7-Day Guilin & Yangshuo Karst Geography Field Study Tour

Afternoon — Arrival in Guilin
Your guide and driver will welcome you at the airport or railway station arrivals hall with a name sign, then transfer you by private vehicle to your hotel. Your guide assists with check-in and offers a brief orientation to Guilin, a city set among dramatic limestone karst peaks on the banks of the Li River. The remainder of the afternoon is free to rest and settle in before the evening highlight.

Evening — Two Rivers and Four Lakes Night Cruise
Embark on a serene boat cruise through Guilin's iconic Two Rivers (the Li River and Peach Blossom River) and Four Lakes (Ronghu, Shanhu, Guihu, and Mulong). Gliding past illuminated pagodas, arched bridges, and cliffs reflected on the still water, you see the city's karst scenery transformed for the night. The route links the lakes and rivers through a series of locks into one continuous scenic waterway. This tranquil journey offers a magical introduction to Guilin's natural and cultural beauty.

Morning — Qifeng Town: the tower karst field
The day begins southeast of the city in the peak cluster at Qifeng Town, where hundreds of limestone towers rise from an almost flat plain. It is a textbook example of tower karst, and because it receives far fewer visitors than the river it is a practical place to stop and look properly. At the outcrop your guide works through the basics: the bedding planes that show the limestone was laid down in a shallow sea, the vertical joints that control how water attacks the rock, and the solution grooves that run down the bare faces.

Late morning — from tower to plain
Walking out from the towers onto the surrounding plain, the group looks at the relationship between the two: the residual hills, the red soils between them, and the depressions where drainage goes underground rather than running off. The exercise is to read the landscape rather than photograph it — sketching the skyline profile and recording where water disappears.

Lunch
A simple local restaurant in the Qifeng area.

Afternoon — underground: the cave as a laboratory
The afternoon moves underground, into a show cave where the same chemistry is visible as deposition rather than dissolution: stalactites fed by drips that lose carbon dioxide at the cave ceiling, stalagmites built up beneath them, and flowstone where water runs rather than drips. Your guide covers what speleothems record and why they are difficult to read, and the group measures and sketches rather than only looking.

Late afternoon — the river and its load
On a bank of the Li River, the group examines what the river carries and where it drops it: gravel bars on the inside of bends, finer sand in slack water, and the terrace surfaces that mark where the channel used to run. Grain size, sorting and rounding are recorded on a printed worksheet, and the session closes with a short discussion of how a karst river behaves differently from a river in impermeable rock.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning — the road up
The drive from Guilin to the Longji terraces takes roughly two and a half hours and climbs steadily into the hills of Longsheng. On the way your guide sets up the question the day is built around: how do you grow a crop that needs standing water on the side of a mountain where the nearest river is far below? The answer, built over centuries and still maintained by hand, is what you are going to walk through.

Late morning — Ping'an Zhuang village
Ping'an is a Zhuang village of wooden stilt houses stacked up the slope, built in the local way with the animals below and the family above. From the village you walk out into the terraces themselves and follow the water: the channels that take it off the mountain, the simple gates and bamboo pipes that divide it between households, and the bunds that hold it on each step. Your guide explains the calendar — flooding, transplanting, weeding, harvest — and what has to happen in each season for the system to keep working.

Lunch
A village meal: rice from the terraces, cured pork, river fish, and pickled vegetables.

Afternoon — Zhuang brocade and the household economy
Zhuang brocade is one of the traditional brocades of China, woven on a wooden loom with a coloured weft against a plain warp. A weaving demonstration at a household covers the loom, the patterns and how long a piece takes, and gives the group a way into the wider question of what a terraced household actually earns and how tourism has changed that calculation. Some terraces here are also stocked with fish, an older practice that returns protein as well as grain from the same flooded plot.

Late afternoon — the walk down and the drive back
A last stretch of terrace path down to the road, then the drive back to Guilin, arriving in the evening.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning - boarding at the pier
You leave Guilin early for the pier, because the boats go downstream in convoy and the water is at its quietest in the morning. The cruise down to Yangshuo covers about eighty kilometres and takes four to four and a half hours, and after the first half hour the city is gone and the river is running between the towers. These are limestone hills, eroded into steep-sided cones and vertical cliffs with flat floors between them; the whole landscape is what geologists call tower karst, and it is the reason the area draws students of geology as well as tourists. The river makes a series of great bends, and the standard sequence of named viewpoints comes up in order - the peaks at Yangdi, the Nine Horses Hill, the sharpened pencil towers, and finally the stretch at Xingping that is printed on the back of the twenty-yuan note. Your guide will tell you which is which, and the boat has an open deck for the middle hours.

Lunch
Lunch is served on board - simple, hot and included in the ticket. The speciality of the stretch is the river fish, usually steamed with ginger and spring onion.

Afternoon - arrival in Yangshuo
The boat lands at Yangshuo in the middle of the afternoon. The town sits in a bend of the river under a cluster of towers, with West Street as its old centre - busy, commercial and loud in the evening, though the lanes behind it are quieter and the countryside starts within a fifteen-minute walk. Depending on the time of year and the water level, the afternoon can be spent on the river bank, on a bicycle loop out to the villages, or simply at the hotel; the following day is given to the countryside.

