Guilin in southern China is a rural, green city located in the midst of limestone karst countryside that gives the place an other-wordly appearance. It is one of the most popular destinations for Chinese tourists, and with the summer school holidays having begun, there were plenty of visitors about when we arrived at the Guilin airport on our flight from Xian. We caught a minibus into the city centre; the ride was uneventful but judging from the strong petrol odour in the cabin, the leak was so voluminous that had it been fixed, the fuel saving in a single week would have been more than enough to cover the cost of the new gearbox and shock absorbers the bus also so badly needed.
In Guilin we spent a day walking around the city centre and through Elephant Trunk Hill Park, named after a rock structure that plunges deep into the River Li that winds through Guilin on its long journey south. Dick was a hit with the friendly Chinese tourists – many had obviously rarely seen a fair-haired westerner and they jockeyed to have a family photo taken with him.
We spent just one night in Guilin before heading off in a hired taxi to Longsheng County about 80 km to the north. We stopped on the way at a roadside food stall for a bowl of Guilin Noodles, and outside a man offered to sell us a large tortoise but we already had all the large tortoises we needed. Our intended destination was Longji Mountain, home to Zhuang and Yao people who live in small villages sited attractively on the hillsides and in the valleys. Since the time of the Yuan Dynasty, around 1300 AD, the villagers have been terracing the mountain to grow rice and the result today is a stunningly beautiful landscape increasingly visited by tour groups from Guilin. The road came to an end at the base of Ping An village and from there it was a stiff 40 minute walk up steep, winding steps to the very top of the village where we checked into the Lanyuege Guesthouse. We declined the offers of sedan chair porters to carry us up the path but we did succumb to the persistent requests from two older Zhuang women who wished to carry our bags for a fee.
Once the day tour groups had rushed up and then down through the village, we had the late afternoons, evenings and early mornings largely to ourselves in a serene, peaceful environment. We went on a long early morning hike around the terraces surrounding Ping An, stopping to admire the fantastic views from the Nine Dragons and Five Tigers, and Seven Stars Accompanying the Moon lookouts. Later we walked across the valley to the nearby Zhuang village of Long Ji that remains largely unaffected by tourism. Walking back towards Ping An we met a woman coming towards us with a stout bamboo pole across her shoulders and from which dangled two large buckets of sewage destined for her chili patch. She called out to us to be careful as she passed, then she recognized us as her customers from the previous day. It was our bag porter! We chatted for a while, then she invited us to pick some chilis from her thriving patch. We politely declined but I said I wouldn’t mind an ear of sweet corn that was growing all around. She explained that she could only pick corn from her own patch and asked us to follow her, temporarily leaving the buckets behind. It was a long walk to her corn patch but she seemed not to mind in the slightest. Once there, she picked the corn and handed it to us, refusing to take any money for it, and we headed off in our opposite directions (having agreed that she could carry our bag down to the road tomorrow morning).
Our taxi driver was waiting for us at 10.30 am on Saturday morning, as agreed, and we set off on the return journey to Guilin, being delayed at two places while heavy earthmovers worked to re-open the ravine road that had been buried overnight by landslides.
There may be a more photogenic place than Ping An somewhere but we are yet to see it.
