Ping’an village, north Guangxi
Ping’an village, north Guangxi
Here I am having a pancake and coffee at a hostel in the Zhuang minority village of Ping’an, which is high in the mountains about 100km north of Guilin. There are tiled roofs below me with wagtails and swallows running along them. This is another backpackers’ spot. (For those who think I only eat pancakes, for my first breakfast earlier I had green tea with rice honey crackers and home-made egg-fried biscuits with dates in the middle. But if there are pancakes and coffee and toast on offer anywhere I can’t resist) Anyway, all around are hillsides ridged with rice terraces and clustered here are wooden houses a bit like alp huts in Switzerland. The Zhuang ladies here wear dark blue embroidered trousers and headscarfs.
I rode to this area yesterday from Guilin. Leaving the city was a bit tricky because thousands of other people were also going here and there on bikes and mopeds swerving in all directions. Matching pairs of girls on little matching tricycles a bit like Andy Pandy’s were carrying vegetables, a big lady on a big tricycle had a whole butcher’s wood board with bits of a pig on it going along, and people rather cleverly using two tricycles at once one going forwards the other chap going backwards, to transport large metal frames.
I managed not to have any accidents and was joined by a Mr Wang who was a police man pedalling along to start his shift. He said as a policeman he cared a lot to make sure I was safe, thought it would be better if I had a companion, but said it was all safe round here so I’d be fine. I should ring 110 if there was anything wrong and his colleagues would help. Quite reassuring. He turned off and waved goodbye.
It quickly became hilly. I stopped at a tea plantation and had some tea with Miss Hou and Miss Tan who had graduated in from the local touridm school specialising in tea. They made the tea for me with a lot of porcelain cups and pots on a wooden tray. Someone brought some sweet potato fritters. Then I turned uphill again and the road suddenly went into a rocky gorge. It suddenly became really windy, coming from all directions. I climbed up hairpins for a long time. At a lonely motorbike repair place I stopped and ate a whole pack of sandwich cream biscuits watched by a toddler in one of those walking playpens on casters, whose mother wouldn’t let it have one. The motorbike repair man gave me his MP3 to listen to. He didn’t really look the type but was listening to something like Enya.
The houses scattered here and there on the hillsides and near rivers were now wooden cabins with lattice windows and lattice balconies. People store sticks and keep hens on the ground floor. It looks like they live on the first floor. There was washing on poles. Finally I turned up a narrow lane towards the village of Ping’an, following the small river upstream. There were dippers on the stones, river chats I think, dark grey with orange tails. On the roadsides there were violets and wild raspberries. I slogged it all the way to this village of Ping’an up a ludicrously steep 6km of hairpins, only to find the last one km to the village was a flight of rough stone steps, which I couldn’t do on the bike. Arghhh. So I rode 6km down again and asked some ladies in the village of Huanglo if I could stay.
These were now Yao people. The ladies wear jackets with handwoven sleeves with pink geometric patterns and embroidered collars, also pink. They have pleated knee-length black skirts and embroidered cummerbunds with silver little tassel bits. They wear silver earrings which make their ears hang down, and silver bangles with birds and flowers on. They don’t cut their hair after age 18 and wear 2m long unplaited hair in a sort of black shiny coil with a black headscarf over. They wear black leggings. The men just wear shirts and trousers. A Mrs Pan invited me to stay. Her house is a big wood cabin in the village, with about 8 rooms on first floor, and a big living area with a TV. She gave me a lttile wood panelled room smelling of wood. I could hear the river and grasshoppers outside. This morning there were a lot of cocks crowing and bees buzzing (alarmingly).
Better go. Aiming for Sanjiang today. I find it amazing all these diverse minority tribes are living with their hens and their 2m long hair and home-made egg biscuits just 2 weeks by bike away from Hong Kong.