Alive and Kicking
It’s been a great vacation so far … as you can imagine, the experiences and stories are many and my desire to type them up is small. I suppose that it’s still worth providing a Cliff’s Notes version, however.
After a beautiful trip through Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong, we went back to Chengdu for a day of rest. We revisited the pandas and spent some time researching Guangxi province before hopping on a train to Guilin.
We stayed one night in Guilin then took a bus north to Heping, a tiny town on the outskirts the Dragon’s Backbone Terraces. This place outside Longsheng (in northern Guangxi province) features some of the most amazing terraced farming in the world … but because we didn’t want to pay the exhorbitant 50RMB “entrance fee”, we arranged with some locals to smuggle us in to Pingan, a beautiful terraced village on a mountainside.
It was awesome … laid back, picturesque, and totally refreshing. All in all, we spent three days hiking through the mountains, talking to the villagers, swimming in mountain lakes, and staying in cabins overlooking the fields. It was an amazing look at the rarely-seen yet very common rural life of so many Chinese people!
After another stopover in Guilin, we headed south to Yangshuo, where we’ve spent a couple of days enjoying the beautiful surroundings and fun activities. Two days ago, we went “drifting” … basically whitewater rafting down a narrow controlled fast-moving river in a two person raft without oars. It was way more fun than I expected. Then yesterday we biked into the countryside, floated down a river in a bamboo raft, and swam in the warm river water. We found a local street restaurant that serves awesome food for a great price (including the fantastic local favorite, “beer fish”) and have been enjoying the wealth of interesting shops and beautiful people.
Tomorrow I’ll head back to Loudi to move out of my apartment, work on my grad school portfolio, visit the SWI (the Loudi Orphanage), and say goodbye to a few friends. I have a little more than three weeks left in China, so it’s time to hit the home stretch in top gear!
