange as the sun came up. We still had a whole day’s cycling ahead of us to reach Guilin, but we had seen the Li in every light now and it had become an old friend.



Need to know

Rob Penn travelled with Explore (0870 3334001, www.explore.co.uk), which has 15-day cycling tours to the Great Wall and Guilin. The cost is from £1,594pp and includes flights from Heathrow, bike hire, B&B in hotels and guesthouses, local guides and support vehicle.

Reading: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler (John Murray, £9.99).

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