Guizhou: where did I see that large statue of Mao before?

Winter Wonderland

From Anshun I took the bus to Guizhou. Too bad there weren’t any stops, some of the sights where amazing. Especially the frozen rice fields. Usually when we think of rice fields the prominent color that comes to mind is green, there was no green in the rice fields these days but the replacing white made a spectacular sight nonetheless. The rice fields were not the only things that were frozen, some parts of the highway were suitable for the Dutch elfstedentocht (ice skating competition linking 11 cities). I’m wondering if the Chinese use any precautions against this (like salting the roads) but those parts where untreated, and we saw some minor collisions during the trip. Our bus also made some small slips but the driver drove slowly and kept lots of distance from other vehicles. Personally I was more worried about the woman next to me: she puked at least three times during the 2 hour trip…

How to beat the peak season?

Arriving on one of the bus stations in Guizhou, my first action was to ask for a bus to Guilin only to hear that these depart from another bus station about 5 kilometers downtown. My other plan was to take several other buses to small villages and enter the southern province of Guangxi that way. I asked for a ticket to the first village, Kaili, which should be easy reachable from Guizhou. To my surprise the answer was that buses don’t drive to Kaili! Heavy snowfall had made even the highways unusable! If Kaili is already that bad, going down south from there over the lesser roads probably requires a snowmobile...

Luckily the train station was nearby, and even though buying a ticket in Anshun wasn’t successful I decided to give it another try. I asked at the information stand at which window I could buy ticket to Guiin, they said window number 1 but window number 1 wasn’t open for business… So I walked to the front of that queue to check why, the window had a 'closed' sign in front of it. After I stood there thinking whether to join one of the other fifteen or so rows, each with at least 200 other potential travelers, or go all the way to the other bus station to try to buy a bus ticket there, something amazing happened. The sign disappeared. Within seconds people around me and others from adjacent queues moved to form a new disorganized queue in front of the newly opened window. Luckily I was pretty much in front and only had to wait 10 minutes before I could buy my ticket. Most amazing thing was that the ticket I wanted was actually available; with the exception that the train stops at Guilin North station and not at Central but that shouldn’t be a big problem. I was pretty glad to get out of the cold and move south where the weather should be more pleasant.

Mao is everywhere

Having around 6 hours to spend before the train departs I entered the city of Guizhou. It has lot of similarities with Chengdu, for example the style of buildings in the skyline and not the least, a large statue of Chairman Mao. Looking very similar to the Chengdu one, and Mao was making the exactly same gesture, so I wondered if they mass produced these statues in the past. Although a little bit large it would be a nice souvenir to bring home one day...Guizhou doesn’t have a real city center: the shops are sprawled over a large area with the major roads crossing that area. From one side of the street you have to walk under the main road or over using the tunnel or bridge. Besides lacking a center I found that the city has much less restaurants compared to other large cities in China. It took me some time before I could find a nice place to sit. Pretty boring city at first glance, and I was not sad to leave it behind.

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