After nearly a week in Yangshuo, Jesse and I were ready to move on. As beautiful as the Li River karst scenery is, you can only take so much of one saturated backpacking environment (and clammy, dank, never dry hostel room). Our time in Yangshuo had served us well. It was a great place to really break in our packs and get our "backpacking" legs in gear. Shanghai and Beijing had been awesome, but being in major cities and having friends putting us up and showing us all around hardly qualify as backpacking.
Stepping foot in Yangshuo was good way to really ease into the whole experience, as not only did it feel like the real thing just getting out of bustling metropolises and staying in hostels, but West St., and all of Yangshuo, really, was a total backpacker's haven, perfectly set up to house and entertain them in comfort. It was atually shocking, beyond what a backpacker's haven it was, how immensely popular it was with Chinese tourists as well. Jesse and I knew there was definitely was a burgeonining Chinese middle class, but we didn't know exactly how large and overly willing to spend their newfound money they were. All the tourist shops selling everything from junky trinkets and fake band name clothes to "authentic" minority garb and tibetan jewelry were only really being given business by these Chinese. Furthermore, the cobblestoned pedestrian walkways in the area were positively THROBBING with Chinese from Thursday-Sunday night straight. Granted, the weeked we were there was a holiday weekend, but still. It was something I had been totally unprepared to see.
Anyways, so after immersing ourselves in this scene, and taking several jaunts out to the surrounding areas to get up close and personal with the Li River and its surrounding breathtaking farmlands, we decided to pack it up and take the "backdoor" route into Kaili and then Guiyang, in Guizhuo province, just above Guangxi. This route would expose us to much more remote locales in the mountains of the provinces, which had steep rice terraces carved into their topography and supposedly some still relatively "untouched" minority villages, with their customs, daily routines, and even ethnic garb fully intact. Rough Guides reported this route would take at the very least, three days to get through, and more realistically, five. The actual geographical distance covered on this route is not much (I forget the exact miles, and will have to confirm later), but as it is thoroughly backcountry China, the moving was supposed to be snail pace. We would see exactly what this (to our alternating surprise, satisfaction, and dismay) entailed.
Travelling into and through Guizhou province was supposedly best done on buses, so this is the only mode of transportation we took through the entire route. From Yangshuo, there was a bus ride into Longsheng (home of the famous Dragon's Backbone (Long Ji) Rice Terraces), from Longsheng, another ride into Sanjiang, from Sanjiang a third ride into Congjiang, from Congjiang, a fourth ride into Rongjiang (though there are buses directly to Kaili), and finally, a ride from Rongjiang into Kaili (Miao stronghold in Guizhou). By the time Jesse and I were in Sanjiang, we'd made the decision to eschew spending a few days exploring the countryside around Kaili, and just barrel our way ahead into Guiyang, the province's capital, from where we could take a train ride into Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. Even before we decided to just skip Kaili, we'd made the more important (and maybe now, looking back on it, regrettable) decision to skip a town called Zhaoxing.
The backdoor route into Guizhou province is highly recommended by both LP and RG for travellers with some time to spare (which Jesse and I definitely qualified as), and it was supposed to give you an intimate glimpse into the lives of the minority cultures (Dong, Miao, Zhuang, etc.) living in the poorest areas of rural China. Of all these villages, Zhaoxing was supposed to be the best (and the highlight of the entire route itself). However, we quickly came to discover that the whole "all look same" philosophy extended to our opinion of rural China and its minority inhabitants as well. See one spectacular rice terrace, beautiful drum tower and wind-and-rain bridge, colorful garb/silver jewlery/long hair bundled into topknots, and you've seen them all. I do have to admit that all those never ending bus rides through the steep, thinly settled mountains were not without their charm. Bus/train rides (aside from motorbikes, my newfound passion) really are the best way to see the lay of the land, and this we had, aplenty.
The scenery really is splendidly breathtaking and calm in this region, and the minority cultures, really still intact. Although we didn't get the thoroughly intimate interaction with these people we had set out to do, just visually, aurally, and olfactorily taking it all in, was, in my honest opinion, enough, and without a doubt, worth it.
These amazing bus rides also gave us a stark perspective of the dichotomy that is China in 2008, developing and expanding at a rate never before seen by any other developing country prior to this time. At per capita income being 10x less than that of the average citizen in Shanghai, Guizhou province really was the poorest in China, and travelling through the mountains, you could really see how much the government was trying to promote every last yuan out of the rural scenery and "minority culture viewing". Our buses travelled on immaculate highways, all of them ubdoubtedly no more than five years old, and other areas of the region being torn up to make room for more of this infrastructure upgrade. The route we took from Sanjiang to Congjiang, was, actually, over a desperately, bone-jarringly bumpy road the entire way through (5 hours). These conditions would never have passed with such flying colors as being deemed fit for human loaded vehicular travel (and in fact, though this is more government BS to weasel money out of foreign tourists, we were required to get "life insurance" for all our overland travels in these parts) in good ol' Merica... and it was an experience, to say the very least.
Needless to say, by the time we got on the train in Guiyang bound for Kunming, we were relieved and excited to be heading towards new territory, in an area promised by LP to have an endless array of things to do (we shall see about that). I'm now sitting at the "Hump" in Kunming, our hostel-cum-nightlife labyrinth here in the "Spring City"... (couldn't ask for the weather to be any better)... just waiting for the sun to set so I can whet my neverending lust for nightlife not just in NYC and Seoul anymore, but the world over.
More thumbnails ...
1 vote 
