New Years Eve ... Yawn

Today was another transit day. I spent about 6.5 hours on the bus from Conjiang to Xijiang, a large Miao village. The only eventful thing that happened was that a rock slide blocked the road for about 30 minutes, until a bulldozer cleared the way.

I spent New Years Eve eating hot pot with a guy from Beijing and a student from Taiwan (we met on the bus), while watching variety shows on TV. Yawn... Oh, and happy new year...

Weary...

I left Zhaoxing in the morning and eventually arrived in Basha. Basha is a small Miao (minority tribe) village, and one of the hillside enclaves in Basha called Wanjiazai is one of the most traditional Miao areas left in the region -- they got running water and electricity only within the last year. There are nice rice terraces here; I got lost on one of the trails and ended up in Wanjiazai, and a Miao family invited me to sit with them to warm up in front of their fire.

On the way back to the village center, I ran into some kids that just got out of class, and took some pics. (They asked me to print and send them to their school -- I have a long list from this trip of families that I need to send pics to!) The Miao boys in this village still will grow their hair in a top knot until they turn 15, and then they can decide whether to keep the top knot or to cut it off.

By that time, I was losing steam and, for the first time on this trip, getting tired; tired of taking pics (some of my equipment fell into the muddy rice fields), tired of taking the same pics of the seemingly same poor people, tired of walking uphill, tired of being cold, tired of bad weather, and decided to go back down to Conjiang for the night instead of staying in the village (where no-one has heating).

But it was dark by the time I wanted to get back to town; the taxis stopped running and the guys with motorbikes didn’t want to take me because it was too cold. So I was waiting by the side of the road, hoping to catch a ride down to town, feeling pretty miserable, when a guy from the village store tapped me on the shoulder and invited me in his house to warm up in front of the fire (pic above).

I chatted with him, his family and his neighbors for awhile. They fed me oranges, offered me smokes, and when they found out that I’m still not married, they offered to find me a Miao wife. Actually, one of the gals sitting with us was really pretty -- she’s 20 and single, and is considered an old maid, because Miao girls get married as early as 14 or 15 -- but I think one of the other guys there has his eyes on her, so I was careful not to unleash my massive charm. (But I think Miao women can take on multiple husbands, so maybe I can be Number 2.)

I was about to have dinner with them when the older brother of one of the guys came by to give me a ride into town. As I was leaving, they insisted that I come back and spend Chinese New Year with them, because I had told them that I’d probably not see my parents this Chinese New Year. They said it was unnatural that I spend Chinese New Year alone, and insisted that I come back to join them. In fact, they said I should stay with them in Basha until Chinese New Year, which is about 3 weeks away. (That's pretty cool, to be on the farming clock vs. the daily billing clock.)

There were times on this trip when my big city guarded nature told me that people are not being nice for the sake of being nice, but because they are after something, be it to sell me trinkets or whatever. Time and time again, like today, I've been proven wrong on this trip. Just as I was slipping down hill toward my usual cynical and faux world weary self, the warm charcoal glow of genuine friendship saved the day.

Swiss Miss

The day started when electricity for the whole village went down. My room got pretty cold as a result, so I made my way towards the other end of town, had some local noodles for breakfast, went down a few alleys to find the one coffee shop in town and had my first cup of coffee in 3 days.

Zhaoxing is a bigger village than the previous villages I visited -- it's not quite as sleepy as Ping An or Chengyang, but not as nearly as developed as Yangshuo or as bustling as Longsheng or Sanjiang. It seems to be the center of a handful of smaller villages in this area, so it has a life of its own; the people here seem to merely put up with visitors, and not depend on them as much as the other villages I’ve visited. People here are nice enough, but not quite as friendly as the smaller villages.

