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.