Saturday, February 16, 2013

Three Dragons

Last week my friends and I left sunny Yunnan and descended into the mists of Guilin and Yangshuo.  Which is just my self-indulgent way of saying that it was cold and rainy.  Even though we had to pullout our wool socks and jackets from the bottom of our backpacks, Guangxi Province had some amazing days in store for us, beginning with a day hiking around the Dragon Backbone Rice Terraces north of Guilin.
  After a slightly terrifying three hour drive up slippery switchbacks up mountainous terrain in the rain, past at least three car accidents, we arrived in the town of DaZhai to see the rice terraces there.  Because miscommunication is one of the facts of life here, we discovered upon arrival that rather than leaving at 6pm, we would have to leave at 2:30 in order to be back at the hostel by 6.  I spent a few minutes bitterly sulking before convincing myself to make the best of the situation, and honestly I still wish we could have had the extra hours to hike through the village and the surrounding terraces.  It was one of the places I was most looking forward to for the whole trip, and I hated having to limit myself to only a few hours.  I guess now I just have an excuse to go back someday, because it even more breathtakingly beautiful than I had imagined.  I know that I keep saying that about places we go on this trip, but it's always true.  Southern China is full of stunning scenery, so much that my friend Katie has decided that we are living inside a Chinese painting. 
At one point we actually walked above the clouds


After traipsing around the hilltops for a while and taking deep breaths of clean, fresh air (again, I know I say this a lot, but really, until you live someplace like Baoding you can't really appreciate how wonderful air can be), we relented to a pair of women who had been following us all morning and went to their restaurant, where we ate local dishes, drank homemade rice wine and bought a bunch of useless souvenirs.


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