One of my lasting memories of this village will be of the open market. I saw a few pigs being butchered, which did not bother me as much as I thought it would, but what I did find disturbing was that, after they were slaughtered, the villagers used a torch to scorch the skin, so that they could scrape off singed hair more easily. The scorching process produced this pungent, burnt, sickening sweet and chemically propane smell that lingered in the air most of the morning, and as time went on, the smell bore into my clothes and made me somewhat nauseous. This is one odor that will be staying on my permanent olfactory blacklist.

My other lasting memory of this village will be Swiss Miss Olga. When I got back to the hotel after coffee, I found this tall blond lady struggling to talk to the hotel clerk in English -- she was trying to bargain the price down, with no luck, but she was in my exact same shoes as the previous night: tired, cold and in need of a hot shower. So I took her around to a few hotels, and found her a cheaper room with hot water and heating.

Her name is Olga, a Russian born Swiss working for the U.N. in Geneva. She was friendly, super adventurous, a photographer, and we discovered that we had been traveling on almost the exact same itinerary at almost the exact dates; in fact, I think I saw her in a restaurant in Ping An a few nights back. Weird... So we decided to hike up to a small village of Tong An together.

It was a straight climb up the mountain. Half way up, we ran into a couple of guys fixing 3 trucks broken down on the side of the road. All 3 trucks broke down at the same time, trying to climb up the mountain carrying sand to build roads. They were the sorriest and sootiest bunch of guys I've seen on this trip, a few of them seemed to be covered entirely in motor grease. They had been stuck on the side of the mountain for a few days, and from what I could tell were making zero progress at fixing their trucks.

They were also the nicest guys -- we chatted them up, started to take their pics, they called over a few guys from the third truck down the hill, and we ended up having a small lunch together (well, mostly just fried dough and biscuits), huddled over a can of burning motor oil for warmth, while huge trucks came flying by blasting horns.

It took almost 3 hours of climbing vertically to get to Tong An village. This turned out to be one of my favorite villages on the trip. It's a small Dong village at the top of the mountain; we found most of village men huddled around a fire under the village drum tower, playing cards and carpentering to build a house.

I watched a few girls play a game of something that looked like hopscotch. After awhile, they asked me for candy, I told them that they shouldn't eat candy because they’ll end up having bad teeth like one of the girls in the bunch, and they thought it was the funniest thing, next thing you know a bunch of village kids were chasing me around.

We got back to Zhaoxing pretty late, and Swiss Miss and I had a long dinner, mainly because, damn, she eats a lot. She has traveled all over the place, and when I asked about her favorite destination, she started talking about India. She spent 6 months traveling in India and inspired me to make that one of the next trips I want to take, but she liked to not only eat, but eat and talk and talk. I haven't really had a real conversation with anyone since I started this trip, and it wore me out. She's leaving for Geneva from the same place I’m flying out of (Guyang), on the exact same day, and she has a list of the same villages that I want to see this week, so it makes sense to travel together. But I think I will leave tomorrow while she stays in Zhaoxing. I’m enjoying traveling alone on this trip and wandering around without really thinking about what’s next and when. To start planning on when to meet for breakfast, or worrying about how fast or slow to walk, or getting our lenses crossed chasing the same pic, is not something I want to start doing. I guess I’m a loner at heart… So, it's back on the bus for me tomorrow.

Rough Day...

I jinxed myself, spoke too soon about clean buses and seated toilets and easy bus rides. I just finished the roughest 24 hours of my trip so far, and would sell my first born for a hot bath.

It started with almost freezing to death last night: the family I stayed with does not believe in heat. And they live in a wooden house with zero insulation, so the temperature of my room was the temperature outside, which was about 5 degrees Celsius. I slept in socks and 3 layers of clothes, with my hands literally in my pants to keep them warm, and I still froze my ass off.

Oh, and then there was the squat toilet, the only one available where I stayed. Yes, I squatted. What choice did I have? I even squatted twice. My thighs got kind of sore after the first squat; the second time around, I learned to lean back a bit, to shift the weight off my thighs and, as scary as is sounds (and feels), shift my weight backwards, as if to roll back into the pit, but it felt much better. Anyway, the cold weather and the fitful sleep and the squatting made for a cranky morning.

