Into the land of Dong
Trip Start
Feb 03, 2008
1
21
33
Trip End
Aug 16, 2009
Rongjiang, Guizhou,
China
Thursday, January 22, 2009
We want to go to a village up in the mountains, about 50 kilometers from Rongjiang, a smallish city near the southwestern border with Guangxi province. This village should have wooden buildings and a tall, old drumtower-the signature architecture of the Dong minority, into whose territory we've crossed. Unfortunately, though the guidebook says the village is interesting, the book doesn't give instructions to get there-because, I'm thinking, you can't get there from here.
The morning is wasting away; we've already spent 20 minutes at the bus station discussing how to get to this village with an enthusiastic bus conductor who insists we should abandon the Rongjiang environs altogether and head farther southwest to Congjiang
On the way to Rongjiang
. She can show us interesting places there, she says, warming to her topic. "Here?" I ask hopefully.
She makes a face: Nothing to see.
Outside, it's similar. The minibus drivers who wait on the sidewalk aren't going our way.
I turn the page in our Lonely Planet. Another village, one only 10 minutes away by car, catches my eye.
Dan flags another taxi and we try the first destination again, out of optimism. The driver shakes his head. He knows the place, but the road is bad. His car is too low, he tells me, gesturing with his right hand parallel to the floor.
"Chejiang?" I ask. His expression brightens and we strike a deal. All the way to Chejiang, though, he talks about that bad road up into the hills. "It's too expensive to go there," he tells me as we get out, even though I can tell he's charged us way too much to get to where we just arrived
The drum tower
. Nevertheless, Dan gets his mobile phone number so we can call him if we get stranded. We estimate it's close enough to Rongjiang to walk back. And Chejiang is nice. It's located on the river in the middle of a wide valley. And, it has a beautifully renovated (or rebuilt) drum tower in a nice courtyard. The sun comes out from the clouds it's been under for the last season or so, and we actually see some blue sky. I get sunburned, and we strip off our layers of sweaters and jackets.
The drum tower is shaped like a pine tree, with a peaked top and multiple layers of eaves stair-stepping down to a broad base. Carved dragons and kyrins (a Chinese mythical beast) decorate the eaves and edges, and small, colorful paintings adorn each layer of the 'tree.' Under the roof is a big firepit surrounded by benches. The drum from which the tower gets its name hangs up in the peak. I try to climb up to the drum but find a locked door on the second story.
The central part of the village is set up to be a tourist attraction, with clean bathrooms and an unmanned ticket window. We wander around for a little but no one comes to sell us tickets so we continue down to the sides of the river and a path paved with small river stones through the less touristy parts of the village.
As soon as the sun comes out, women stride briskly out of their stone houses balancing blue and pink plastic tubs of laundry on their hips. They go to the river and spread the clothes in the shallows, beating each article with rounded sticks
Drum tower and sky
. Hard work. I tell Dan if I had to wash clothes like that, we'd never be clean. A teenage boy comes up to chat with us in English, mostly to impress his girlfriend, we assume. He tells us they're from here, and looks around at the river and the banyan trees and the drum tower with pride. We think they must be from well-off families because the girl had braces on her teeth and didn't have to go wash clothes in the river like all the other women.
After exploring all of the several stone paths through the village we decided to start walking the four or so kilometers back to Rongjiang.
The road was fairly straight, through wide fields patchworked with gardens growing vegetables I couldn't identify. We passed a fish farm, using green soda bottles as floats for the nets, several crumbling old buildings, and lots of interesting alley ways into pocket-sized villages. We explored a few of these alleys, but the villagers weren't as welcoming as we had hoped they would be, so we mostly stuck to the main thoroughfare.
By sunset, we crossed a long bridge across a bend in the river and entered Rongjiang again
The tourist pavilion at Chejiang
. It was a good day spent examining new architecture and lifestyles. And it was a grand long walk on the only sunny day we've seen in a month. We're a little sad to leave Rongjiang because the people at our hotel are nice and the city's wet market is lively, but we've heard there's a weekly market on in Xiajiang the next day, down the road an hour or so, and this time, I'm sure there's a bus.
* * *
WHAT IT COST
Double room at the Ju You Hotel with AC and hot water showers: 60 RMB
Taxi to Chejiang: 30 RMB
Breakfast of * fried vegetables: 3 RMB
* snot rolls (rice noodle sheets rolled around meat and vegetables and steamed): 3 RMB
*sticky rice: 1 RMB
* apple vinegar: 4 RMB per bottle
Sunflower seeds to sit and munch while we watch the traffic in Chejiang: 6 RMB per pound
Entrance to Chejiang (had we paid it): 10 RMB each
