One of the nice things with the Thermo conferences is the mid conference field trip. It provides an excellent opportunity to meet and get to know other participants of the conference in a very different setting. During this field trip we got to see some of the beautiful karst landscape during a boat trip on the Li river from Xingping village and we visited one of the many spectacular caves in the area, the Silver Cave near Yanshuo.
Boat trip on Li river.
At one point during the boat trip a local woman comes on board with a bamboo rod with 2 cormorants. For a few yuan one can pose and be photographed with the cormorants balanced on one's shoulder. With the hundreds of tourist boats passing through per day, this is of course much more lucrative than the traditional fishing with cormorants. So I wonder if the old man in the photo below gets paid to fish in this part of the river, close to where the boat stops for the cormorant photo shoot.
An old fisherman fishing with cormorants.
At times there was more or less a boat traffic jam......
..... but the scenery is beautiful.
Water buffalos.
Tourist boats waiting in Xingping.
Waiting at the entrance to the Silver Cave, near Yanshuo. It was so busy here that we had to wait at least half an hour before we were allowed to enter the cave. The cave is spectacular, but the track through the cave is basically one long queue of people.
Mirror lake is the center piece of the Silver Cave, with perfect reflections of the cave formations in the lake.
I prefer natural lighting in caves, but Chinese tourists clearly prefer coloured lights.
This photo is taken with flash light, which overpowers the coloured lighting in the cave and gives (part of) the structures a more natural colour.
Many of the chambers and formations were enormous.
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