We arrived in Ping'an from Guilin in the early afternoon and were immediately impressed with the scenery. As Chris described it, it was like "Sapa on steroids". Driving for a couple of hours, along windy roads, the mountainous landscape looked like a giant version of one of our architectural models, with thousands of curvy contours stacked on top of each other forming beautiful reliefs. Within the contoured land lied the picturesque village of Ping'an. Wooden houses with slate tiled roofs laying within the valleys, revealing and hiding themselves depending on the angle.
We spent the afternoon exploring the maze of stepped paths between the identical looking buildings, trying to keep track of the location of our own guesthouse. Worried that we might experience the same type of hysteria as in Sapa from the local residents, we were glad to see that the people were a lot calmer and less insistent. The village is well set up for visitors without being overwhelming. We enjoyed a delicious dinner in a restaurant overlooking the rest of the village and valley below. The local specialty is to cook rice inside bamboo sticks over a fire. The result is smokey tasting sticky rice. It was quite good and we had it with braised tofu and eggplant. We had an early night preparing for the walk we planned on doing the following day.
We set off at a reasonable hour after a quick breakfast. The weather was pretty wet and unstable going from drizzly rain to showers. We didn't let that stop us and we started the 4 to 5 hours walk from Ping'an to Dazhai which goes through the villages of ZonghLiu and Tiantou. The walk was stunning and although we had to be careful with the camera in the rain, we couldn't resist taking photos of the mist over the submerged terraces reflecting the cloudy sky. We made it to ZonghLiu in good time and had a bowl of noodles there. We then continued on to TianTou, or at least tried but didn't get there until much much later that evening. We must have made a wrong turn at some point leaving the village as we traveled up a very long, steep and slippery trail of rock steps leading us all the way up to a pass over one of the mountains.
Once at the top, our head in the clouds, we started getting confused about which path to take as the one we were on started to disappear. Like an apparition, a black cow was standing in the mist and she lead us to her master, an old cow herder with a dozen of animals. We asked for the direction to TianTou and started to sense that we may not be on the right track. His hand gestures seemed to point in bizarre directions and after much hesitation, debating whether to continue and get hopelessly lost or turn around, we decided to keep going with the logic that a path would lead somewhere even if it was the wrong place. Our logic worked and eventually we arrived in a village but it wasn't TianTou...
Once at the top, our head in the clouds, we started getting confused about which path to take as the one we were on started to disappear. Like an apparition, a black cow was standing in the mist and she lead us to her master, an old cow herder with a dozen of animals. We asked for the direction to TianTou and started to sense that we may not be on the right track. His hand gestures seemed to point in bizarre directions and after much hesitation, debating whether to continue and get hopelessly lost or turn around, we decided to keep going with the logic that a path would lead somewhere even if it was the wrong place. Our logic worked and eventually we arrived in a village but it wasn't TianTou...
Chris asking a local for directions....
We will never know for sure where we were but it was the wrong side of the mountain and we would have to walk back up and down the other side to get to our destination. At that point, we were tired, wet and hungry. We asked for help from some long haired women. Thanks to our phrasebook and a bit of imagination on both sides, we agreed that we would eat something and that one of the women would guide us on the two hour trek to TianTou and then Dazhai. They fed us a stir-fry of pork (mainly fat and some tasty chunks of meat) and bamboo sprouts. It wasn't half bad and we also had a cup of rice wine to give us some strenght for the road. Around 5pm, we were off again, dreading another round of slippery steps in the mud. Our guide wasn't too fast but she was agile as she managed to stay completely free of mud splatters while we were slipping around, caked in mud up to our knees. We took a few tumbles even thinking for a moment that I might have broken my elbow. Luckily, my butt took the bulk of that fall. Eventually, drenched to the bone and exhausted, we made it to a village and into a house which turned out to be her mother's. Her daughter, sister and nephew were there too and they welcomed us warmly. We were forced to take our clothes off and change into borrowed ones until the next morning. They then gave us a cup of a sort of fermented rice drink. After a few moments trying to work out what was going on, we were taken to a hotel where we could have a warm shower and a comfortable bed. Relieved to be having a nice dinner rather than sleeping in the wild, on top of a mountain, we ate lots and then fell asleep like rocks.
The next morning, it was only a short walk to the bus stop from where we would go back to Guilin one day later than we expected. Once back there, we had nice showers and hung out at the hostel before catching a night train due to depart at 2:20am to Heng Shan, Hunan where we were going on another long walk up a mountain...we called it stamina training for Sweden.
The view from our hotel room...It wasn't all for nothing!
The view from our hotel room...It wasn't all for nothing!
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