And then I missed the bus. I first headed back to Sanjiang, but missed the one daily bus from Sanjiang to Zhaoxing, a Dong village in Guizhou that I heard about. I could have stayed overnight in Sanjiang to catch the next day's bus, but Sanjiang is a dump (see pic above) (besides, the choice of meats at Sanjiang restaurants is not to my liking: rat and dog), so I rattled off the names of a few other villages I heard about to the station attendant and they pointed me to a bus to Congjiang.

This bus was stuffed to the gill, with a dog and a duck and 3 birds in the aisle. And it smelled bad (I probably added to the bad smell, after a second day of not bathing). And people smoked non-stop -- they weren't smoking no weak Marlboro lights or menthols, they were smoking the full on local smokes. And bus fumes leaked into the cabin the whole time. And the first 3 hours out of the 4.5 hour trip was over dirt roads -- these weren't just unpaved roads, they were muddy and full of craters, in fact we stopped twice for mudslides to be cleared, and I literally was bounced from my seat, ass completely in the air without contact with ripped blue vinyl seat, more than a few times. (I was glad I made the decision to squat earlier in the morning, otherwise things could have gotten ugly, and more smelly.) (One last thing about squatting: when I lived in Japan, a friend of mine tried to convince me that squatting was actually a more healthy way to toilet than sitting, something to do with the body being placed in a more natural position where the small intestines are aligned with the colon, making for a smoother exit. My friend said that this was proven by scientific research -- I don't doubt that, because the Japanese are probably the most scatalogically oriented people in the world, so they would do studies about squatting vs. sitting, not that there is anything wrong with that, I love my Japanese heated toilet seat with multiple spray and massage options.)

So I finally get to Congjiang, sore ass and all, and the bus driver remembered that I wanted to go to Zhanoxing, so he pointed me to another bus that went to Luoxiang, where I could hire a taxi to take me to Zhaoxiang. So off I went to Luoxiang, another 2 hour mini bus ride, this time over paved roads, only by the time I get there it's already dark and there are no taxi's in sight. One of the other passengers heard me asking about Zhaoxing, so he said that I could hitch a ride with him if I help him load his truck. I said ok. It turns out that we had to load and unload a pretty big haul of aluminum siding. Damn, so I had to do manual labor to get a ride, why des that not surprise me, on this day, the mother of all bad travel days. So I helped out with the aluminum siding and hopped on the back of the truck for the final open air ride up the mountain to Zhaoxing. Oy vey, what a day.

By all indication, Zhaoxing is a beautiful place. I'll be spending the next two days here, exploring the town and surrounding villages. Now I got to find me a hot bath…

Chengyang

I stayed overnight in Chengyang, a Dong (minority tribe) village in the northern part of Guangxi. The Dong are known for their "drum towers" (kind of a town hall) and "wind and rain" bridges. There are two wind and rain bridges here, and a third is under construction. The oldest one has been around for over 100 years, and is in need of repair. The more well-known one is over 80 years old.

There are lots of kids running around in this village (kid with bug eyes pic, another kid pic), and I spent a good part of the afternoon kicking a ball around with a few of them.

The family I stayed with said that there is a Japanese woman who has lived in this village for a few years, and learned the Dong dialect and local weaving from the villagers. She's now teaching the villagers Japanese, to attract more Japanese tourists. I tried but couldn't find her; if NHK reads this, they should go find her, they go crazy for stories like this...

Transition Day

Today was mostly a travel day, so I'll talk a little bit about logistics.

After I landed at Guilin airport, I've traveled everywhere by bus, which seems to be the primary way to get around. Each city has a central bus stop (or two), and buses leave every 30 minutes or so to neighboring cities. Between bigger cities like Guilin and Longsheng, there are coach sized buses; mini-buses shuttle between smaller towns. The buses I've been on have been fairly clean (except this morning, when a few people got car sick as we were winding around mountain roads).

