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Published: October 7th 2011
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After the horrible early start (got up at 5:20AM) in Huai Hua I got on the train. Hard seat carriages have 3 person seats on one side and 2 person seats on the other. Every single 3 person seat was taken up by a person lying down sleeping, so that left only the 2 person seats. They were nearly all taken, but I found one with a working window. The first 2 hours were nice enough. Then a few people left and I grabbed a 3 person seat and tried to have a nap for another hour.
I checked my map and realised that this train actually went pretty close to a place called LongSheng, the gateway to the ‘Devil’s Backbone Rice Terraces’, a place I wanted to see. So I got off the train after only 4.5 hours of travel at a backwater called SanJiang, and joined a crowded minivan for a 20 minute ride to some other fleabitten town, from where I got a bigger bus to LongSheng. My real goal was the village of “Ping An” in the rice terraced area. When I got to LongSheng however, I found the 1PM bus to Ping An had just left,
and there wouldn’t be another one for 2 hours. The bus station looked awful, and I didn’t relish staying there for 2 hours with nothing to do, and probably nowhere nice to eat or wait. So I got a ‘taxi’ (I use the word loosely) to take me to Ping An for 100RMB. Maybe at first I thought this was a steep price but the poor bugger really earned his money. It was a long journey to get to the entrance to the scenic area (where I had to buy a 80RMB ticket to enter the scenic area), and then a huge climb up to the entry to Ping An. Mile after mile of twisty winding narrow roads, ascending up through incredible scenery. I thought maybe I had heard wrong and it was actually 200RMB, but no, 100RMB was the correct price. When we got to the carpark at the end of the road, I looked up and saw a huge climb, by foot, up to the actual village. Maybe a few hundred feet more of climbing. And I had a heavy bag on wheels – plus a day pack. There was a bunch of local ladies there eager to
carry my bag. At first I thought this would be a poor example of laziness on my part, but pretty soon I realised there was probably no other way to get that damn bag up the hill. The ladies had baskets on their backs and could easily attach a suitcase such as mine. So I agreed on a price and a lady tied my suitcase onto her basket, and we started the hike up to the village of Ping An.
Although it looked quite arduous she didn’t seem to find the work a problem at all – she said she was ‘used to it’. Nevertheless I joked she should get herself a horse for this work!
Although I had no idea when I would be leaving, she promised to come back the next afternoon to carry my bag back down.
I checked into the ‘Countryside Inn’, with a great aircon room with nice view on the fourth floor for 120RMB. (The only negative of this place was the thin timber walls and floors let ALL the noise through. Anyone talking or walking around and you hear them distinctly.)
These rice terraces were built many hundreds of years ago
and stretch right up enormous hillsides (they would be called mountains in most places). The amount of labour that must have gone into making them must have been enormous – as must be the labour required to plant and grow all those crops every year. Plus the numerous paths are made with large stones that are hauled and placed by hand. I saw some guys repairing a path – they were manipulating large stones that would have been over 100kg. They have to pull the stones out of creeks, split them into the right size, then carry them to the right place and put them into the paths. I do hope these guys get at least some of my 80RMB admission fee!
After lunch I had a very nice relaxing walk up to the 2 recommended viewpoints. The terraces looked very nice and peaceful. Some of the sights were brilliant, though I did not quite see the same one as I had seen in a BBC documentary about China, which looked positively breathtaking. The terraces look different in every season, and the most spectacular time would be spring when the paddies are flooded ready for planting. However the other
seasons also have their own advantages. End of summer means green and yellow paddies full of near-mature rice.
There were quite a few westerners around in Ping An, and it was easy to get Chinese and Western food with English menus!
Wednesday
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I had another walk around the terraces in the morning with a detour over to a traditional village. That village had no western or tourist influences present – no shops, nothing for sale etc. But the village looked very rustic and pretty. Weather was pretty warm. Back at my hotel, I had lunch, and while eating noticed that my porter from yesterday had turned up eager to carry my bag back down the hill.
Back down the bottom of the hill I boarded a minivan for Guilin, which happily deposited me at the train station, where I knew a couple of value hotels were located.
(I actually ended up in a slightly more upmarket one, The Cairns hotel, for 206RMB. Still pretty cheap and a lovely room. It’s so nice to be in a room where few things are broken, and with a bit more space!)
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