Guilin
Trip Start
Nov 01, 2005
1
88
95
Trip End
Nov 01, 2006
Guilin,
China
Thursday, October 5, 2006
So with the money starting to run short it's time for another bus journey back to civilisation and the big city of Guilin.
While waiting for the bus I looked for an internet cafe.
Unfortunately chinese being a tonal language, get the tones wrong and you happen to get a bad word, ah well.
So just one night in Guilin, atm works!!! in the money again.
Meet some nice people in the hostel, the streets are thronged even by chinese standards as this is the start of the big week long holiday,
next morning get the bus to yangshou with some others from the hostel.
This is probably the most known western persons hang out in china. Chengyong 28th, 29th September
Next another bus journey, 5 hours on a very bumpy unsurfaced road to the next town sanjiang. Then a shorter bus to another Dong village Chengyang, to spend two more nights.
Here their big attraction is a big traditional style bridge.
I did some more walking through a network of really small villages, and up the overlooking mountain. posted by conor at 9:19 PM 1 comments
Zhaoxing Next morning got a bus which said it was going to Zhaoxing,
it actually just went to Luoxiang which meant an hour and a half walk with all my bags in the mid day sun.
Zhauxing is the largest village of the Dong minority, still really small.
It is a little more tourist developed (spoilt?) than Xijiang.
The village is located at the bottom of a valley, again wooden buildings prevail.
The old Dong women spend alot of time beating dark blue die into fabric with a wooden mallet.
I went for a long walk up the valley and up the mountainside to another, much less visited Dong village. I found a path back down through all the rice fields, really nice, peacefull and pituresque.
On the second evening I was treated to a performance of traditional music and dance.
This was primarily for local consumption, I was the only foreign tourist attending.
The dacing was really good quality, quite athletic, beats the tibetans sleave waving line dancing I'm afraid.
Most of the performances seemed to have the theme of occasions when young guys and girls have the chance to meet each other, some had pantomime like phisical comedy.
One was titeled "no music no love" and featured 5 guys on the hunt for girls, when they found 4 girls, 4 of the guys got out their musical instruments to impress. The last guy just hit on each of the girls in turn and was shoved, fliped and stabbed with an imaginary sowing needle, let that be a lesson to ya.
