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We left Chongqing on Monday afternoon on a 1,700 km overnight train south-east to Guangzhou in Guangdong province, our entry point into China almost three months ago. This train was also modern and clean, and more typically than our recent train journeys, full. We shared a 4-bed compartment with two quiet pleasant Chinese men. The journey took 22 hours and for the first time we ate dinner in the train restaurant car (previously we had taken packet instant noodles and fruit with us). The dinner was OK although not meeting the expectations raised by the glossy brochure in our compartment that claimed that the on-board chefs were all highly accomplished. But the views from the large dining car windows were fantastic; we passed stunning steep hillside scenery interspersed with flat jigsaw-patterned rice and corn fields and long periods of blackness as we sped through mountain tunnels many kilometres long.
Later in the evening I pored for a time over our map of China and saw that our route would take us briefly through the north-east corner of Guizhou province. We had spent several great days in Guizhou in March 2007, visiting the capital city Guiyang and the fantastic Miao villages near Liuzhi in the west and the more prosperous ones in the mountains near Kaili to the south-east. We were very fortunate on that occasion to be driven to those places by a resident of Guiyang and relative of Lee Tuan’s family whom we met over Christmas lunch in December 2006. He and his wife and family were visiting Adelaide and when we told them of our plans they told us that they lived in Guiyang and would be happy to show us around.
The following March we travelled by train east from Kunming in neighbouring Yunnan province and got off early in the morning at the coal mining town of Liuzhi in western Guizhou, with a slightly wild west feel about it. “Su Su” was kindly waiting for us at the station with an interpreter (Jenni) and he hired a taxi to take us into the nearby mountains to the village of Suoga. We passed large expanses of iridescent green and yellow rice and canola fields on the way. Suoga and the more outlying village of Longga are home to the “long horn” Miao people, so called because of the women’s cultural practice of winding their hair, and that of their ancestors, onto a large horn-like frame that they wear on their heads on festive and ceremonial occasions. These days, though, a lot of artificial yarn seems to be used in place of ancestral hair. We spent a couple of hours walking around this photogenic village, snapping away and talking with the locals. Many of them came down to the road to see us off when it was time to go. They are obviously very financially poor people but appeared to be happy notwithstanding the tough lives they live.
After an overnight stay in Liuzhi we caught the morning train to Guiyang where we spent some time at Su Su and his wife’s apartment before hitting the road in Su Su’s car for Kaili and the surrounding villages. Our top priority was to visit the Miao town of Xijiang about 3 hours from Kaili. But out from Kaili the road to Xijiang was being rebuilt and we took an alternative steep mountain track that provided a heart-stopping hour. In one place the track was slightly less wide than the car and there were no guard rails, with the result that we could peer down on nothingness except the faint hazy outline of Xijiang thousands of feet vertically below. On the track we were about an hour of steep downward zigzags from Xijiang, but one foot wrong from our driver and we would have arrived in town in dramatic style within a few seconds. But our host and driver was sure-footed and careful, and it was thankfully more than an hour later after nightfall when we finally made it safely into Xijiang and checked into a guesthouse run by a Miao husband and wife schoolteacher couple and the sister of one of them. They gave us a great dinner and plied us with their home-made rice wine liberally dispensed during many toasts and Miao songs of welcome. Having just flirted with danger to get here made the whole scene even more warm and cosy, and no-one refused rice wine that night.
The guesthouse itself was made entirely of wood, as were all the houses in town. This one was relatively new and beautifully-smelling, and our room was large and cosy with fantastic views over the village. Our hosts had to leave for school very early in the morning and they pointed us towards a food shop in the village where we could have breakfast. We walked there and had a huge bowl of delicious water buffalo and vegetable noodles fortified with a fiery dollop of chilli oil. Then we went on a long walk around the town and in the nearby fields where buffalo-drawn ploughs were tilling the earth and an ancient looking water wheel creaked as it turned. This was possibly the most beautiful village we have seen anywhere in China and we were sorry to leave. Our guesthouse hosts stood by our car and sang a song of farewell as we headed off slowly up the steep winding road out of Xijiang.
We visited a few other villages on our way back to Kaili and Guiyang, most notably Langde where we chanced upon a Miao welcoming ceremony that had just got underway for several coach loads of Japanese, Chinese and Korean tourists. Xijiang is not touristy; Langde most certainly is and it is firmly on the coach tour circuit in Guizhou. The Miao people in this region are into silver in a big way; they believe it has special powers and their ceremonial dress features silver jewellery and silver-looking headgear and other objects. The instant we arrived I spotted an opportunity and we quickly infiltrated the long line of tourists walking up the track to the village, at the top of which a rhythmically swaying row of old men straight off the front cover of National Geographic played their traditional wind pipe instruments, and along which Miao women in ceremonial dress enthusiastically dispensed rice wine from communal clay cups. I had three or four despite Lee Tuan’s tut tuts of disapproval, and my explanation in defence that it would be rude to refuse failed to convince. Later though, I squirmed a little at the potential cross-infection fest I had just participated in and was very glad of the Hepatitis A shots we had a few months before. It brought back memories of Holy Communion at the Lutheran Church I was taken to every Sunday as a boy and the spirited debate that preceded the replacement of the single silver communion cup with a separate vessel for each member of the congregation, one of whom had only recently bounced back from a bad bout of TB. But that’s another story.
Once everyone was assembled in the large village courtyard, the locals put on a touristy but still nice Miao traditional song and dance performance. After it was finished we spent some time in the village shops and walking up and down the winding alleyways that snaked between the houses made even more photogenic by the golden corn cobs hung out to dry from the windows. Then we headed for Kaili where we stayed overnight before returning to Guiyang the following day. In Guiyang our hosts drove us around this attractive modern city and took us to eat at great street cafes. We stayed with them in their apartment before flying out from Guiyang when the time came for us to move on.
That was all in early 2007 and it would have been nice now to slip back down to Guiyang again and head off to fabulous Xijiang for a second visit. But having been in China now for nearly three months, the clock is counting down fast on our 90 day visa and we must be out of the country within the next several days. But this time we came prepared with two 90-day visas in our passports, so once we walk across a border somewhere (Hong Kong or Macau are the two most likely candidates for visa purposes), we can simply turn around and walk back into mainland China and take up where we left off, for another three months. Guangzhou in southern Guangdong province, only three hours by bus or catamaran to Macau or Hong Kong, is an ideal place from which to do just that.
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