Magical landscape of karst mountains, waterfalls

China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region is known for its scenic beauty, but for most people the image starts and stops with Guilin, the region on the Li River celebrated for centuries in classic poetry and paintings. A road trip during the National Day holiday week through the opposite side of the province, along the border with Vietnam, revealed that Guangxi has much more than the Li River going for it.

After renting a car in Nanning, the provincial capital, I headed first for Daxin as a stopping point before going to Detian Falls the next day. On the way to Daxin, barely more than an hour out of Nanning, I came to Longhu Shan, or Longhu Mountain, a beautiful piece of primeval rainforest that is home to thousands of wild monkeys, including a population of about 3,000 macaques. Scenes there looked like they could have come right out of Africa or the Amazon rainforest.

Just as I entered the nature park a powerful storm hit, but after about an hour of intense rain and lightning, it let up as suddenly as it had appeared, and the place became magical. With the sun peeping out and the trees dripping wet, I hiked along a route that took me down and over a river via a bamboo bridge, then steeply back up stone stairs to a snack stand where a vendor sold me bags of peanuts and pointed to a large macaque sitting on a tree maybe 10 meters away, just staring at us. He said there were more monkeys along the way, pointing south.

That was an understatement. After maybe 10 minutes, I came to a spot that showed it wasn't the people who were eating all the peanuts. At a bi-level structure, visitors were feeding too many monkeys to count. Some had babies clinging to their undersides, some were big, some were small. Some were dominant, others meek. This was apparent when seeing the strong ones intimidate the others away in their effort to hog the food.

All appeared to be macaques, and it was fascinating to see how adroit and quick they were at peeling bananas or shelling peanuts and chestnuts.

Longhu Shan, at least for me, was easily worth the 60-yuan (US$9.8) admission charge. One could spend hours on the extensive system of trails and bridges, viewing monkeys not only being fed but also climbing, swinging and leaping from branch to branch in their natural arboreal environment. It was hard to believe this place was only about 70 minutes from Nanning.