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Dazhai, China
Dragons Back Rice Terraces25 April 2013
Longshen
I am lying in bed listening to frogs chirping and thinking about the stir fried frog on the dinner menu his evening. Frogs must love this place. Those that don't get eaten anyway.
The rice terraces outside our window tonight are truly spectacular. Yes, it is the wrong time of year to see them as they are not sprinkled with snow, or lush and green, or golden ripe, or flooded in water in preparation for planting; but the muddy, misty, 500 year old stepped landscape is just awesome anyway!
The summer rains have begun, the clouds drift in and out touching the ground and leaving everything sparkling in their dewy swirls. Streams trickle and tinkle down rocky cracks and soft focussed bamboo sways in the chilly wind. It is a scene from a sad and terribly romantic story. You keep expecting to hear a lonely flute or clarinet sigh its heartbreak. But mostly you just hear loud cackling and soliciting from the incredible long haired ladies.
The Dragon's Back Rice Terraces are so named for the surrounding mountains which undulate across the horizon (when you can see them through the low clouds)
painted door
Dazhai, China like a dragon's back. The shimmer of water in the terraced paddies has also been likened to the shimmer of the scales on a dragon's back. Either way, the place is as mystical as any dragon inhabited landscape could be.
We arrived just outside of Dazhai village by bus from Guilin, on a misty rainy morning. We had booked a room in a hostel above Tiantouzhia village, but had no idea how far we would have to walk up the hill with our packs. Fortunately we travel at Air Asia hand luggage weight so only carry 7kgs each plus cameras and gadgets, as the walk turned out to be a bit of a trek up a narrow mountain path.
On arrival at the bus station we were swamped by a bevy of long haired ladies with rice baskets on their backs offering to carry our luggage. I couldn't bare the thought of a beautifully crinkled old lady, probably older than my mother, carrying my stuff up a mountain, so we politely refused, but after being here for two days and watching these women, I am completely in awe. They scurry up and down like tireless little hamsters, all
old man
Tiantouzhai, China day, with huge suitcases strapped to their backs. Needless to say they have great legs and butts for ladies of a certain mature age!!
The long haired ladies don't only carry luggage though. Their main source of income is supposedly their long hair. Traditionally these ladies never cut their hair, and many have hair down to their shins. They let it all hang out at shows for tourists, but mostly it is wrapped cleverly around their heads like a turban.
And the men? Well, we didn't see many of those on our way up the hill; just a couple ploughing paddies. Everything here seems to be run by women from restaurants to hotels to blanket weaving to embroidered belt making. Industrious these old wenches!! The ladies are lovely. They are loud and funny and will try to sell you anything on their person. If you don't want the trinkets, then maybe you want the freshly picked bamboo shoots or mountain herbs - you must want to buy SOMETHING! They would sell you the clothes off their backs. Failing that, they will always offer to drop their hair for money...
You come to these terraces to hike and
long haired ladies
Tiantouzhai, China to take amazing landscape photographs. Sadly though, the weather was not playing along, so instead of photogenic we had atmospheric. Hopefully we can turn our flat grey pictures into something more flattering to the environs with Pictogram! But, the hiking was great. Slippery, wet, misty, and one huge thunder storm, left us muddy on the bottom and fuzzy on top. We didn't dry out again until we got back to Guilin City two days later.
We first set off to Ping'an, but only reached a tiny village whose name I have forgotten, before we had to turn back so as not to run out of light; but the six hour wander through ancient mountain villages with wooden houses suspended off the hillsides, surrounded by rice terraces and forest was awesome. And, because of the weather, we had the whole place to ourselves. The perfect antidote to the Chinese city.
The night before we were to leave, the heavens opened and it pissed down properly. We clambered back down to the bus stop the next day shrouded in our plastic packet ponchos and hopped onto the bus back to Guilin. About half way down the mountain pass, before reaching
the main road everything suddenly came to a halt. A massive boulder had been dislodged from the cliff side above the road and had brought down a couple of tons of mud with it, literally 10 minutes before we got there.
What to do? We had very expensive boat tickets booked from Guilin the following morning and were not prepared to just sit and wait for something to happen or not. So we decided to take a chance and walk over the landslide in the hopes of catching another bus on the other side. We got lucky. As we got through there was a bus bound for Guilin about to leave. With no Chinese between us, we managed to ascertain this by grabbing the youngest looking girl in the queue and forcing her to speak English.
She was great. She introduced us to her friends and we spent a pleasant trip to town chatting to these four architectural students from Nanning. I have to say, the young Chinese are incredibly positive and so eager to interact with foreigners. And it was great to see so many young girls studying architecture!! It was sad to say goodbye, but we
rice paddies and us
Dragons Back Rice Terraces, China exchanged email addresses and took the obligatory group photo at the Guilin bus station before going our separate ways.
This really was the first time we had been able to communicate properly with locals on this China journey and it is one of the moments of our trip that will leave a fond and memorable impression.
Back in Guilin and we tried to scrub up and dry off in the one night we had there before leaving for Yangshuo. We were familiar with the city as we had spent two days here before heading to the Longshen area. Guilin is the prettiest city we have visited in China. It is all lakes, rivers, gardens and carst topography. People are friendlier than in the other big cities we had visited, and the city centre is small, relaxed and easy to get around. After Xi'an it was like arriving in heaven. And the air is clean.
We stayed at the Riverside Hostel and YoYo was one of the friendliest and most helpful hostesses we had met up until then. She suggested a Chinese restaurant, Mc Found, and we ended up there, with about ten plates of food between us,
man and horse
Dragons Back Rice Terraces, China every night of our stay.
I think Guilin helped to put us back in the China mood. After Xi'an we were both feeling a little like we had had enough of 10million + sized cities and unbreathable smog. It is good to know that there are two sides to China, though the spitting, hooting, and toilets are as bad here as anywhere else.
Yangshuo, just 4 hours by boat down the Li river, promises some more relaxation. Hopefully the weather gets better...
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