So last entry was ending our day in Yangshuo with pizza on the "Foreigner" street. :) The next morning we headed by bus to Longsheng to view many wonderful sights and terraced rice fields! It took us about 3 hours to get there and it was well worth the ride.
View from the bus. When Chinese folks travel...there's NO rest for the weary! ha We were up early every morning by 7:00 a.m. having breakfast and schlepping our suitcases to our bus. It was a very busy schedule for four days but well worth any lost sleep. After several hours on the bus (I tried hard not to doze for fear of missing out on the incredible countryside)...we stopped in a village in Lonsheng for a delicious lunch!
Delicious chicken broth soup served from a tall wooden container. And you can see the big buns of steamed bread which is very dense but very good and filling. I ate half a bun. There were more delicious dishes to fill up on.
Ahhhh. Delicious dishes!
One of the minority tribes of the Longsheng area. Go here to learn more:
http://www.chinahighlights.com/guilin/longsheng/attraction/minorities-tribes.htm
These woman sang to us and then offered us a small thimble-full of some very potent rice liquor! We gave them a few yuan (12 to 24 cents) as they passed us the local "nectar."
Local residences and a few tourist stalls.
This beautiful lady, from the Yao minority, was wonderful. She did her very best to sell me a silver bangle bracelet, which I didn't want. Did I buy one? You bet I did! ha And for my purchase I was able to take several photographs of her without guilt. She was VERY short and as you can see they wear huge silver earrings which create HUGE holes in their ears. I showed her the small silver hoops I was wearing in my very small ear holes! ha She was just a lovely older lady and you can see some of her VERY long hair at the front of her headdress. I was told that the Yao women only cut their hair when they are married and then again when they die. But one of my students said they also cut their hair when they reach 18 years old. I have video of them revealing their long hair and how they wrap it onto their heads and I'll upload it to youtube.com soon.
After lunch we abandoned our big motorcoach for a small van-type bus to travel up the mountain to see the village where folks tend to rice terraced fields and also enjoy a healthy tourist population (though when you get to the "top" it's not really the top as you then have to hike up a couple of miles to get to the very top where there are several hotels and cafes and many tourists).
At the point where the small vans let us off, we still had a great distance to traverse by foot to get to the stop. Though there were plenty of men to "carry" folks to the top....I didn't cheat. But then...I also didn't make it to the very top! ha Hey....I'm big and old! ha But they certainly tried to get me to employ them to "carry" me to the top. Lots of folks hoof it up and then it's MUCH cheaper to get a nice comfy "ride" down so I saw many folks being carried down the steep paths. I did hike for a long distance but ended up stopping, relaxing, conversing with locals and enjoying the trek back down.
They certainly made it look very appealing to be "carried" to the top!
For a while the path was very wide with lots of folks. The path would soon turn into small paths of very steep rock/stone stairs......lots of stairs!
At the top, there were many hotels and restaurants! Let me say again that there is no way to the top except by manpower. Many tourists choose to spend the night at the top. Do they haul their luggage to the top? No. They pay elderly porters (mostly women) who carry huge woven baskets on their backs to carry their luggage. I watched many of these women traversing to the top with heavy loads on their backs, all hunched over. And I also saw them coming down from the top with no loads on their backs, yet still hunched over from years of this kind of making a living. A bit sad to see.
Beautiful, no? It's nearly midnight here but I've just plugged in early Michael Jackson and getting a second wind! ha
Even if you click on the photo above to see it bigger, you may not be able to see that this hotel sign boasts about having internet! :)
Local bamboo waiting to be used in housing construction.
I'm going to stop now and continue this post tomorrow night. You know....I've been extremely fortunate enough to see many places in many countries in my lifetime. It all started when my mother saw fit to pay for me to have the opportunity to see many European countries when I was a high school student as part of the People-to-People High School Student Ambassador Program. It changed my then young life at barely 16 years old. I was also able to see several different countries/cultures when I worked part-time for American Airlines and could travel nearly free. I also know that some of the incredible places I've had the pleasure of seeing are one time shots. I'll never get to visit them again. I feel this way about Longsheng. I will never get to visit this particular area in China again. So know that I took time out to just sit and observe and "drink in" the amazing culture I was momentarily a part of. A beautiful, clear day and a good time for some self-reflection. Some things are just very hard for me to put into words. It's hard for me to convey just how lucky I feel to be experiencing all that I am here in China. I can only hope that these posts of photos and words can reflect just how happy and "in my element" I feel. My job here is sometimes very demanding and I do work hard. But these times when I get to travel around the country make it all worthwhile. Sometimes the "means to the end" is SO worth it! :)
Stay tuned and hopefully tomorrow night (I have the next 2 days off) I'll end posts of this adventure and move on to some local (Beijing) adventures. :)
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