Evening - West Street
Dinner in town: beer fish, the local specialty cooked with the river's carp, and stuffed snails. Afterwards the riverside is the place to walk; there is a light show on the water on most nights, and if you would rather see the mountains instead, the Impression Liu Sanjie performance on the river below town is staged on a schedule your guide can confirm.

Cultural Insight - natural criteria
The karst around Guilin and Yangshuo was added to the World Heritage list in 2014 as an extension of the South China Karst, which was first inscribed in 2007. The citation is under natural criteria: the property is recognised as the world reference for tower karst and for the geological processes, some three hundred million years old, that produced it. The effect of seeing it from a boat rather than a viewpoint is worth noting - the towers are individually unremarkable and collectively astonishing, and the scale only registers from the water.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Yangshuo.

Early morning — out before the boats
Birds are most active in the first hours of light and the river is quietest before the cruise boats start, so the day begins early with a transfer to a calm reach away from the main channel. Your guide carries a spotting scope and a printed checklist, and the group moves slowly along the bank, stopping wherever something shows.

Morning — what is on the water
Egrets feed in the shallows and in the wet rice fields behind the bank; kingfishers work the overhanging branches; swallows and martins feed over the surface. In the cooler months the river also carries visiting waterfowl, and spring and autumn bring passage through the valley. Nothing here is a guaranteed sighting, which is part of the point — the session teaches how to look and how to record, and the checklist is yours to keep.

Late morning — the riverbank as a habitat
The second session is on structure rather than species: the vegetation zones from open water to reedbed to cultivated field, how the bank changes after a flood, and what the deposited sediment tells you about the last high water. The group also looks at the human side directly — fishing methods, sand extraction, and the traffic of tourist rafts — and discusses what each of them costs the river.

Lunch
A village restaurant near the river, with local river fish and vegetables.

Afternoon — wetland walk and field notebooks
An afternoon walk through the wetter ground behind the bank, where the reedbeds and the irrigation channels hold a different set of birds, followed by a seated session to compile the day's list, sketch the vegetation zones, and write up the observations. Your guide leads a short discussion on the conservation measures that apply here and the arguments around them.

Evening — free, with suggestions
Dinner in Yangshuo, then the evening is yours; your guide can point you towards West Street or the riverside paths.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight in Yangshuo.

Morning — into the fields
A short drive out of Yangshuo into the flat farmland between the karst towers, where the same families have worked the same plots for generations. You meet the household you will be working with and your guide translates throughout. The work depends entirely on the season: transplanting rice in late spring and early summer, weeding and water management through the summer, harvest in autumn, and orchard work pruning and picking kumquat and pomelo in the cooler months.

Late morning — the work itself
You work alongside the household rather than watching: standing water, mud, and the technique of getting seedlings into the ground at the right depth and spacing. It is slower and harder than it looks, and the household will usually correct your form within the first few minutes. Tools, irrigation practice and the crop calendar all come up naturally while you work.

Lunch
A farmhouse meal cooked by the household, largely from what the farm and the kitchen garden produce.

Afternoon — oil tea and the kitchen
Oil tea is a Guangxi staple: tea leaves pounded with ginger and garlic, fried in fat, then boiled into a savoury broth poured over puffed rice and served with condiments. You make a batch under instruction, and while it is going your guide covers the wider picture — what the farm sells, what it keeps, how much a plot this size supports, and how tourism and migrant work have changed a household's arithmetic over one generation.

Late afternoon — return
Drive back to Yangshuo in the late afternoon. This day pairs with the Li River wetland day as a two-day ecology and agriculture programme.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning — field notebook review and team presentations
The programme closes the way field courses should, with the students doing the talking. Each team has spent the week keeping a field notebook across three contrasting sites — the tower karst around Qifeng, the Longji rice terraces, and the Li River channel and its wetland margin. Teams now present one transect each: what they measured, what they saw change upstream to downstream or uphill to downhill, and where their observations met or contradicted the reading they were set beforehand.

The session is led by the accompanying teacher with the field guide present, and each team takes questions from the others. Notebooks, photographs and sketch maps are handed in as the programme record, and the best judged transect is written up on the final day for the school to keep.

Late morning — West Street and the last hour
Yangshuo's West Street has been the town's market street since the Qing dynasty and is now the place students spend a final hour: local snacks, printed cloth, and the kind of ordinary street life that does not appear in a textbook. It is also the practical last stop for anything the group wants to buy before the airport.

Farewell lunch
Lunch is taken in Yangshuo before the drive north. Beer fish, stuffed river snails and Guangxi rice noodles are the regional dishes to try; the guide orders around allergies and any dietary requirements the group registered at booking.

Afternoon — transfer to Guilin and departure
The drive from Yangshuo to Guilin takes about an hour and a half. Groups flying out are transferred to Guilin Liangjiang International Airport; groups continuing by rail are transferred to Guilin North Railway Station for the high-speed service toward Guangzhou, Guiyang or Changsha. Your guide assists with check-in and stays until the group has cleared.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch