From caves to cafes: China's 'cool resources' fan summer tourism

GUIYANG — With summer heat-waves sweeping across China, the country's southwestern karst areas are getting creative, offering unique tourism experiences deep within their cool caves.

Following a guide, tourist Chang Ting ducked into a natural cave in Guizhou province. After trekking about 100 meters along a narrow rocky path, her mobile signal disappeared.

"It felt like stepping back in time, and all the noise faded away," says Chang, from Xi'an, Shaanxi province.

This unique escape has emerged as a new travel fad among young Chinese people during summer vacations. The fresh approach to cave-based sightseeing gives tourists more to explore while boosting summer spending.

Viral videos tagged "Guizhou cave exploration" have gained over 5 million likes on major lifestyle and short-video platforms, with related topics racking up hundreds of millions of views.

Karst landforms cover more than 60 percent of the mountainous province, and a total of 42,800 karst cave entrances have been identified.

Leveraging these resources, Guizhou has developed diverse experiential forms of cave tourism to cater to different types of visitors. Options include outdoor cave adventures with semi-extreme sports, in-depth underground river tours with social media-friendly photo ops, and relaxing cave visits featuring themed dining spaces.

Song Yuanqiao and Zhao Fei, two veteran cave explorers with cave-rescue experience, run an adventure project in Yanzidong, or Sparrow Cave, in Guiding county. Relying on the natural cave passages, they have designed outdoor activities such as zip lines and tightrope bridges.

To turn this niche hobby into a standardized commercial operation, Song and Zhao visited Hungary, Spain, and other countries to learn cave route design, industrial codes and safety management standards.

Song recalls that back in 2018, cave exploration drew little public attention. In 2023, inquiries spiked dramatically as inexperienced tourists began asking about cave routes. "We never imagined it would become so popular," Song says.

A cafe now stands at the cave entrance while thrilling rock-climbing routes stretch deep inside. Since its trial operation in late April, the site has drawn more than 2,000 visitors.