Xijiang
Trip Start
Nov 01, 2005
1
86
95
Trip End
Nov 01, 2006
Xijiang,
China
Monday, September 25, 2006
Xijiang
Xijiang in only 2 or 3 hours along a dirt road which clings to the mountainside, from Kaili, but it seems a world away.
The village pituresquely covers a hilside overlooking a valey of rice paddies.
The paddies climb up the side of the mountains either side.
The village is tiny and really quiet, and surprisingly since it is listed in the guide books it has very few tourists.
Xijiang is the largest village of the Miao minority.
China has 55 peoples or races, 92% of the population is han chinese which means that all of the others are refered to as minorities.
The Miao women ware an artificial flower in their hair untill their thirties after which they change to a tea towel head dress.
Getting off the bus I was invited to stay in a homestay and to eat dinner with them, very convenient and nice to stay with a local family.
I went for long walks through the rice fields and terrices up into the surrounding mountains.
It is rice harvesting time, which means that the feilds quite active.
The men carry really big wooded boxes into the feild, then cut the rice with a hand sycle. They then whack the bunch of rice grass against the box so that the grains fall out. Everyone carries the rice back to the village, ballanced on two sides of a long peice of wood carried on the sholder. It's amazing the loads that people carry. The old women and young kids get a bit of a laugh getting the foreigner to carry their load for a while, so I was roped into service. I wouldn't like to try carrying what the men had.
Then the rice is dried on every available flat peice of road, square or rooftop, all this with no machines.
posted by conor at 8:30 PM 0 comments
To Guizhou
So time to hit the road again.
I got an overnight train to Guiyang in Guizhou provence.
Sleeper trains in china are rows of bunks three high, always pick the top one.
It means that you wont have people staring at you all night, you're too high.
Arrived in the morning in Guiyang and after wandering a bit, decided what else can you do when you're exhausted from traveling all night but travel some more, so got on a bus to Kaili a few hours further west.
Kaili which is still a big town is quite near several pituresque minority villages.
There was a bus leaving straight away for a village that I wanted to visit which was in the right direction for me called Xijiang so I hopped on the bus.
I neglected to use an atm in Kaili which was a bit of a mistake.
There should have been a big sign on leaving the town reading, "you are now leaving the international banking system, no working atms for the next 4 days worth of bus journeys", but that only occured to me later.
