Rural China: Yangshuo and Dehang

The trip from Guilin to Yangshuo proved to be the most scenic and relaxing way of travelling within China.  We made our way to the Li River, backpacks and all, and climbed into a bamboo motorized raft.  We drifted down the winding, lazy river for what seemed like ages, passing beautiful green covered karst peaks, waterfalls, and fishermen.  Two hours and 65 kilometers later, we arrived near Yangshuo, where a little bus took us into town.  The town of Yangshuo is smaller and cuter than Guilin.  Though the real highlight, like Guilin, is the surrounding countryside.  We spent the first evening exploring the town and eating delicious steamed buns filled with vegetables.

To properly enjoy the Yangshou countryside, Maren and I rented bikes the following day and set out along one of the tributaries of the Li River.  We didn’t have much need for a map; we just followed dirt trails along rice fields, streams, and through tiny villages.  The whole area is remarkably green and lush.  Even the rivers appear green.  Halfway through our ride we decided to cool off in one of them.  We didn’t find a real swimming spot, just crossed through a field to the grassy edge of the water and jumped in.  It really amazed me how people live in the tiny villages.  Life seems to move so slowly for them.  You can see on their faces they just don’t have the same concerns or sense of urgency as most Westerners or Chinese people from big cities.

On the ride back to Yangshou, we stopped at Moon Hill, a karst peak with a bizarre shaped rock formation on top.  We left our bikes and hiked up the mountain, which is a couple hundred meters high.  From the top, we had fantastic views of the entire greater Yangshuo area.  Countless green karst peaks sprung up in all directions with tiny villages nestled in the valleys.  We caught a great sunset over the Li River as we rode into town that evening.

The following day was a travel day.  After relaxing in the morning for our last few hours in Yangshuo, we started a long and slow train ride north in the afternoon.  We had to switch once in the evening, and finally reached the city of Jishou early the next morning, which was as close to our destination as trains go.  We then found a bus to take us yet again into the rural Chinese countryside, this time to the tiny minority village of Dehang.  Located in a nature reserve far from any large city, Dehang truly captured the perfect mix of authentic culture and beautiful scenery.  The village was practically devoid of tourists and was quite quiet, even in the main square.  We found a cute but rather run down guesthouse to stay in located right on the stream flowing through the town.  Part of the building literally hung over the water. 

We were quite hungry after the long train trip, so we ate a meal at our guesthouse.  The lady running the place cooked us four different vegetable dishes.  I can barely explain what they even were (Check out the picture I’ll be posting in Picasa) but they were all unique and delicious!  The sour melon and minced red peppers were really unusual.  It started raining during our meal and was absolutely pouring by the time we had finished.  We put on some rain gear and set about exploring the town.  There are several trails that lead out of the town through the nature reserve.  The first one took us past waterfalls and stone bridges, along rice paddies and a cute family of ducklings.  

The weather improved and we regrouped back in town with lunch and tea, only to set out again in the afternoon along another stone path.  This one took us up another stream to the Nine Dragon Waterfalls.  We turned off the main path, passed a miniature hut with a donation jar for some guy who apparently maintains the trail.  The path was muddy, steep, and treacherous.  We criss-crossed back and forth past rushing water, crossing crude wooden bridges and clambering along the jungle-like path.  We eventually reached what appeared to be an impassible waterfall, though there was an unstable wooden ladder leading right against the waterfall itself.  I made the rather poor decision to see what was beyond the top of the ladder.  There were some steps cut into the rock which I could hardly see due to the rushing water.  I climbed basically up through the waterfall itself, holding onto a steel cable which had been bolted into the rock in a few places.  I got soaking wet and slipped several times, but managed to make it over the top of the falls to a ledge and a pool where I could see more waterfalls above.  I made my way back to where Maren was waiting very, very slowly, gripping the steel cable for dear life.  As adventurous as Maren is, I made certain she didn’t follow me on that path.   :)

After the amazing Nine Dragons Waterfalls, we continued along the stone path until we reached the Liusha Waterfall, the tallest in China at 216 meters.  The height of the falls was really impressive, though despite the recent rain, the volume of water was pretty low.  There was a large green pool of water at the base of the falls with a couple of people swimming.  Maren and I walked along a trail in a loop around the pool, so that we actually went behind the waterfall, which was really cool.  There were four Chinese girls, obviously tourists, who took a liking to Maren and me.  We all snapped a bunch of pictures together.  One of the girls was so tiny that when she stood on a rock next to me for a picture, she was still only as tall as my neck.  It was already dark as we walked back into town.  Along the way back was an old lady selling tiny crabs and fish on sticks, fresh out of a hot pot of oil.  We realized it was fresh seafood caught from the stream that runs through the town, and we ate them whole, shells and heads too, yum!

In Dehang, all of the ‘restaurants’ were really somebody’s home, and always only had one person working in them.  Sometimes the family was eating together, but we were always the only guests because the town is so tiny.  It was bizarre to see every one of the handful or so places to eat in town have the same exact menu which they give the tourists.  The menu didn’t make much sense to us.  But the funny part was that when we pointed to one of the choices, the menu didn’t seem to make any sense to the people cooking the food either!  They stared at the Chinese characters and looked confused about what we were ordering.  After getting back from the waterfalls, we found a place to eat on the main square.  Instead of using the menu this time, for one of our dishes we pointed at some fish we saw, the same tiny whole fish we had tried earlier which came from the stream.  We were served a huge plate full of whole deep fried fish, along with some veggies and a bunch of spices.  One of the more interesting Chinese meals we tried.  And it went very well with Chinese beer.

