The Yangshuo & Longji walk.

Meet in Guilin and drive south an hour and a half to Yangshuo, dropping bags at a guesthouse among the peaks. The first walk starts from the door: the Yulong River valley on its west bank footpaths, ten easy kilometres through paddy, pomelo groves and hamlets, with the karst towers standing in ranks on every side.

The half-way mark is the Ming-dynasty stone arch of the Yulong Bridge, still carrying foot traffic after five centuries. Tea in a riverside village while the cormorant fishermen set out for the evening; the day's walking ends as the fireflies start, and dinner is beer fish, the Yangshuo dish, cooked in the guesthouse kitchen.

The karst gives its views grudgingly, and today is the day you climb for them. A morning circuit south of town through the Banyan tree country to Moon Hill — the natural arch in a limestone tower you can walk to the shoulder of — then onto the village paths that link the smaller peaks, twelve kilometres with two short, steep viewpoint scrambles.

The afternoon walk threads back through farming hamlets where every path is shared with buffalo carts and schoolchildren. Finish with the sunset viewpoint above the Li River, watching the tour boats dwindle to lights below.

Optional and unmissable in the dark: the light-and-lava spectacle of a cormorant fishing demonstration is a tourist act, and we say so — but the real fishermen still work the Yulong at dusk, and you will have already watched them on day one.

Transfer forty minutes up the Li River to Xingping, the ancient river town, and walk the riverside trails south along the water: nine kilometres below the karst walls, past fishing rafts and drowned villages, to the viewpoint at the great bend — the exact scene printed on the back of the twenty-yuan note, which you should bring for the photograph.

Xingping itself is an old port town of Ming and Qing shopfronts, and lunch is in one of them. The afternoon crosses the river by ferry and returns north on the far-bank paths, the side the boats never see.

Late transfer north toward Guilin and onward up into the mountains — overnight in Longsheng town, ready for the terraces.

The road climbs two hours from Longsheng into the terraces, and the walk begins where the road gives up: five kilometres of stone-step paths rising through the paddies to the Zhuang village of Ping'an, perched at 880 metres above the 'seven stars and moon' configuration of fields that took its shape from the landscape, not the planners.

Check into a Zhuang timber guesthouse, then walk the village's two classic overlooks in the late light — the terraces from above are a bas-relief in green, and every field boundary was laid by hand.

Dinner with the family: sticky rice cooked in bamboo, the local chicken that has run up and down these steps all its life, and rice wine poured by the grandmother of the house.

The full terrace crossing: eleven kilometres of stone paths over the saddle between the two great village groups, from Zhuang Ping'an down through cloud forest and up again into the Yao country of Dazhai, deep in the Jinkeng bowl where the terraces climb in unbroken curtain from the valley floor to nearly 900 metres.

The route passes through hamlets where the washing lines and the drying racks are built over the paths, and the higher you climb the older the engineering looks — some walls here have held water since before the Ming. Long-haired Yao women of Dazhai keep the tradition of a single haircut from girlhood; the village explains it without performing it.

Arrive at Dazhai and a guesthouse on the middle terraces. If the sky is clear, the sunset from the west-facing viewpoint above the village turns the whole bowl gold.

A short dawn walk to the upper viewpoint while the mist still sits in the bowl — in season the fields are mirrors, flooded and reflecting the sky, and the photograph takes itself. Breakfast back at the guesthouse, then the cable car down for anyone whose legs have finished negotiating.

The road returns to Guilin by early afternoon, with a stop at the Longsheng hot springs if the train or flight allows. Trip ends at Guilin station or airport.

The honest summary: two landscapes, sixty kilometres of paths between them, and a strong preference, declared by everyone who finishes, for the stairs of water over the towers of stone — until they see the karst again at the airport and reverse the verdict.