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To be honest, it’s been five weeks since I left Guizhou province in southwestern China. When I first arrived home from my year abroad, I got a bit distracted with rehabituation to American culture in all of its lavish decadence. But the photos haven’t changed and I hope I can give a fair idea of my time there in the few words to follow.
My first impressions of the province were misleading to say the least. I arrived by train 12 hours after leaving Changsha to find myself in the capital Guiyang, which turned out to be one of the most expensive cities in Western China. The province, with a population that averages the poorest in China, has been the target of extensive government investment to develop it as a transportation hub in the Southwest. The ridiculous irony is that it was by far the most tedious and slow-paced travel I have experienced thus far, the worst of which culminated in a nine-and-a-half hour bus ride that took me the 200-kilometer trip between Leishan and Congjiang. This investment has apparently hugely inflated the price of living in the capital, which is so much more new and sparkling than the city I’ve been living in. Needless to say, I wasn’t all that interested in taking pictures of it. However I did meet a much smaller but very friendly expat community that seemed to consist of maybe a dozen students and teachers from the U.S., U.K., and Africa.
From Guiyang, my first stop were the falls outside of Anshun. This place was the final straw. I will never again visit any hyped-up, commercialized, and over-visited Chinese tourist trap. The crowds, the prices, the short-tempered condescension (however understandable) of those employed there… enough said. My room in Anshun was quite the opposite. I paid the equivalent of $2.94 for one night and the family who ran this dirty little guesthouse was incredible warm and welcoming.
Anshun – Kaili – Xijiang:
Xijiang was a Miao minority village in the Southeast of the province. I think the photos pretty much speak for themselves. I spent most of my time there wandering for hours in the rice paddies. I noticed curiously that the paddies, which were drowned in water at this point in the rice cultivation season, had large fish hitting the surface. I spoke briefly with a farmer tending his plot and he communicated to me through both simple Chinese phrases and characters written in water on stones, that these fish were raised here and later harvested along with the rice when the paddies were drained in the fall. They have been farming in this way for hundreds of years, cultivating two crops in the same plot by a totally sustainable means. There is something for us to learn here.
Xijian – Leishan – Congjiang:
Help from a nice girl on the bus over who I struck up a conversation with was the only way I would have ever made the bus in Leishan, which picked me up, with no seats to spare, on the side of some random road. I already told you how long this trip took because of the quality (or rather lack of completion) of the road to Congjiang, now you know how uncomfortable it was.
Just outside of Congjiang there was Miao village perched on the slope of a hill. None of the little wooden houses in the village had running water, very few had electricity, but there were a few with semi-functioning looking satellite dishes. The first floor of these homes housed the livestock, and the second the families. I was invited in by one of these families for lunch. They showed me the few photos of their family and fed me raw cucumbers. There, even those with nothing offered everything.
About two hours down the road towards Guangxi province, I visited the Dong village of Zhaoxing. The bus only took me as far as the next village over, the last 8 kilometers I did on foot. The most viscerally present memory of my time here was the meal I had. Niubie it was called, a Dong minority specialty [Niu meaning beef and bie translating confusingly and somewhat inaccurately as ‘shrunken’ or ‘shrivelled’]. It can only be described as sliced beef and young celery shoots cooked in what smelled and looked like the semi-digested contents of a dyspeptic cow’s stomach. Adding a bitter, sour taste to the beef, the celery sprouts and tar-black cow stomach juices actually complimented each other well and seasoned the beef in a flavorful way.
Really, I spent so much time traveling, I had relatively little time to enjoy the sights. You earn your vacation in China, and for that reason, I enjoyed those places so much more. Relaxation is more holistic when you’ve been hassled by beggars, screwed around by would-be tour guides, misled by those who claim to be informed, and stuck on buses that crawl across pot-holed dirt roads for the majority of your travel time.
Congjiang – Guangzhou
On my 17-hour bus ride I had the chance to watch the sun rise and then set and then rise again. The landscape passed incessantly. The terraced mounds like the variegated shells of giant land tortoises, the limestone hills rising like listless sentinels as dark descended, each one engrossed in its own personal vigil. I passed through Guilin at dusk like a memory. The mountains began to take on a darker hue of the same shade as the sky. Everything appeared as a reflection on the window of the bus, the hills marching slowly by, the digital clock, the lady in the fetal position behind me. The temperature read 55 degrees in the window’s reflection, and for a moment, I lost sense of space and time. I woke at dawn in Guangzhou.
The last leg of the journey is still to come.