Today, I left Ping An and transited at Longsheng. I spent some time walking around a market close to the Longsheng bus station; they sold the usual meats and vegetables, plus some other interesting stuff like ... dried rat. (I took some pics of the vendors, including the pic above, who were not camera shy at all; at one point, a guy came up to me and asked if I was photographing and investigating the sale of protected animals -- he said that there are people hunting and selling wild boars but they're not supposed to.)

From Longsheng, I caught a mini-bus to Sanjiang -- this is the bus station (pic), the mini-bus (pic) and the driver (pic). And from Sanjiang I took another mini-bus to Chengyang, where I'm spending the night.

I've been staying at hotels that run between CNY80 to CNY140 (about US$10 to $20). They've all been basic but clean, with heat and hot water, and with seated (as opposed to squat) toilets. I like toileting while seated, and am willing to spend a few extra renminbi that! If you pay less, around CNY40 (US$6), you get a room with no heat and shared bathrooms.

Here in Chengyang, I'm staying with a village family -- they take in visitors that come to the village. For CNY40 (US$6), I get a room without heat, a shared bathroom (with the family), and a home cooked meal.

Ok, off to take a walk around Chengyang.

Yao Ladies

I spent the day walking around the Long Ji rice terraces near Ping An. It was more like walking up and down the rice terraces -- there were no flat sections on the narrow stone paths. (My god it was painful, I feel like I spent 5 hours on the stair master.) The rice terraces were jaw dropping, an amazing thing to see. It's also an awesome feat of engineering to make rice fields out of sheer sides of mountains.

The weather wasn't very good, there was a light drizzle all day and the mists came in the early afternoon -- visibility was really bad so it was tough to take decent pics of the rice terraces. (That's my excuse, anyway.)

I had hiked about 1.5 hours west of Ping An when I ran into 4 women from the Yao minority tribe. They tried to sell me a bunch of handicrafts and trinkets, but I asked them if I could take their pics instead. I guess they're used to this, because they immediately dropped their baskets and started to unbraid their long black hair. The Yao women let their hair grow down to their feet, cut it, but keep the hair to wind and weave around their heads.

I took a few pics, not too many because I felt really weird about it... It seems like such an intimate act, to unbraid a lifetime's worth of one's hair, and to do it front of a total stranger to earn tips seems, well, kind of like, um, a Yao version of the strip show.

Two of the Yao ladies insisted that I go back to their village and eat at their house. So I said ok, and walked another hour to Zhong Liu. The entire hike was over rocky paths made slippery by rain and prodigious amounts of oddly shaped donkey shit. I couldn't keep up with the two ladies, me in my hiking boots and them in their canvas sneakers. They do this 4-hour trek from their village to Ping An every day (there and back), over these unforgiving hills, to sell handicrafts or find work as tour guides.

My hosts live in a 3-story wooden house; there's electricity but no running water or heating, so there were lots of buckets around with water for washing and a small fire that doubled as the stove and the heating.

For lunch, they grabbed vegetables from their garden and used ready-made cured meat. Everything used in the meal was fresh, and grown or raised in the village (with the exception of oil and salt), from the vegetables to the rice to the yams to the pork to the eggs to the chili peppers. A simple meal never tasted soooo good.

(As time went on, some relatives and neighbors came by to warm themselves in front of the fire. The weird thing was that I only saw women and kids, no men. Where did the Yao men go?)

It turns out that this lunch-at-my-home thing is good business: once they get you in the door, they cook slowly, make you eat a lot, and then they start bringing out their high margin goods like hand-made bags, scarves, tablecloths and silver bracelets. It's hard to say no to people who have been so hospitable as to have opened the door to their home!

Food

I still can't quite get over how I spent my Christmas eve with those village musicians and actors …

Anyway, today was a travel day: 2 hours on a mini bus from Yangshuo to Guilin, another 2 hours from Guilin to the dusty town of Longsheng, and the last leg was a 1 hour trip to Ping An. But to get to Ping An town, there’s another 25 minute vertical climb up granite steps.

