Our Trip to the Rice Terraces in Guilin

We began our trip at the Shenzhen train station about 5:50pm on Friday. We booked three tickets on an overnight train from Shenzhen to Guilin. We had three hard sleepers. This means that there are three beds in a cabin. We booked the two lowers and one of the uppers. The lowers are essential because they're the only ones with a table and enough height so you can sit up without sitting in an awkward position. The upper's nice because you typically have more leg room because there's a place to store bags. That was nice for Matt because Matt's taller than me and Ross. The tickets for the lowers were 249 yuan (roughly $35). Oh yea, there was three of us, me, Ross (an Australian) and Matt (Polish).

We arrived in Guilin before 7am and made our way to the bus station, roughly half a mile's walk down the main road. There are other buses at the train station but those are privately operated and can stop anywhere they want until they're full - not recommended when the bus station's a short walk. It was very cold.

We got to the bus station, bought our tickets and hung around because we had about 30 minutes to kill before the bus left. We bought some drinks and snacks and had an interesting, half-understood chat with the workers. Typically, everyone will ask where we're from. When Matt and Ross say Poland and Australia, nobody really cares. When I say America, everyone smiles and says, "Ohhhhhhhh, ta shi mei gua ren!" That's them saying, "Ohhhhhhhh, he's an American!" It's interesting because that's all they really care about and they assume all white people are American, unless otherwise stated. Me being American gets the older worker excited and talking really fast. The three of us aren't the best Chinese speakers but eventually, I figure out she's saying she wants to hit me because America recently sold Taiwan some weapons and the fact that America supports Taiwan's freedom. It's time for the bus....

We hop on the bus and it's not too crowded, a few empty seats. I believe the ticket was 27 yuan (roughly $4). It was supposed to be a 2 hour ride to Longsheng...and it was. Longsheng is just a transport town. We had to get off here and wait for our next bus to Pingan Village. We had some time to kill so we threw around an Australian football, roughly the same as an American football. We walked around for a short time and saw the local dentist (I've posted a picture of his "office" on picasa). Now, time for the bus.

The bus to Pingan was 7 yuan ($1) each. It took a little less than 90 minutes, which was nice, and we arrived about 1pm. The view was just beautiful. We picked up locals along the way, as well. One guy loaded the bus with freshly cut timber, on top and inside.

The first hour was beautiful views then the last 30 minutes was just a winding road which quickly ascended the mountain, back and forth, back and forth.

Finally, we arrived at the foot of Pingan village. You had to hike about 30 minutes up the mountain to reach the village, the main village in the Longji Titian (Dragon's Back Rice Terraces). Or...if you weren't up for the hike, you could pay two guys 200 yuan total ($30) to carry you to the village, like royalty.

We made our way through the village, crowded with international hostels, boasting internet and western food. This wasn't what we were looking for. We briefly stopped here and there for photos but mainly just pushed through the tourist trap.

Once we got out of town and further up the mountain, the tourists disappeared and the terraces came in to sight, stunning. We played around up here for a while taking pictures with the terraces and the village in sight.

At this point, it had been misty and we had taken the rain gear on and off at least once. For the rest of the trip, we didn't put it back on and just toughed it out. It never really rained but was foggy, misty and occasionally we got sprinkled on. The temperature wasn't too bad, roughly low 50's. It was nice weather to be hiking in.

At this time of the year, the rice was harvested a month ago so there's no rice, no greenery and no water. It's definitely not the best time of year to go but it still made you stare in amazement.

We kept hiking for a while, over terraces, down terraces, back over and back down. We did this for about 2 hours until we came to the next village, Zhanglui. This village was pretty cool. We immediately saw it coming over one of the hills. We walked in on a couple washing their mushrooms in the stream for dinner. The lady pleaded with us to let her cook us dinner and stay at her house for the night, but we had plans to continue to Dazhai village for dinner and sleep.

We started making our way through the village, soon realizing that we had no idea which path to take to continue our trip. As we asked the old lady, her daughter popped out, offering to go with us for a small fee of 20 yuan ($3). We declined, wanting to continue on our own. Unfortunately, this made them unable to tell us the correct path. We headed out on our own anyway.

Surprise, surprise, we got lost. We ended up in the middle of the rice terraces with no path. We had seen another path and knew how to get there so we made our way that way. This was a great accident because this provided the best pictures of me from the whole trip. I was on a lower level than Matt and Ross and they got pictures of me walking in the middle of these huge terraces on the mountain with the village in the background - love the pictures.

