Day Four &ndash; A Farmer&rsquo;s Paradise

Monday 18 January 2010

6:42am Train arrives in Guilin
7:30am Begin three hour bus ride bus ride to Longji rice terraces
11:00am Spend five hours hiking through rice terraces and hills trying to find our hotel (but not regretting a single step)
4:00pm Find our hotel (at the top of the rice terraces)
4:30pm Continue hiking and exploring
7:00pm Eat an amazing dinner of “mud chicken” and bamboo tube rice. Amazing!

Kiersten:
As our bus began to leave Guilin and climb into the mountains, I was in awe at how beautiful it was. This was our first time being in rural China countryside and after being in huge cities for months it was amazing to be able to look around and not see a single building. Once we got to the small village of Dazhai, which is as far as the bus goes, we got out and began to hike. We knew our hotel was at the top of a mountain, but exactly where, we weren’t sure. We had our trusty little map so we weren’t too worried. But, of course, we got lost. I’m so glad we did get lost though! We got so far off that it was just us and mountains of rice terraces stretching out all around us. We finally ran into a mother and daughter who were working in the terraces. As they heard us approaching, Eric heard them say, “what, is there someone all the way out here?!’ They offered to be our guide (almost everyone that we met was quite willing to do that, for a small fee of course) but I told Eric I didn’t want one. So off we wandered again. And we did make it to our hotel…eventually.

Eric:
The rice terraces were three hours in the opposite direction of the Guilin’s famed karst mountains, but in the research we had done previous to coming, we knew that it was a place we didn’t want to miss. In fact, we were so impressed by the things we read, that we planned to spend two days and one night in the area. We were not disappointed. All around us were endless hills, large and small, of terraced fields, and in their midst were nestled villages unlike anything I had seen before. For six hours that first day we climbed up and down their stone steps, marveling at what all that was around us. First through Dazhai, then up the back of a mountain, back down the front of it, through Tiantou, up to the highest point where our hotel was waiting, and then back down to see more, we hiked and hiked and hiked. But the hills and villages were too amazing to stop before dark.

What impressed me most that first day, besides the evident work that it took to build the thousands upon thousands levels of terraces, was the work ethic that was still being manifested in the lives of the locals, China’s Yao ethnic minority. We hardly passed one villager that wasn’t either leading a horse or hefting a load of branches. And, judging from Kiersten’s own attempt to lift a similar bundle, it is no easy task. We stopped one villager descending the mountain to ask her what the wood was for. She held her own bundle with one hand on her shoulder as if it weighed nothing. Her answer surprised me, and it made me admire the Yao people even more. The wood was for cooking, and a trip was made into the high parts of the terraces two to three times a day to fetch the wood. I know that there are people all over who are similarly hard-working, but it fascinated me that I was standing among a people who made things happen. It’s hard for me to explain, but I respected these people.