Rice Paddies as far as the eye can see
Trip Start
Oct 13, 2009
1
9
13
Trip End
Nov 04, 2009
Ping An, Guangxi, China
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The road up to Longji and the Dragon's Backbone rice terraces is very Alpine too and here is another place you have to buy a ticket to enter. It's popular as a day trip from Guilin and lots of groups are leaving as we arrive. Good timing. There are no motor vehicles or even bicycles (well it's mostly steps) in the village and it's a steep half hour walk up to the hotel. Porters are on hand to carry the bags and I watch in amazement as a small Zhoung woman smaller than Mimi hoists my 20 Kg bag into her bamboo basket and up to the village. What a job!
The village is quite traditional despite the tourist trade and we watch the children coming in late the school, old ladies selling trays of tofu and the local speciality bamboo rice roasting in bamboo tubes. Later we try some for dinner. Mimi eats most of it - she is a real rice lover. The typical houses are three storey - animals on the ground floor and living upstairs, though it seems a fair proportion of them have been converted into guest houses, at least part time. There's a sprinkling of westerners, but apart from two English couples staying at the same hotel nearly all the travellers we have met here seem to be French, German or Dutch. What happened to the English sense of adventure?
We have a first view round the rice terraces. It is still hazy (though a bit cooler up here) and we do not get any long distance views, but they are still impressive even though the rice has been harvested.
Ethnically dressed women are hanging around the mountainside selling their wares, especially brightly dressed Red Yao women who only ever cut their hair once in their lives. They come from the next village over the hill which is less touristy to make a living. The truly local Zhoung women wear black with towel turbans wrapped round their heads. There are quite a lot of interesting plants here and we see tea tree (the camellia where the oil comes from), viburnum, loofah gourds and gentians.
The rooms in the hotel are quite small and overcrowded with furniture. It looks like they have bought a "room pack" of furniture for a hotel room 4 ft longer! Two chairs are squashed between Mimi's bed and the wall and the table that should be between them is stuffed under the desk. They are also having problems with the electricity and we spend quite a lot of the stay with no power and little hot water. There's a huge TV but the only western programme they show in China these days is CCTV 9 which is a sort of Chinese propaganda programme (and English language films) in English. We try one of the local specialities which is a sort of smoked pork belly a bit like bacon stir fried with green garlic for dinner with our bamboo rice and a rather good aubergine dish.
In the morning after a Guilin noodle breakfast (rice noodles) we walk down to another Zhuang village which is less affected by tourism. We get to look round a house which is really very spacious. These are not small tribal huts. The paths are all paved with slate which is also used as a foundation building material and in huge slabs to bridge streams. It's a very quiet walk and far from the Chinese groups; we can hear them chattering from a long way away as we get back towards Ping An, having their photos taken with some girls dressed in Dong costumes. Lunch before we leave includes a sweet bean paste cake which looks a bit like slug and has the texture of a raw jelly cube but is not unpleasant. Oh, and we also have some young loofah gourd fried with egg. Very versatile plant then. However they use them for washing up rather than washing their backs.
