Walking the Longji Rice Terraces - Guangxi Province - Aug 4-6, 2012

---

So you may have noticed a gap in my blog entries - August 3rd is nowhere to be seen!! Well, that's because August 3rd was spent first on a bus from Dali to Kunming, then in a taxi to the Kunming Airport, then on a (delayed) plane from Kunming to Guilin, then in a bus from the Guilin airport to downtown, then in another taxi to our hostel in Guilin where we spent about 12 hours of our lives. So not too much to say although I guess I just told you the story of the day anyways!!



The morning of Saturday, August 4th, we grabbed a bus in Guilin up to Dazhai, one end of the Longji Rice Terraces. It was about 3 hours on a bus on some winding roads, and the driver was not as careful on the curves as our driver to Dali had been. But we survived. When we arrived at the rice terraces, we were immediately bombarded by Yao (yet another ethnic minority) women offering to be our guides and carry our things. The women were all pretty old and very small and we thought 'who would make these women carry their things??' The answer, of course, is Chinese people. But we carried our own things. (We had dropped off the bulk of our stuff in a storage area at the Guilin bus station so we ony had what we needed). We then began the hour-long hike from the village of Dazhai up to our hostel in Tian Tou Village. It was a really nice day and we had some great views out over the rice terraces! When we got to the village it took a bit of walking around but we finally found our hostel for the night. It had a great lounge area where we predicted we'd be spending a lot of time since we didn't pay the extra for a room with a view. Our room was basic but it was a private ensuite which is nice. It only had a squat toilet and the bathroom in general was pretty ghetto - check out pictures. But it was fine for one night. We had lunch at a restaurant in the village which was really chill and had really good food. My favourite thing about the food was that, for once, it WASN'T overly seasoned and I could actually like taste the food the way God intended. I've eaten a lot of eggplant in China and I sware that was the first meal where I could TASTE the eggplant. Awesome. The cook also had the cutest son ever and he was playing peek-a-boo with us the whole time.





When we got back to our hostel we asked about seeing the Yao women wash their hair. See, they don't ever cut their hair and it grows reeeally long. Apparently they used to cut it when they got married and give it as a gift to their husband but now it seems they all have the long hair which they tie up into a turban thing on top of their head. All the tourism ads for Dazhai show pictures of women washing their hair in the river and we wanted to see that. Unfortunately, we were told that it's a big tourist trap to go see - it's expensive and they're up on stage and they just take out their hair. Basically, not worth it. So instead we enjoyed the amazing views and had a lazy afternoon. I even took a nice nap. We both did a lot of reading. We had dinner at the hostel that night and watched "Inception" on the TV in the lounge. It helps take the edge off the film when pretentious backpackers are having annoying conversations right next to you! We had wanted to watch a comedy but we were told there weren't any comedies.





The next morning we woke up to clouds and rain which was a little disheartening because it was the day of our big hike through the rice terraces! We had a nice breakfast at the hostel and got directions to Pingan Village - though the directions consisted of taking pictures of pictures of forks in the road and pointing in the correct direction of travel. Anyways, with those pictures as our guide, we set off on the trail from Tiantou to Pingan - a classic hike for tourists of China. It was cobblestone steps for most of the way and there were moments of complete solitude, likely a result of the weather, which was really nice. Our directions weren't really stellar and we had a few moments where we didn't know the way. Some of the people we asked wouldn't help us and instead offered to be our hired guides but most people were friendly and helpful. We enjoyed the hike and we made it in just under 4 hours which is really good time. When we got to Pingan we discovered it was a much bigger village than Dazhai but we got some help finding our hotel (that's right, HOTEL not HOSTEL! we're going fancy). When we got there, we realized that the proprietor doesn't like people who book the cheapest room and so we were down a dark hall on the top floor which was crooked and required walking up some pretty ghetto stairs to get to. We also didn't have a remote for the A/C, they charged us for it!! But regardless it was a much nicer place than where we'd stayed the night before. It even had a Western toilet! And we both clawed ourselves some free soap and shampoo.



At the hotel, I had a quick shower then we went off to find food. We found a nice restaurant with a view where we had some bamboo rice, a local speciality. Basically they BBQ rice inside a bamboo shoot. It was pretty good! It started downpouring while we were eating but it cleared up for our walk back to the hotel. Since we had a room with a TV (haven't had that since back in Beijing!!) I decided it was time to watch some Olympics. What I learned: watching the Olympics in China kinda sucks. Although I got to watch some good events (athletics was fun and non-stop action, male gymnastics was awesome and China vs. Korea women's court volleyball was SO GOOD) we mostly had to flip through game after game of badminton and table tennis. Game after game...I came to two conclusions:

1. Watching CCTV makes you think China and Korea are the only people in the Olympics and

2. Badminton is a good sport to watch if you want to fall asleep.



I sadly fell asleep while trying to cheer for Denmark as they took on China in men's doubles badminton. I'd like to think China lost but looking at the medal board I'm pretty sure they didn't. This country is ridiculous.



Anyways we watched a lot of Olympics cause the weather sucked. We had dinner in the hotel which was alright. Then we went to bed.



The next morning, we got on a bus to Guilin to get our stuff at the bus station, then got on a bus to Yangshuo, our next stop. There's not much to see in Guilin anyways.



-Dafne

---

Photos

Old Man
he was charging for photos so we had to do it stalker-photo style

Time for an afternoon nap
kicking it Chinese style