Automatically translated and then edited by me
In order to experience the country life in China we decided to travel to Guilin and from there make excursions to the countryside. Without having done any research on Guilin we had assumed it was a small country town. We were surprised to discover that it is a city of 4.5 million inhabitants! Although perhaps for China this is a small country town. From Guillin we took a trip to the Longshen rice terraces and the Li River.
Longshen Rice Terraces
The Longshen rice terraces are about 100km away from Guilin and lie between 600 and 800 meters above sea level. The terraces were built over 600 years ago and extend over three small villages, Ping’an, Zhongliu and Dazhai, which are populated by the Yao people. Yao is a recognized nationality in China, they live in mountainous areas in the south west of China. Yao also live in Laos, Vietnam and the north of Thailand. The women cut their hair only once in their life at the age of 18, the hair is tied up high.
We decided to walk from Ping’an to Dazhai and stay there for one night, leaving our luggage at the hostel in Guilin. We were a bit disappointed from the first village Ping’an, the tourism has taken over this small village; every second building is a hotel and there doesn’t seem to be many locals living there.
But the hike from Ping’an to Dazhai is very idyllic and not affected by tourism, because there are mainly local tourists at the rice terraces and most Chinese don’t like hiking so much. The rice terraces are watered in June and the rice is harvested in October/November. We were a bit unlucky as about 90% of the rice was already harvested and the terraces were empty, but it was exciting to watch the locals harvest the remaining 10%. In the evening all the rice was harvested, so we had caught the last day to observe this craft. We had booked a very cozy hostel just outside Dazhai, it was in the middle of the farmers’ houses and after the hike we could sit on the terrace and watch the locals drying chilli, working in the garden, harvesting rice in the fields and preparing dinner.
Li River
After the trip to the rice terraces and a day in Guillin we went for a boat trip on the Li river. Our hostel owner booked us a boat trip from Guillin to Yangshuo with a bus which took us from the hostel to the harbour outside of Guilin. At 07 a.m. a bus brought us to the harbour, in the bus was a guide who spoke the whole trip non-stop and super fast in Chinese. In the beginning we didn’t understand at all why she speaks so much until we used the microphone function of Google Translator and realized that she was advertising different products you can buy from her. We were the only foreigners on the bus, which became our undoing when we arrived at the port. As soon as he parked the bus, the guide got off the bus and everyone else got off. Now the port in Guillin is at this time full of local tourists so it was impossible for us to find the passengers of our bus and we had no idea where we have to go because we did not understand the instructions in Chinese. We then contacted Cindy from the hostel and she contacted the tour guide who showed up after half an hour and handed us the tickets for the boat trip.
The ship had two covered floors with numbered seats; four people sitting opposite each other with tea on the table in the middle. We decided to spend most our time on the ship on the deck. Only when the guide said that now is a good time for a photo, the other travelers came on the deck to take a quick photo.
The landscape is extremely beautiful, the river meanders through countless mountains, the whole trip was breathtaking. When we arrived in Yangshuo we decided to climb one of the mountains to see the sunset and were rewarded with the most beautiful sunset we have ever seen.
We ended the evening in the hostel room with food we had gathered from a few places nearby; a real Chinese takeaway! This proved to be a bad idea as we spent the next few days in China with a stomach bug. It had to happen at some point I guess.