My friends, I, Clare, must confess: we succumbed to an organized tour. On a coach bus. With a tour guide bearing a yellow flag and using a loudspeaker as he switched back and forth between Chinese and English. Yes, there were mitigating factors such as the 2.5 hour trip to get to our destination and having to switch public buses multiple times if we went on our own, but these do not make up for the agony that is an organized tour. We hereby vow to avoid tours at all costs.
Our goal was to see the Longsheng rice terraces, but our tour started with a visit to the village of the Yao long-haired people, so-called because the women only cut their hair once in their lives, when they get married. We watched a performance during which Yao women "married" tourist men (both Chinese and foreign). It was excruciating to watch the foreign men perform the ritual Yao customs of carrying the women on their backs and singing love songs to their "wives." We left feeling awkward and exploitative--awkward because another Yao custom is to pinch the behind of people you like, which the Yao demonstrated on us tourists liberally, and exploitative because we were part of busloads of tourists who show up at this village for an hour to gawk at the strange people and leave without ever learning about the culture or what the Yao people think of their lives and of us tourists. That's one of the most frustrating things about the language barrier: not being able to have real conversations with locals about their country, their lives, their thoughts on tourism, etc.
Our next stop on the tour was the village of Ping'an, home to the Zhuang minority culture and the famed Dragon's Backbone rice terraces. After trying the local specialties of bamboo rice and bamboo chicken (literally cooked inside bamboo), we hiked up to the viewpoints to see the terraces. The rice terraces are truly spectacular. When the sun strikes them, the water in the paddies shines making the entire hillside glow. There's not much to say, except that our photos do not do them justice.
The bus ride back to Guilin was more of an adventure then we expected. These villages are out in remote, rural areas and a road was only extended out to them in 2002. The road winds along cliff edges and drivers honk wildly as they come around blind turns. (Although in China drivers always honk wildly as well as swerve and weave; Jen equated it to Mario Kart which is a surprisingly accurate comparison). On the way to Ping'an, we passed an accident, and on the way back that road was closed. We had to take the "old road" which turned out to have a landslide blocking much of it. Luckily a crew with bulldozer was able to clear a path for our bus.
On the bright side, we met some fellow North Americans on our tour who were also planning on traveling to Yangshuo the next day. We didn't indulge in snails with them for dinner but did hook up with them to book a cruise down the Li River to Yangshuo. More on that in the next entry.
