Wondering and Wandering

Monday evening, our entourage of three adults and two children took the one hour flight out of Guiyang to Guilin which is in the Guangxi Province of China.

When you see painting of China that have rice paddies in the foreground and tall rock and hill formations in the background, that is the Guilin area. All along and in the LiJiang (Li River) there are limestone karsts that jut through the mists and haze. There are so many formations, they take on an ethereal, shadowy aspect.

When we landed at the Guilin airport ,it was 9:30p.m. and much later by the time we got our luggage. We had decided to stay at a hotel near the airport so that we could set out early the next morning for our small resort town outside of Guilin. It seemed like a good and logical plan when we made our itinerary. However, Tuesday morning when we went down to the lobby to check out and to arrange a mini bus to take us to Yangshao, we were emphatically told “NO!” No, they would not call a taxi. We could see the airport out the hotel lobby window. We motioned, gesticulated, and used our Mandarin phrase books….. stony faced “No” was all we got. Finally in frustration, we called the hotel that we were going to in Yangshao and communicated with someone there who communicated with the current hotel clerk. When I was finally put back on the phone, it seems that because of the holiday, this hotel had no taxis to call to arrange for us, but no worry, the hotel in Yangshao had a mini van that could be on its way to pick us up immediately. Grateful to the Yangshao hotel people for the rescue and disgusted with the Guilin Airport Hotel people for the less than communicative way they dealt with us, we trooped off to the airport to meet the minivan. What a sad looking, dispirited crew we were dragging our luggage down the highway for the fifteen minute walk to the airport! Once at the airport though we happily connected with our minivan driver and we were off for the 65kilometer drive to Yangshao, south of Guilin.

The guide book calls Yangshao a sleepy yet hip village, a traveler’s mecca, plunked down within otherworldly topography. It was all of those descriptors, except sleepy! The town was ALIVE with tourists, Chinese and Westerners alike. It was after all the third day of the Spring Festival. We spent three days and three nights in Yangshao and it was amazing.

We spent Tuesday exploring the town which is a shopping extravaganza… many good from the ethnic groups of the area. I bought many, many souvenirs to bring home next year at holiday time. It is expected that you will bargain and it was great fun. The town is lively from early in the morning until late at night with shops and night market tables set up all over the village. There are many restaurants that offered western meals… we delighted to go out for eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast and coffee each morning and even succumbed to pizza and salad one night.

Wednesday, we rented bikes and spent six hours biking along highways, dirt roads and through fields. The entire time we rode, we were surrounded by phenomenal vistas of the karsts. We stopped in a bustling town along the Li River for a leisurely and hearty lunchtime meal. Menghua’s child seat was a bamboo chair lashed onto the back of a bike. The seat was not lashed quite squarely so you had to compensate in steering and pedaling for the slight left lean of the bike. Welcome to China!

Thursday morning, we took a boat trip down the Li Jiang to the old village of Fuli. The boat driver left us off on a garbage littered, rocky beach and pointed up over a hill, indicating that Fuli was that way. We managed to understand that we would be picked up at this same spot on the river at 2:30p.m. and set off up the little rise. At the top, we saw a large, beautiful rolling field with Fuli across the river and on a hillside beyond. It was not immediately clear how we would cross that part of the river, but we gamely set off across this field inhabited by many a water buffalo, some tethered and some not! Over another rise, we came to a small cement bridge that took us into the picturesque and old village of Fuli. We spent the rest of the day exploring the old Fuli and the newer parts of Fuli with a pleasant teenager who befriended us (and wanted to practice his English).

Here I must quote the guidebook because its entry is a set up to the Fuli adventure.

The villages in the vicinity of Yangshao are best visited on market days, which operate roughly on a three day monthly cycle. Thus markets take place every three days starting on the first of the month for Baisha ( 1,4,7,etc), every three days starting on the second of the month for Fuli ( 3, 5, 8 , etc) and every three days on the third of the month for Yangshuo and Xingping ( 3,6,9, etc). However, after every third market, the next one is in four days, not three, but this doesn’t happen in all towns. Confusing? Definitely. Oh, there are no markets on the 10th, 20th, 30th and 31st of the month.

Whew! Did you get all that. Well we didn’t either, but WONDER of WONDERS, the young teenager who had befriended us told us that he had been on his way to the market when he found us! We were off and after a 45 minutes walk, we were there. What a bustling, happening place. There we met the teenager’s brother, who joined our parade and we toured the market. It was quite like the market we had been to in Zhangue in October and our own cherished market that happens every Saturday in JinShiTan near our school. These markets are a visual and olfactory slice of life!

As promised a boat picked us up on the garbage strewn, rocky beach and we chugged back up stream to Yangshao… happy that serendipity had mingled with convoluted schedules and we had found our way to a local village market and happy that we had seen the huge fans that Fuli is known for and happy that we had had a delightful visit with local teenagers.