We kept on moving and got back on the right track, thanks to a local man and his family who was wildly amused by the foreigners walking through their muddy rice terraces.

Unknown to us, we had just started our 3 hour hike to the next village. Up to this point, there weren't any really hard parts. Most of the path had stones laid down, which wasn't pleasant in the rain but it was pretty easy. It was more of a walk with some stairs. We soon came to a massive climb that just seemed to go on forever. We did stairs for over 30 minutes straight. We were finally sweating and exhausted. We encountered young children going home from school on the path. We assume, since it was Friday, that they spent the week at the school and went to their village for the weekends.

We hiked and hiked. It was starting to get dark but we could just see the next village in the distance so we went quickly to beat the sun. We came to Toutai village. When we got to the village, we arrived just in time to watch the village finish raising the last wall of a new house. All the men in the village were there to help out. Most of the women were there to watch. It was an interesting sight. Their houses are 3 stories tall and they don't have machinery. They still do it the way it was done hundreds of years ago...and not for entertainment but simply because that's the way it's done. We got pictures and video of this. Very interesting.

We picked the hostel that was next to the happenings and decided to call it a day. By the time the men were done celebrating with firecrackers, it had turned dark...as did the whole village. There were no lights and it was pitch black outside. We wanted to walk around and find somewhere interesting to eat but quickly turned around and headed back to the hostel for dinner.

We ate a hot, decent dinner and took our showers. We were exhausted. We went to bed and slept until 10am the next day. We woke up at sunrise just to see if we could see it but it was too cloudy.

So I wrote everything prior to this while sitting in the Newark, New Jersey, airport thanks to a winter storm. I'm going to make the next parts a little shorter, simply for time's sake.

We woke up and went downstairs for a simple breakfast. During breakfast, we were treated to another local tradition. Since the house was raised the day before, they were throwing a type of roll from the top of the house. The people all around were supposed to try to catch these rolls. There was a catch. The rolls were like rocks. At first, I reached with one hand to grab one and it practically broke my hand. After that, I started using my sweatshirt to catch them. The village people were impressed. Ross, however, was able to catch them easily with his bare hands while taking pictures. He said it was just like cricket and it didn't hurt.

After the festivities we made our way out of the village and on to what was supposed to be our sleeping point, Dazhai. It was an easy, 30 minute walk. Dazhai was not so beautiful so we just walked through and caught the next bus back to Longsheng.

In Longsheng, we were able to catch another bus to Sanjiang's main bus station. The ride was almost 3 hours and was on the only road in or out of the entire area. It was a full bus with nothing but local people, everyone stared at us.

Parts of the road had been recently wiped out thanks to landslides and rain. One part had completely given out and fell into the river below. Needless to say, it was really a one-lane road, but not by design.

We finally made it to Sanjiang. From here, we were supposed to take a local bus or taxi to Chengyang, the ancient capital of the area and where the villages are. We got in a local taxi (a motorcycle with the back cut off and a 2 wheeled cart welded in place) and went around the rainy roads for a couple of minutes. After the local bus station said no more buses, we got in a van/taxi and made our way to Chengyang.
This road also seemed quite perilous but it must not be with the way the drivers were flying around corners in the rain. It had gotten much colder since we arrived in Chengyang. There was a cold front coming through and I think it hit during our 3 hour bus ride.

We paid to get in the village and made our way to the first hostel we saw, agreed on a price, added clothes and took off to eat.

The food that night was horrible, the worst pizza we had ever eaten at any point in our lives. Why'd we order pizza? Because we ordered a lot of Chinese food but we still didn't feel full after all of it so we decided on a pizza to be our dessert and hopefully fill us up. It didn't.

The next day, we woke up at 8am so we'd have time to explore before returning to Guilin for the train. We went downstairs and ordered some breakfast. Again, eggs and some meat, nothing special. This time though, we realized we didn't hear the "dragon's breath". That's the sound of the gas under the wok, it's so hot and so much gas it sounds like a dragon.

We poked our heads in the kitchen just in time to see the husband putting lit pieces of wood under the wok. Then he got down on his knees and blew on it to stoke the fire. We realized it'd be a while before we ate.

We walked around the village and made our way to some nearby villages that were less kept up for foreigners.

It was really cool to see everything like it's been for 800 years. I could've walked around villages all day.

We met some local school boys, roughly 12, and played a little basketball with them at the local school for all of the children.

