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.