Five days through Guilin’s karst country, designed around the rivers, rice terraces, and village rhythms that make this landscape world-famous.
A Three-Star cruise traces the Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo, drifting past Nine Horses Mural Hill and the Yellow Cloth Shoal printed on the 20-yuan banknote. Traditional bamboo rafts carry you down the quieter Yulong River in the afternoon. Yangshuo’s flat Ten Miles Gallery cycling route winds past Moon Hill’s natural limestone arch, and a wellness afternoon layers tea therapy with a Zen body-tapping session that loosens the travel fatigue out of your shoulders and back. The route climbs to the Longji Rice Terraces — seven-hundred-year-old Zhuang and Yao rice steps carved into mountain ridges — for a night at a traditional stilt-house homestay, a hands-on afternoon of glutinous rice pounding, oil-tea making, and bamboo-tube rice cooking, and a Zhuang fire-pit banquet under the rafters. The journey closes back in Guilin with Elephant Trunk Hill and the Ming-dynasty Jingjiang Princes’ Palace before an evening return home.
Your guide meets you at arrivals at Guilin Liangjiang International Airport or Guilin Railway Station — a private car is waiting. From here, everything is handled.
After settling into your city-centre boutique hotel, the afternoon is yours to recover from the flight and walk the riverside at your own pace. Guilin is built around the Li River, and the karst peaks that made this landscape world-famous begin right in the city.
The day closes with a wellness welcome dinner — the Guilin kitchen leans toward clean, slow cooking built on local ingredients. Expect white gingko stewed duck (*bai guo dun lao ya*), Li River steamed fish (*Lijiang qing zheng yu*), and organic seasonal vegetables. Your guide walks through the four days ahead over tea and answers any questions before you head back to the hotel to rest.
After breakfast, a private car takes you to the cruise pier for the morning’s main event — a three-star Li River Cruise from Guilin down to Yangshuo. The boat drifts slowly past the most-photographed stretch of the river: Nine Horses Mural Hill (*Jiu Ma Hua Shan*), where centuries of weathering have resolved the cliff face into the shapes of nine running horses, and the Yellow Cloth Shoal (*Huang Bu Dao Ying*) — the exact bend printed on the back of the 20-yuan banknote. Karst peaks pass on both banks for the better part of four hours.
Lunch on arrival in Yangshuo is a Li River fish wellness meal — the river fish is the signature of this stretch, cooked simply with ginger and spring onion to keep the flavour clean.
The afternoon trades the larger boat for a traditional Yulong River Bamboo Raft (*Yulong He*) drift. Yulong is the quieter sister of the Li — two rafters and a poler per boat, with karst peaks, small stone bridges, and pastoral villages passing on both sides. The pace is unhurried and meditative.
After a Yangshuo wellness dinner, the evening closes with front-row seats at Impression Liu Sanjie (*Yinxiang Liu Sanjie*) — Zhang Yimou’s original Impression show. The Li River itself is the stage and twelve floodlit karst peaks are the backdrop; six hundred local performers in minority costume move across the water to choreographed light. It is still the largest outdoor stage in the world. The car returns you to the Yangshuo hotel afterward.
After breakfast, a short drive brings you to the start of the Ten Miles Gallery (*Shili Hualang*) — Yangshuo’s signature cycling corridor. The route is flat, easy, and paved; the riding is gentle rather than athletic. Karst peaks line the road, rice fields spread out on either side, and the route passes beneath Moon Hill (*Yueliang Shan*) — a natural limestone arch where a perfect moon-shaped hole cuts straight through the ridge. Your guide rides alongside and points out the photo stops.
Lunch is a pastoral private-kitchen meal — light, seasonal, and built from mountain-gathered ingredients.
The afternoon shifts into a slower register. A guided Tea Therapy (*cha liao*) session opens with a local tea master leading a slow tasting of Guangxi’s wellness-leaning teas — pu’er, Liubao, and a mountain herb blend — each poured through several infusions with the properties of each explained as you drink. That flows into a Zen Body-Tapping (*chan pai*) practice: the instructor guides rhythmic open-palm tapping along the arms, shoulders, back, and legs, drawing on traditional Chinese meridian-tapping technique. The goal is to loosen the travel fatigue out of your muscles and warm the body through gentle percussion rather than massage — relaxing, unhurried, and something you can keep practising after the trip.
Dinner is an organic Yangshuo kitchen meal before the car returns you to the hotel for an early night.
After breakfast, a private car leaves Yangshuo for the Longji Rice Terraces (*Longji Titian*) — roughly a three-hour drive north into the ridge country of Longsheng. The road climbs steadily; by late morning the valley opens onto seven-hundred-year-old terraces carved into the mountain slopes, first shaped by Zhuang and Yao farmers in the Yuan dynasty and still farmed today.
Lunch is a Longji farmhouse meal — vegetables and rice from the surrounding terraces, cooked over a wood fire.
The afternoon is a hands-on Zhuang Village Crafts session with a local family. With a village instructor leading each stage, you take turns pounding glutinous rice into ciba rice cakes (*da ci ba*) in a wooden mortar, learn to make oil tea (*da you cha*) — the Zhuang and Yao stir-frying a tea brew that anchors every household meal — and cook bamboo-tube rice (*zhutong fan*) in fresh-cut bamboo over open flame. The instructors explain how each dish fits into Zhuang daily life, and you eat what you have just made.
As dusk falls, dinner is a Zhuang Fire-Pit Banquet (*zhuang xiang huotang yan*) — the village long table sets up around the open hearth, with smoked meats, mountain vegetables, and rice wine served under the rafters while village performers bring out traditional Zhuang songs and dances. You stay overnight inside the terraces at a traditional Zhuang Stilt-House Homestay (*diaojiaolou*) — wooden floors, a veranda onto the rice steps, and the village quieting down outside your door.
Dawn over the Longji terraces is the quietest moment of the trip — the ridges lit in soft light before the village wakes. After a farmhouse breakfast, the private car starts the return to Guilin.
Lunch in Guilin is a light wellness meal before the afternoon’s city sights. A guided walk around Elephant Trunk Hill (*Xiangbi Shan*) — Guilin’s city symbol, a limestone hill shaped like an elephant lowering its trunk to drink from the Li River. Water Moon Cave runs between the trunk and body of the elephant, and at certain angles the cave and its reflection form a complete moon on the water.
The afternoon closes with a walk through the Jingjiang Princes’ Palace (*Jingjiang Wang Cheng*) — a Ming-dynasty princely city built between 1372 and 1392, older than the Forbidden City in Beijing. Fourteen princes across twelve generations lived inside these walls over the 257 years of the Ming dynasty. Today the site also serves as a campus of Guangxi Normal University, and the climb up Solitary Beauty Peak at its centre gives a panorama of the entire old city.
Timed to your flight or train, the private car takes you to Guilin Liangjiang Airport or Guilin Station to close out the five-day journey.