The next day was filled with more hiking around Dehang.  Our first hike in the morning was a complete accident.  We mixed up some signs we saw and ended up climbing a gigantic mountain just outside of town.  We hiked up a steep path for quite a while before realizing it wasn’t where we intended to go.  But Maren and I were both a bit curious (and maybe stubborn) and decided to see just where this trail through the forest went.  We eventually got to a set of endless staircases taking us directly up a cliff.  After what must have been a thousand stairs, we reached the top of the mountain.  The path was so steep, that we were now looking nearly vertically down on Dehang from above!  The views around were decent, but not worth the long painful hike. 

We sorted ourselves out on the correct path in the afternoon.  This was a beautiful scenic hike along a stream winding upwards through a valley.  We passed tons of green rice paddies, pools perfect for swimming, and impressive waterfalls.  Eventually the hike started getting steeper and we climbed hundreds (thousands!?) more steps up to our destination:  the appropriately named Platform of Heavenly Questioning.  This was a naturally formed flat stone ‘platform’ jutting out into the valley.  The trail leads to the platform from behind, so you reach the platform with three sheer cliffs around you and an absolutely stunning view of the valley below.  This climb was definitely worth it for the views and the amazing platform itself.  We laid down on the rock for a long time and rested.  On the way back, we jumped in a couple of pools to swim and cool off.

The hiking Maren and I did in Dehang was incredibly exciting and beautiful.  Nearly every day we had spent in China up to this point involved hiking or biking, and we were rather exhausted.  For our next stop in the country, we picked a spot with no natural beauty whatsoever.  Xi’an is instead a cultural mecca in the middle of China.  Only a 20 hour train ride away…

I’ve published a few more albums on my Picasa Web Albums page (http://picasaweb.google.com/SkiMania29).  I finished the ones from Thailand and will hopefully be caught up to where my blog is soon!

Guilin, Dazhai, and Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces

The most overdue blog in the history of the world…

Guilin really is as beautiful as its reputation.  The city itself is somewhat commercial and touristy, but as soon as you escape the center the scenery is fantastic.  Maren and I spent our first day exploring the area on bikes.  We rode in beautiful weather through green countryside passing karst peaks, farmers in rice paddies, and countless lakes and rivers.  We spent the entire day on the bikes and got lost several times.  We finally completed kind of a half loop around the entire greater Guilin area and made it back to our hostel.  In the evening, we found a busy street lined with restaurants.  Despite all the crowds, several Chinese people working at the restaurants came up to us to aggressively ‘convince’ us to pick their restaurant.  We had no idea how to compare, but eventually settled on one and ordered a local specialty: chicken hot pot.  The pot filled with random and unrecognizable pieces of a whole chicken finished cooking on the stove at the center of our table.  I still am not sure why so many pieces had weird bones in them; the only piece I could identify was the feet which were not particularly tasty.

The following day we decided to check out the scenery a bit further from Guilin.  We got our packs together and took two busses to reach the miniature minority village of Dazhai.  Dazhai sits high in the mountains and is populated by perhaps a couple of hundred farmers.  The rice terraces perched in the surrounding mountains are an incredible feat of engineering and give the area its name of Dragon’s Backbone.  The village was actually used as a model by Mao for its agricultural techniques.  At the other end of the Dragon’s Backbone is the larger and more touristed village of Ping’an, so Maren I decided to stay in Dazhai where we were virtually the only foreigners.  The bus journey had taken longer than we expected, so we found a place to stay for the night and delayed our trek until the following morning.  In the evening, we explored the village which is truly incredible.  All the homes seem to double as guest houses and are very large.  They are all wooden and have tons of red lamps hanging outside.  There are rice terraces built into the sides of all the nearby hills, and we found several pathways leading up for some great views over the town as it got dark.  For dinner, we ate some vegetable and rice dishes (of course), which included bamboo flavored steamed rice which was served inside a piece of bamboo.

We began our hike from Dazhai to Ping’an first thing in the morning.  We started out on a stone step trail, but along the way it switched from rock to dirt to the edge of the rice paddies themselves!  The path was hard to follow, but we asked locals along the way who helped guide us.  We passed through half a dozen or so tiny villages, completely isolated and unspoiled.  But the real highlight was the rice terraces.  The terraces are built right into the side of the mountains, and complex irrigation systems ensure a steady flow of water reaches even the most distant paddies.  The scale of the terraces and the way they wrap endlessly around ever y contour of the natural environment are what really make them so awe-inspiring.  They also look quite different during each season of the year.  We experienced them in the middle of the summer where the sun bounces off the water and the green shoots of rice are no more than half a meter above the waterline.  The effect of the sun creates a golden image across hundreds and hundreds of terraces.  It is easily one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever experienced.  During our 5 hour hike, Maren and I took somewhere close to 700 pictures (!), yet they don’t even quite capture the grand feel of it all.  In some sections, we literally walked in between rice terraces along the grassy dividers, a hundred meters above the villages in the valleys below.  We passed a handful of locals working the fields and only a couple of backpackers.  The entire hike was serene, peaceful, and beautiful.

We reached Ping'an late in the afternoon and weren’t sure whether we would be able to get back to Guilin the same day.  After talking to a couple of locals, we figured out where to wait for a bus.  The bus took us back to Dazhai where we had left our packs, but it was the last bus of the day.  Once getting to Dazhai, the driver planned on turning right around.  We used some complex negotiating (think hand signals) and jumped off the bus as soon as it stopped.  We literally ran 500 meters or so through the village to grab our bags from our guesthouse, then turned around and sprinted towards the bus.  Fortunately, the driver seemed to have understood us as he was still there, waiting patiently.  We made it back to Guilin in the evening to stay at the same hostel as a couple days earlier.

Our next adventure began the next morning on wooden raft travelling 65 kilometers down the Li River to Yangshuo.  Stay tuned!  I promise the next blog won’t take nearly as long as this one did!  Pictures coming as well.