Yangshuo

Yangshuo is far inland and has no beaches. What it has instead is river swimming. In the hot months people swim from the gravel banks and shallow weirs of the Yulong River and in calm stretches of the Li, often at the end of a bamboo-raft or cycling day, and the water is pleasantly warm. It is a refreshing extra, not a reason to come. Anyone who wants sand and sea should plan a separate stay on the coast.

Eating in Yangshuo is built around a few regional dishes rather than a deep scene. The one everyone orders is beer fish, river fish braised with tomatoes, peppers and local beer. Alongside it come the Yangshuo stuffed dishes, where snails, tofu, bitter melon and aubergine are filled with seasoned pork, and the bowls of Guilin rice noodles eaten at breakfast. The restaurants around West Street lean towards tourist menus. Simpler places in the side streets and in the riverside villages are often better, using river fish, bamboo shoots and garden vegetables.

Cafés with Western breakfasts cater to climbers and backpackers. There is no fine dining tier and no wine or coffee culture worth seeking out.

Visitors do not come to Yangshuo for its sights. The town centre is mostly rebuilt, and West Street keeps its old stone paving and some traditional-style shopfronts but is lined with shops. Within the county there are older brick villages along the Yulong River, a few stone bridges such as the Ming-era Dragon Bridge, and the Big Banyan Tree, a tree said to be over a thousand years old. There are no significant museums. The real draw is the landscape, and a visitor interested in heritage will find more in the old towns in the area than in Yangshuo itself.

Yangshuo's nights happen on one street. After dark West Street and the lanes off it fill with crowds, and the bars open their doors to loud music, dancers on stage and table games. It stays busy well past midnight, mostly with domestic tourists out for a rowdy evening, and on weekends and during Golden Week and the Spring Festival it gets very crowded. If you want that, it is easy to find. Outside it there are a few quieter backpacker bars and riverside terraces, and in the villages and the countryside the night is dark and silent.

This is the reason to come. Hundreds of steep limestone karst peaks rise out of rice fields and bamboo groves right at the edge of town, with the Li and Yulong rivers winding between them. Hardly anywhere else is such famous scenery this close to your guesthouse. The classic outings are a bamboo raft drifting down the Yulong, a walk along the Li between Yangdi and Xingping past the view printed on the twenty-yuan note, and cycling the flat lanes between villages. Moon Hill, Xianggong Hill and the climb up Laozhai Hill above Xingping give the best viewpoints.

Yangshuo is also one of Asia's great rock-climbing bases, with hundreds of bolted limestone routes, and there is kayaking and caving too. Spring brings mist and green fields, summer is hot and wet, and autumn is the clearest season for walking and climbing.

The day trips are mostly small old towns rather than major sights. Xingping, about forty minutes up the Li River, has a compact quarter of old houses and a ferry landing. Fuli, closer still, is known for its old street and its painted-fan workshops. Daxu, an old river port on the road to Guilin, has a long flagstone street of wooden merchant houses, and Huangyao, about two hours away, is a better-preserved Ming and Qing town of ancestral halls and bridges.

Guilin is about an hour away, with its lakes and hills in the city and the Reed Flute Cave, though it is a pleasant city rather than a destination in itself. Taken together it is an agreeable list, not a remarkable one.

Yangshuo works best for families with older children who enjoy being outdoors. A bamboo raft on the Yulong River is gentle and almost every child loves it, and the show caves outside town, some with mud pools to bathe in, are fun. Easy bike rides through the villages also work, either on a tandem or with a child seat. Chinese families travel here in large numbers and children are welcome everywhere.

There is nothing built specifically for children, though: no zoo, theme park or play museum. Summers are hot, humid and stormy, West Street is noisy at night, and country roads carry scooters and tour buses, so cycling with young children takes care.

The town centre is small and easy to walk, but almost everything worth seeing is out in the countryside. Many visitors simply hire a bicycle or an electric scooter and ride the lanes along the Yulong River. Local minibuses link the town with Xingping, Fuli and the larger villages, and taxis, ride-hailing and drivers for hire fill the gaps. The high-speed rail station sits outside town, a drive away. Main roads can be busy with tour coaches, signage beyond the centre is mostly in Chinese, and without a bike or a driver much of the area is hard to reach.

Shopping here means souvenirs. West Street and the lanes around it are lined with stalls selling silk scarves, ethnic-style clothing, tea, jade trinkets and bamboo carvings, much of it mass-produced. The one real local craft is the hand-painted silk and paper fans of Fuli, a nearby village where workshops paint them by hand. Osmanthus products and local tea make simple gifts. There are no fashion streets or department stores, so nobody should come for the shopping.

Day to day, Yangshuo is cheap. Village guesthouses and small hotels in town cost little for most of the year, simple restaurant meals and rice-noodle breakfasts are inexpensive, and bicycles and local minibuses cost very little. Where money goes is the ticketed experiences: boat cruises on the Li River, bamboo rafts, cave entries and the big outdoor night show all carry tourist prices. During Golden Week and the Spring Festival, when much of China travels at once, room rates jump sharply. A traveller who mostly cycles, walks and eats locally will spend very little.

The performance everyone knows is the large outdoor night show on the Li River, created by the film director Zhang Yimou. Hundreds of local performers, lit on the water against the floodlit karst peaks, act out the legend of the folk singer Liu Sanjie and village life on the river, and it is a spectacle rather than a drama. Apart from that there is little to attend: a few staged ethnic dance shows for tour groups and loud cover bands on West Street. There is no theatre, concert hall or real live music scene.

Yangshuo has no bathing tradition and only a few spas, but it can be a very restful place if you stay in the right spot. Guesthouses in the Yulong River valley and the villages towards Xingping look out over rice fields and karst peaks, and days there settle into a slow rhythm of cycling, river swims and long evenings on a terrace. Tai chi and qigong classes are easy to find, as are foot and body massage. One of the show caves has a warm mud pool. The town centre is the opposite: crowded and loud late into the night. Choose the countryside if rest is the point.