Guilin #5: Reed Flute Cave...

OK, let me clear out the rest of my Guilin (

桂林) Trip! (now three weekends ago! so far behind!)

Our main destination for the final (rainy) day in Guilin was the 'Reed Flute Cave' (芦笛岩 - named after the reeds that grows nearby.  It was about 20 minutes by taxi from downtown... there wasn't much outside except some tourist trap shops and bus parking lots... but inside was quite impressive!    

最後の桂林の写真ブログですよ！中国の広西桂林の旅行最後観光所は’芦笛岩’と言いました。山の中洞窟です。桂林市から何分だけのタクシです。すごい面白かった。僕の写真を見て下さい！

Check it out:

The cave wasn't really really deep (i think only about 1/4 mile or so.... but the ceiling in the galleries was quite tall and the stalactites were pretty huge!

Pretty impressive!  But before you get the wrong idea,  those spectacular colors are coming from artificial lighting,  not natural colors of the rocks!  (like I said in Guilin part 1, Chinese people have gone APE$HIT over the colored lights)

Here's a without flash and with flash to see what the real colors are:

OK, natural beauty is nice, but in this case the lighting 'enhances' the natural beauty...

Needless to say, even in caves, that Chinese habit of finding things that rock formations look like and then naming them after that ( as mentioned here) extends to the underground ones as well:

Sometimes its a real stretch...

But in this case I do see some string beans:

In the back there was a really large gallery,   looked like you could play a full tennis match in there:

the ceiling was really high too...

The one on the right was called the pineapple... for obvious reasons.

In one part there's a small pool of water with rocks cropping up... they call it 'Little Guilin' - saying its resembles the limestone mountains found outside...  i tried to do a zoom shot from the opposite side of the gallery to get a good angle...

One thing about the colored lights... I'm absolutely sure they destroyed a lot of the cave's formations in climbing around, hanging lights and running wires...   One weird thing was that the lights would shut off after only a minute or two... basically you had to wait for the chinese language tour guides to come through and use their remote control to turn the lights on in a given section...     I guess all those lights use up too much electricity to leave on all the time... :-P

on the way out, one more formation:

This one was called something like 'Lion sees off guests' or something like that...  actually kind of looked like a petrified lion... 

anyway, a pretty good cave... I've been to ones in the US, Europe and Japan,  this one was definitely the most colorful...