Thursday night, we went to a light show at an amphitheater on the river. It was an amazing and magnificent event that included costumes that lit up, illuminated karsts, hundreds and hundreds of local people paddling bamboo rafts, dancing and singing. It was a magical evening and we were happy we had suffered the traffic jams and the incredible crowds to get there and back to the hotel again.

The three days in Yangshao were hardly enough to scratch the surface of the adventures one could have on the LiJiang and amongst the karsts, so I know I will return to the area for more exploring.

Friday morning (February 23rd), after yet another hearty American breakfast, we made the 65 kilometer trek by mini van back to the airport and flew out of Guilin to Beijing. The long anticipated Spring Festival trip was coming to a close, but it wasn’t over yet!

We left the Wei family village late Monday morning (February 19th) after a huge and beautiful meal that consisted of so many dishes that the heated table in the front room was stacked two dishes deep.

A parade of people carried our belongings down the hill from the family compound and watched as I packed Sister’s small van with bags belonging to Betsy, Alex, Menghua, Leslie, XiaoWei and his niece Xiao Xing and me. In addition to our bags, I packed a huge bag of rice and two bags full of slabs of smoked pork meat, pickled herbs and beautifully round rice cakes. One bag of food had been gifted to Leslie, Betsy and me by XiaoWei’s parents and the other bag XiaoWei was taking back to Beijing for himself and his sister, Xiao Xing’s mother who had not been able to make the trip home for Spring Festival. The rice was going to Guiyang to feed the parents of a good friend’s of XiaoWei. On the road to Guiyang later, we were able to persuade XiaoWei to take our 50+pound bag of food to this same family. They are destitute at the moment and the rice and food would feed them for a good long time.

After the van was packed, Sister drove the van ( sans us)out of the village by dint of taking a running start at the steep muddy hill that headed out of the village. We all proceeded to walk out of the village and met Sister’s van at the school where pavement met mud. Six adults and two six year olds piled into the van with the luggage and food. It was now mean feat. After hugs and many a thank you, we wildly waved good-bye and headed on to our next village adventure. What a wonderful family and an amazing visit.

Next we were on our way to meet up with another friend of XiaoWei’s who is a television journalist. We met the journalist and his uncle who were traveling by motorcycle on the road and in tandem, we were off to the journalist friend's family home several mountain tops away to have a special lunch. Loaded as we were, the van did not move very quickly up hill and down dale, but it gave us that much more time to admire the lush green of the terraced mountainsides. We stopped to skip rocks at a river and crossed by foot on a rickety board suspension bridge. Sister drove around and across a car bridge and we continued on up a verdant valley to the journalist’s small village. We enjoyed a leisurely and tasty meal and then it was time to head yet another village for a special surprise that the journalist had arranged just for us.

We arrived in this new village. The small cement paths of the village were crowed with people. Given the number of people and the small size of the place, it seems that the entire village had come to greet us. The local performance troupe was going to put on a village opera performance for us. There were men, young and old, in vibrant yellow and red costumes. Brightly painted wooden masks were propped up on foreheads and many of the costumed men held a variety of instruments. There was a small performance stage, but before we knew it, it had been decided that the performance would be done on a hilltop at the edge of town. So we all paraded along with the villagers up to a grassy clearing at the top of a steep hill. What a sight… musicians playing, everyone chatting, kids laughing and running… up the hillside and around the edges of a clearing. People had carried two benches up the hill and nothing would do, but what the visitors sit on them. We were eventually able to squeeze together closely and include several elderly women and then slowly ease off the benches under the guise of taking pictures and bring another elderly woman or two on board. Over the course of the next hour and a half or more, we watched three acts with long intermissions in between acts. It was during the intermissions that we wondered if perhaps we were the show and not the colorful acts we were seeing. Some peopel just stood around looking at us , I had many sweet interactions with the elderly women around me… much hand holding, pats on the cheek and many smiles and lots of nodding.

Yes, I have no idea what you are saying to me, but really I am so thrilled and honored to be here and to be seeing this. I love your hat. Great cane and tell me again how did you get up that very steep path? How will you get back down

A fishing story vignette, a flirtatious dance and a lion dance later and the village performance was over. We posed for a picture with the majority of the troupe and then we proceeded to troop down the hillside and back to the main part of the village. The elderly women that we had made room for on the benches made their precarious way down the steep path… you know there were many years of body memory operating there as they careened on down.

Once down, we said many a good bye and many a thank you and posed and took many a picture and then piled back into the packed van. We hit the road and made our way to the main highway to travel up and down mountains south to the Guiyang airport to take the only daily 8:30 p.m. flight to Guilin. In Guiyang we had a bit of time to spare and Sister managed to call the proprietor of shop that sold Miao batik fabric hangings. The shop keeper opened up for us and in a twenty minute shopping frenzy, we made some amazing purchases before we headed to the airport and made our hour long flight to Guilin.

How could three days be filled with so many rich experiences and such heart warming interactions with people? How could I be so fortunate? Life is good.