7-day Tour of North Guizhou Province - 21st Oct to 27th Oct - Part 2

When we left the rice fields at Longji our guide drove us a long way over to the Eastern border of Guizhou province to a town called Xingan. The route was quite scenic but marred with frequent building work. Obsessive house building as we had seen elsewhere. Often left unfinished and with debris spread around the roads and pavements. There was also a lot of road building which is more purposeful bu t not pretty. New highways are being built and the construction of tunnels and massive viaducts could be seen in many places. This results in the existing roads being overloaded with trucks full of road building materials, which then clog up the small towns we were passing through while they try to negotiate past the inevitable house building messes in each town. The Chinese goverment want highways to reach more of the rural areas so that they can develop poorer areas and make more use of their labour and produce but it does tend to cause massive detours while it is going on. The roads  also make it more viable for people to stay in their rural or small city locations instead of moving to the big cities. Fortunately our guide had good contacts in each area who could inform him which roads were not being dug up or congested, so we were never seriously delayed.

Xingan is quite a large modern city though with a few older streets as here where we were looking for a place to eat. We tried to order a hotpot, like we had in Shanghai, like a fondue where you cook your own bits of food in a boiling sauce on the table. Even our guide's language skills were defeated this time and to our horror we ended up with a huge wok of food already cooked and full mostly with snails. Fortunately there was enough other stuff to feed Liz and I but our guide had to eat a lot of snails!

The reason for going to Xingan was that it is the beginning of the Ling canal. This was amazingly built in 214 BC to facilitate the movement of supplies for the troops into south China while their first and most revered emperor was uniting China for the first time. This was the same emperor who started the first great wall. The picture here explains it in detail (if you enlarge it), but basically it joined two rivers, one flowing North and the other flowing South with some impressive and very innovative river diversion and management.

The main dam and diversion channels are still there in Xingan and some of the canal as in the pictures. The ploughshare shape dam still works to divide the river into the canal section which then flows through the city.

The rest of the city was quite modern and commercial. Although we had seen them elsewhere, there seeemed to be a great concentration of 3 wheeled transport in Xingan. Mostly motorbike based. The slick new red one in the picture is one of the many taxis. We used one of these after our snail meal - 3 of us! It looks like the old Reliant 3 wheelers such as I had myself as a student, but with only a motorbike engine, so in spite of there being no hills, it felt like it would not survive the journey to our hotel. It was really on ly a fibreglass covered version of the old ones you can see in the background. Three wheelers are also used for moving goods as well as the ubiquitous 'tractor' style ones where the entire engine is outside the vehicle and suspended above the single front wheel. Some of these are scaled up and used on much larger trucks, which are then piled with huge loads and look extremely unstable. However we only once saw one that had fallen over, so they seem to do the job.

After Xingan we continued driving East and visited 'the scholar village'. This is a village that became famous in about 16th century (?) when a school was founded there and several students from the village passed the imperial civil service exams, allowing them to work in the imperial court. It was unheard of for so many to pass from one small village, so it quickly became believed it was a lucky place (very common in China to attach luck to things). A shrine to the original founder was built and students still place offerings to help with their exams. You can also see the shrine is placed in front of a hill. It is facing South and the hill blocks the bad luck spirits that would of course come only from the North. This principal is used for most spiritually significant sites, e.g. tombs, temples, shrines. Even now new graveyards often have an artifical hill built in them so that the gravestones can face South with their back to it.

Similar beliefs are made visible in the old town centre market place shown here where sections of wall stand opposite the street entrances so that bad spirits cannot enter the town. Bad spirits apparently dont go round things.

The town had been very prosperous in the past but is now very run down with many once expensive houses now very neglected. The town is a very minor tourist attraction and gains negligable income from its former fame. The local policeman even asked our guide to show him our passports - not because he needed it, but because he had never seen a foreign passport before - on our behalf  our guide declined, not least because the policeman seemed a bit drunk. The residents seemed to live in very poor conditions and in old dark houses, probably supported only by local subsistence farming.

Continuing on from the scholar village we were held up for an hour or so by an accident on a rural main road where a motorbike seemed to have rammed into the side door of a truck and sadly been killed outright. A large number of policemen spent a very long time measuring and photographing everything during which time only bikes could pass along the road. A vast queue of mostly trucks built up in the mean time, but everyone seemed very calm about it. The Chinese people dont seem to get upset about traffic problems. If something gets in your way or holds you up, you just wait for them to move. Hooting the horn is used a lot, but it only seems to mean 'watch out, here I am' rather than 'GET OUT OF MY WAY!' This was the only accident we saw in spite of the apparent wildness of the driving. People seem to expect the unexpected and are not in fact driving very fast most of the time.

We ended the day at a hot spring centre. Quite a contrast to the old world towns and accommodation we had been in before. This was a very posh new spa resort adjacent to a natural hot spring. A set of pools have been built with different temperatures and accommodation in a large hotel, or in 'VIP suites' where we were put which were cabins close to the pools so you could pop out for a dip before breakfast. A very welcome luxury at the end of a quite exhausting 7 days of touring.

 After the spa we set off back to the hostel owned by our guide at Yangshuo where we started, but stopped a couple more times. First at a typical village of the Hakka people which were built with a walled enclosure, usually for a single [large] family. The one we saw still houses about 200 people, all related. The 'village' is more like a single large building with a sequence of large courtyards all through the centre of it. Accommodation was split with the master of the house and important offspring on one side and his other wives and their families on the other side. The current residents still owe their occupancy to their seniority in the family. Other family members live in a more conventional village outside the enclosed building.

A typical contemporary village main street on our route with the usual building materials in the street and many small businesses and eating places.

We also stopped at a larger walled town which was much more on the tourist map. Pretty but all rather sanitised for the Chinese tourists to take their photos and buy not very relevant souvenirs. As you can see in the photo we were back in the area of the 'karsts' familiar from Yangshuo where we started. The contorted tree is an old 'Banyan' which grow parasitically on other trees until they completely replace them.