Guilin and the Dragon Backbone Rice Terraces

So China has this national holiday week at the beginning of October which means way too many people all trying to move around the country at the same time so getting train tickets is like winning the lotto. So we flew from Shanghai to Guilin. Guilin is a smaller little town surrounded by these really cool limestone rock lumps jutting up like miniature mountains.

The hostels were all charging 450yuan per person to go see the rice terraces for a couple of hours which we decided was a complete rip-off so we were determined to do it ourselves. We left our big rucksacks in the hostel and off we went early in the morning despite the disapproving looks we were getting from the hostel staff. We managed to find the right bus somehow and off we went.

The rice terraces are spread out around little minority villages up in the hills and we planned to do a days trek from the village of Dazhai to the village of Ping'an. The scenery was stunning and once we had climbed enough steps to bring us through the first village and out into the rice terraces we found ourselves completely alone staring out across the hills. We walked for a couple of hours up and down through the terraces until we saw our first person, a young Zhuang woman harvesting the rice from one of the terraces. Zhuang women have the longest hair in the world and they wrap it up around their head in a style that resembles a turban. The terraces themselves as you can see above are really fabulous to look at.

We marched onwards and the only sounds were coming from the streams running down the hills and our footsteps. We eventually reached the second village halfway through our trek, Tiantouzhai, which is up very high looking out over the terraces and hillsides. A women stopped us there to ask if we were hungry and we said yes and followed her back to her family home where all the women in her family sat around a fire and cooked us up lunch. The houses in these villages are all huge and made of timber. It was a vast empty space inside and we wondered why they build them so big. They fed us rice and vegetables and pork and we thanked them and paid them. The women then grabbed me and started dressing me in traditional clothing for a photo... I looked absolutely ridiculous but roy was loving it : ) then the mother took her hair down to show is how long it was....all the way to the floor, she seemed pretty proud of herself!

Off we went again then, it had started raining at this stage so going down was tricky over the slippy rocks. We noticed at one point that the hill we were walking over seemed to also be a graveyard and in the mist and isolation it was a little eery!! We bumped into a group of old local woman carrying baskets of corn and other vegetables on their backs up the hill. On we went until we reached a fork in the road with no signpost, we had to choose so we went left. The path was very narrow and wrapped around the hillside with a sheer drop to our right, I had a heart attack when roy slipped and nearly fell off! After about twenty minutes of following that path we heard a woman shouting behind us, one of the old women we had bumped into had seen from up the hill that we had taken a wrong turn and had ran the whole way down and around the path to catch up with us!! I hope I am that fit at her age! Fairplay to her! So we followed her back to the fork in the road and she showed us the right direction. Dont worry we paid her for her troubles : )

We finally made it to the top of a hill overlooking the village of Ping'an and some of the most amazing views of the rice terraces. We pottered on down to the village and found our hostel for the night, another large wooden structure with great views. It felt like we were staying in a giant log cabin. Besides the gigantic monstrous spider we found in our room that night it was a great little adventure for the day. I wish we had taken a photo of the spider but in my state of complete panic there was no hope of me operating a camera and roy was too busy battling it out with his flip flop in hand.

We made it back to Guilin the next day where we managed to connect the laptop to the hostels big flat screen to watch the Ireland v Italy match, we even had the Chinese hostel owner watching it and he was loving it, all for the boys in green. What a great match it was!

Onward to Yangshou next,

Later!

Sarz x