On the way here, I could already see parts of the Long Ji rice terraces and bamboo forests. There is so much natural beauty in what I've seen of Guangxi, but the people here live under the kind of poverty that I haven't seen elsewhere in China. Man that's cruel, to live in the midst of an overwhelming wealth of beauty but have so few means.

Ok, on this transition day, I talk briefly about food. I haven't eaten anything all that good until today. I've tried local specialties like beer fish (which is basically an attempt to cover up the muddy sooty taste of bottom feeding catfish with beer, with very little success) and Guilin rice noodles, but nothing struck me fancy. Until today in Ping An, where, after spending all day on buses and eating biscuits, arriving after dark, tired and hungry, I stopped at a small place for dinner and saw some local folks eating a bamboo rice thing (pic above). And it was goooood. They stuff rice, local sausage, a yellowish yam, mushroom and carrot into a bamboo stalk, and cook it over open fire. Yummy!

That's all for today. I plan to be up before sunrise tomorrow to do a 3-4 hour hike through the rice terraces. The sun came out today for the first time on my trip, and it warmed up a bit, so hopefully tomorrow will be a good day to hike and take some pics.

Wacky Christmas Eve Funeral

My Christmas eve started with a river cruise and ended with a funeral. Let me explain.

I started the day quietly, taking it easy in anticipation of a long day on the bus tomorrow to Longsheng. I went on a river cruise in the afternoon on a bamboo fishing raft, and in the evening I went to see a Zhang Yimou choreographed outdoor light show called Liusanjie, performed by local villagers on their fishing rafts, which sounds dumb but was actually pretty cool.

After the show, I was wandering around town when I stumbled into, of all things, the red hat’d gold epaulette’d marching band that woke me up yesterday morning with their awful playing and endless firecrackers during their funeral march. (I know I'm now fated to join this marching band at some point on my karmic crawl toward insect-hood.)

This time, they were playing with a performing theater troupe. I started taking pics, felt really self conscious because this was a funeral dinner that spilled into the street, but people didn’t seem to mind or care or notice, in fact they smiled at me, so I kept at it, making my way towards an old guy playing (I think) the pipa. I smiled sheepishly at him when he looked over, and instead of throwing his shoe at me, he pointed his chin towards behind the stage. And so I made my way back there and chatted up the middle aged actors when they were in between scenes or doing one of their endless costume changes. (I couldn't follow the story, or the two dozen characters played by 4 pudgy actors.) I made myself warm around their charcoal fire, ate peanuts and bananas and oranges with them, smoked Guilin cigarettes with the troupe leader Mr. Huang, who explained to me that local funerals last for 3-4 days and always end with this dinner and performance thing the night before they bury the guy.

The band guys kept joking around about when this 3 day funeral was going to finally end and I kept taking pics because the actors kept striking poses. I felt kind of bad because the family of the deceased was watching all this horsing around and I thought for sure they were going to come behind that curtain to either tell us to shut the hell up or to kick our asses. But nothing happened. So I hung out with these merry part time farmers/musicians/actors until the clock turned twelve. Merry Christmas.

Boys and Girls

I rented a bicycle in the afternoon and rode about 15 km outside of Yangshuo. Before I saw the painted wall in a small village in the pic (above), my little bike ride was all giggly kids and old men with toothless smiles and farms; and I was all like, man the air is fresh and clean and wouldn't it be nice to have a little place out here with chickens and water buffaloes and grow my own vegetables, it feels good to get out of the big city, get in touch with nature and a slower pace of life. The painted wall put an end to all that real fast -- it roughly translates as: “having a boy or a girl is the same, both are your heirs”. It was a needed kick to the groin reality check; this trip through the countryside ain’t gonna be no idyllic pastoral, that's for damn sure.

