Our second weekend in Yangshuo, we took a field trip to the Longji rice terraces. These scenic paddies line the sides of steep hills in the Guangxi countryside. They were made famous in the 1990s by Li Yashi, a Chinese photographer, who captured the fields draped in morning mists, wet and dancing with reflected sunlight, or all-in-white, blanketed in snow. The terraces have now become a major tourist destination, particularly for Chinese tourists.
Li Yashi’s (李亚石) Longji photos are ubiquotous on postcards at the terraces.
To get to the Longji area, we took the bus from Yangshuo north to Guilin. We spent the night in Guilin, enjoying an evening walk around to the town’s brightly lit waterways, peppered with color-changing bridges and tall pagodas. The next morning we caught a minibus from Guilin to the town of Ping’An.
Longji’s most famous sites are clustered around Ping’An, TianTou, and DaZhai villages – but the highlight of the weekend was the 3-hour walk between the first two villages. Setting out, we’d been unsure whether we’d want a guide for this walk, so we figured we’d play it by ear and that there would be plenty of opportunities to hire some help if it proved necessary.
Indeed, as we reached the outskirts of Ping’An, at a viewpoint poetically named “Seven Stars Surrounding the Moon,” we struggled to find the path onwards to TianTou. As we asked around for directions, one of the women selling bits and bobs along the path offered to walk with us. Her asking price for the three hour hike: $15. We didn’t have the heart to bargain.
The walk between Ping’An and TianTou is lovely – perhaps less dramatic than the sites at either end, but with much greater solitude. What made the hike special, however, was our guide, Pang Liang Yan.
At 52 years old, Pang Liang Yan was strong and full of life. The village where she lives lies halfway between Ping’An and TianTou, but fails to draw tourist dollars away from the flashier and more-accessible hotspots on either end. So much of our hike was Pang Liang Yan’s daily commute: a 90 minute walk through the rice terraces each morning and night with a basket full of goods on her back. As we reached her home village at the mid-point of our walk, Michael asked Pang Liang Yan if she wanted to stop by her home so she wouldn’t have to carry her heavy basket all the way to TianTou and back. Well, at least he tried to ask - just two weeks in, our Mandarin is still quite limited. It quickly became clear that Pang Liang Yan had never conceived of her load as a heavy one. She mistook Michael’s gesture as an expression of his own fatigue, then offered to port both our backpacks on top of her basket for the duration! Despite her insistence, we managed to hang onto our light, high-tech day packs and our now-humbled pride.
Pang Liang Yan fueled all that extra energy into breaking down the language barriers between us. She spoke just a few words of English, but was keen to learn more. And, she was incredibly patient and persistent in getting her meaning across despite our limited Mandarin. As we walked along the rice terraces, she pointed out the best spots for photos and identified corn, banana, pumpkin, and peppers growing amongst the rice. She told us about her family (multiple siblings and kids despite China’s one-child policy) and asked about ours. She was both savvy and curious about the prices we paid for our entrance tickets ($15), transportation from Guilin ($20), lodging, and food. She told us that she’d spent her whole life in and around the Longji countryside, judging even the 90-minute bus ride into Guilin an unaffordable extravagance. She vigorously disagreed when we suggested the bus price might be lower for locals than for us foreigners.
With Pang Liang Yan at the end of our hike.
It’s striking to encounter rural poverty in China so close to the country’s growing wealth. As a thriving domestic tourist destination, the Longji terraces attract throngs of China’s growing middle class, decked out in designer fashion and high tech sports wear, driving BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes Benzes. Pang Liang Yan’s story – living in a small rural village, eeking out a few dollars a day, never travelling even 30 miles from home – seems a world apart. The very rice terraces that the urban middle-class admire for their beauty are back-breaking work for the farmers that must manually cultivate and harvest these tiny plots of land on steep mountains. We’re learning that this type of enormous wealth disparity is a defining chacteristic of modern China.
After saying our goodbyes to Pang Liang Yan, we enjoyed a beer on the deck of our hotel and settled in for the evening. The next morning, we finished the walk into DaZhai – the highlight was a midmorning snack of freshly ground soymilk at a mountainside stall – and then couldn’t resist the noisy cable car up to one final viewpoint before boarding the minibus back to Guilin.
We spent Sunday night again in Guilin, and then used Monday morning for a short coda to our Longji fieldtrip - a four hour river cruise back to Yangshuo along the Li River. This was our first experience being part of a bona-fide Chinese tour group. There is a certain ritual to these things, which feels not altogether different from an elementary school field trip. Each of us got a small sticker of a cormorant, our group identifier, to paste on our sleeves. Our tour guide speed-talked through her script into a staticy portable microphone and amplifier on our bus ride to the boat terminal, and then anxiously waved a small flag– emblazed with a cormorant again–in a vain attempt to keep our group together as we disembarked at the tourist docks. It did not help her cause that at least one other tour group at the crowded docks had the identical cormorant stickers and flag.
Once on the boat, the scenery did not disappoint. Dozens of these tour boats make the trip from Guilin to Yangshuo every day, so we were part of a long train on the river. But this was one of those cases where the crowd didn’t really diminish the views. The most striking karsts are between Guilin and Xing Ping (the little town where we went on our bike ride the prior weekend) and then further south around Yangshuo. But the whole ride was lovely.
Robynn also struck up a lively conversation with a friendly boy on the boat, who was undeterred by our near-total incomprehension of his rapid-fire story telling. And we got to witness–and join in on–the amusing spectacle of a steady stream of vendors on bamboo rafts pulling up to the tour boat. They sold fruit to the passengers and fish to the boat cooks, where it became part of our river-cruise lunch.