Time had passed and it was time to head back. We got our bags, retraced our steps all the way back to Sanjiang's bus station. We did make one stop at a spot next to the road. A couple raises bees on the side of the road so we stopped and got a big piece of honeycomb to take back for the Chinese teachers at the school.

From Sanjiang, we hopped on a bus to Guilin from here.

In Guilin, we had some hours to kill so we decided to have a nice, big dinner. We walked around for a bit and finally settled on a great place. We ate the best dinner of the entire trip.

We didn't have any problems with communication the entire time until the restaurant. There was a picture of ribs in the menu. The picture showed 6 ribs together and had a price of 8 RMB under the picture. I asked in English and Chinese, how many ribs does 8 RMB buy? Both times, different people said 6, counting the ribs in the picture. We all thought, great. There was 3 of us so I ordered 12 total ribs, 2 orders, so I thought.

During our great dinner, we saw a waiter walk by with 2 ribs on a plate and thought, that's not good. Why would people order just 2 when the order is 6? Uh oh. That would also explain why all of the waiters were amazed when they saw our waiter bring out a plate of a dozen ribs. In the end, we ended up having a little more expensive dinner than we planned but that was ok, it was great and we barely spent any money the entire trip.

We made one more quick detour to Guilin's lake. It was very beautiful, all lit up at night. Next to the lake was a hotel that had a waterfall show at 8:30pm so we decided to stay and see. It used to be called the Lijiang Hotel but had changed names and I never actually saw the new name, oh well. For 10 minutes, water pours from the top and blue lights light up the water. It really isn't that interesting but it sure does draw a crowd.

After the interesting waterfall show, we made our way back to the train station and our trip was over. We soon fell asleep on the train and ended up back in Shenzhen.

It was a great trip. The rice terraces are so much more beautiful and amazing than pictures let show. It was similar to the Great Wall. You really can't imagine how beautiful and amazing a feat it really is unless you're standing there looking at it. China has many, many unique, beautiful places to see and the rice terraces are definitely high on the list.

My Trips to the Hospitals

No, I don't mean that I was hurt or sick and was in the hospital. This last week, one of the assistants in my class had her appendix removed and one of the children in my class had a bad case of the flu (no, not H1N1).

Last Friday, I walked in to school to not find Traci. I was told she was sick and at the hospital. Later, through a game of charades, I found out she was actually having her appendix removed. All of the teachers, a mom and dad from class, Vi and me all went to visit her Saturday night. Everything had gone well and she ended up being released from the hospital on Wednesday afternoon. The hospital was just a 10 minute walk from the school so I visited her during lunch on Monday and Wednesday, as well. Oh yes, after Saturday's visit, Thomas' (a student) mom and dad took us to dinner, great.

I didn't know but a student, Happy, had been hospitalized that Sunday for the flu. I didn't find out until later in the week. The other teachers in the class and myself went to visit him on Thursday night. He was doing much better so we visited for a while. Happy said he missed me a lot. The boys are much closer to me than the female teachers, it's nice. After that, Happy's dad took us all out to dinner. Oh, I forgot, that was my Thanksgiving dinner.

The only thing new with me or Vi is that I bought a new camera. One of Ross's children's parents works for Samsung and got a really nice discount so I went and bought one. In Asia and Europe it's ST550 but the model number is different in America. Anyway, yesterday and last night was spent walking around Shenzhen taking pictures. I will post them soon, the night ones are really cool.

Last Sunday, I went to a golf tournament here in Shenzhen. It's the World Cup of Golf held at Mission Hills Golf Club (the largest golf club in the world). The club has twelve 18-hole golf courses, all designed by famous golfers. One of Ross's children's parents is a member and has a house out there so they gave the teachers some tickets and sent their driver to the school to take us.

The tournament was fun but enjoying the time at the house was even better. We pulled up to a mini-mansion with a Massarati parked out front. We've all heard that in China, performance cars are taxed a minimum of 100%, sometimes as much as 200%. That means this car cost them over $300,000 while the house was priced over $3 million.

The father is one of the largest bbq grill manufacturers in the world. He builds the grills, then sells them to larger companies to put their names on. He has his American headquarters in Atlanta, off 285. His grills are sold in Home Depot and Lowe's, meaning he's doing OK. They're also sold in the top 3 hardware stores in Australia.

We had a great lunch, an assortment of grilled meats and excellent red wine. It was great to sit, eat and relax outside by a pool with a view of a pond and golf course. Not able to hear car horns or construction for a whole day was a new experience.

We'll definitely be going back up there for another dinner.

Also, I've posted pictures from Halloween and more of the kids in my class.