Surreal Start

I woke at 8 a.m. in Yangshuo to the surreal: a funeral procession down the main street led by non-stop firecrackers and a 12-piece marching band dressed in red top hats and gold epaulettes. I got too close to the firecrackers and now my right ear is ringing. Shortly thereafter, I did find the perfect cup of coffee at Café Ming Yuan, but even that was somewhat surreal, since the place looks like an English tea room with floral prints on the wall, antique coffee grinders on the shelves, Victorian-like chairs and light jazz playing (although not quite in full stereo due to my temporary hearing loss) (hopefully temporary).

Day 1 in Guangxi

Day 1. It seems a bit unreal, this trip, where I did very little planning in the way of where I want to go and what I want to see, or what I want to accomplish. I know I will start in Yangshuo (Guangxi), and I know I want to visit the rice terraces in Longsheng, and then see some small villages in Guizhou, and be back in Shanghai in 2 weeks time, but otherwise I have no set itinerary or schedule, or even much knowledge about how to get from point A to Point B. I made no hotel reservations, and booked my flight yesterday at 6 p.m.

So far: I landed in Guilin at 6 p.m., it’s dark and raining and freezing cold, I have no idea how to get to Yangshuo, so I hop on a bus from the airport to the train station, ask around and find a mini bus heading to Yangshuo, there’s a homeless guy next to the bus trying to burn plastic bags and trash to stay warm, I give him some paper to burn so that we dont breathe toxic fumes while waiting, the bus finally leaves 1 hour late and then goes around town picking up passengers until it fills every seat, including 2 extras who sit on plastic buckets in the aisle, we finally head out at 10 p.m., but wait, we’re delayed at a train crossing for another 20 minutes, so I arrive in Yangshuo after 11:30 p.m., it’s below zero but the rain stops, I follow a few people with luggage heading out of the bus station and find my way onto West Street, look in on a few hotels after warding off about 7 or 8 people asking me if I want a massage with 18 year old girls, and here I am. (In my hotel room, not getting a massage, in case you’re wondering.) Serendipity has treated me well, one-half day into my wandering around walkabout trip into Southwest China.

Rather than feeling out of sorts, I have to say that this lack of an itinerary feels liberating. Not knowing where I have to be or when I have to be there, I’m sort of … detached from my own right brain, letting things happen, curious about how things will turn out rather than worrying about what and when is next, having no reason to get miffed about a 2-hour delay on the bus because , well, I don't really need to be anywhere in 2 hours time.

I do have some things I want to do. First, I want to make my way to small remote villages and see the Chinese countryside. I want to travel more within China (unlike my 3 years in Japan, where I didn’t actually travel much outside of Tokyo), and see the rural heartland. And, I want to take some good pictures -- I feel that my photography is not progressing. I’m getting a little better technique wise, but don’t feel like I’ve made any meaningful pictures. My recent pictures have been more slight-of-hand rather than good. There should plenty of good pictures being around the beautiful scenery here and the Guizhou hill tribes, so I’m curious to see what I can do.

A quick note on my packing: in my bag is my Canon 40D, Canon 16-35 2.8L lens, Tokina 12-24 lens, tripod, and a set of Cokin graduated neutral density filters. (I debated whether to bring my Canon 24-105 4L lens, but in the end I left it at home, I think that would have been overkill.) Why 2 wide angle lenses? Well, the 16-35 stops down to 2.8, so I have a fast lens for low light, if I end up staying with villagers deep in the hills. Not the ideal set up, but it's best I can do without the dreamy 70-200 2.8L... Anyway, with only 2 lenses and one change of clothes in my backpack, I’m light on my feet and extremely mobile (but yeesh I will probably start to smell pretty bad after a few days).

So, tomorrow I start in earnest. I will spend some time chilling out in Yangshuo town, see if I can find a decent coffee shop, and if the weather holds up, I’ll rent a bicycle and explore some neighboring villages. And then we’ll go from there (wherever there turns out to be).