In western Guangxi
I came back down from the pancake place in Ping’an with an ink wash painter from Beijing. He and his friend were on a painting trip, painting scenes of Longsheng rice terraces after a few days doing Yangshuo water and mountains. Now he had to rush back to Beijing to take his fine arts masters exam in four days’ time and he was all busy with his bags and with his roll of paintings on his shoulder.
Back in the village I paid 30RMB to Mrs Pan’s father-in-law for board and lodging. She’d told me I’d know him because ‘he has a bad leg and marks on his face’. I found him at the first floor window of their wood house resting his leg.
I was hoping for a nice quiet easy ride to Sanjiang, but after 15km, the tarmac became dirt track, all potholes and messy gravel and mud and puddles. People told me it was because they were ‘xiu lu’ ‘building the road’. I think the character xiu originally meant ‘to perfect’. As I struggled through the mud and potholes, the road appeared very far from perfect. I was doing about 10kph and hitting a lot of potholes. I got uselessly cross that nobody seemed to be doing anything about the road. I came across one small band of folk patting with spades at small piles of gravel and mud, and later a man in a caterpillar earth mover moving orange dirt from one sdie of the track to the other, neither of which seemed to be helping anything very much either.
After about 30km, I pulled over at a shop and asked how much futher it was to Sanjiang and how much was ‘xiu lu’. Answer: 45km, all of it under construction. I realised I couldn’t make it before dark. I decided to give up. Mrs Cao the shopkeeper said she’d help me catch a bus. I bought some biscuits.
A boy of about 12 dashed in with scratched scabby legs holding a lizard stroking its head and silver throat. The boy was called Shengjiang. Sheng for Longsheng, and Jiang for Sanjiang, the two towns in between which he was born. Mrs Cao explained that you cook these lizards and ther’re very health-giving for young boys. Shengjiang leapt around the shop in his dusty sandals and then suddenly let the lizard go and it darted under a table with a basket of eggs and a jar of pickled cabbage on it. Mrs Cao was cross. No one could find the lizard. Shengjiang galloped off.
An old man bought an ice cream and ate it on the dusty bench outside the shop. The three of us ate the rest of my biscuits. Then Shengjiang came back with another lizard, and Mrs Cao got cross again and flapped him out of her shop.
She flagged down a local bus and helped me put my bike in the back with the spare wheel. The bus struggled through deep mud huge piles of rubblle and rocks, only doing 20kph. By the time we reached sanjiang it was 7pm and nearly dark. It was a pity because the river looked fabulous in the afternoon sun and it would have been nice to ride. At least I know now how to get a bus if I need to.
The next day I rode from Congjiang to Rongjiang along the Duliu River. The road was just a mud track but not being xiu’d so much better. I saw Dong women in blue smocks with white headbands. Children in villages all along the river were playing with hoops, bowling them with sticks. A boy yoohoo’d me from the top of a fruit tree where he was picking armfuls of blossom. Cowherds were squatting on the roadside watching their cows. I saw a couple of Dong ‘wind and rain’ bridges, a bit ramshackle, in a small village, and several drum towers.
In Yongxi town there was a tiny hospital where a pair of doctors in white coats were sitting on the doorstep in the shade of some old trees chatting. There were villages of wooden houses on the opposite bank, with noises of chopping wood and cocks crowing. Down in the river, boys were playing in boats rowing and shouting and swimming. People were rowing standing up with two oars or sculling slowly with one oar. Some were in flat-bottomed boats pushing with punts upstream. That looked hard. There were houseboats with little curved roofs lashed in pairs close to the gravel river banks.
Towards evening the sun shone orange over the river, and I could only see silhouettes. I stopped for the night in a small town called Fulu, with moths flapping and tapping at the window. Thank goodness for the mosquito screen and for Mr Lu the inn owner who with a grass besom brush got rid of the most enormous spider. I had dinner opposite with the inkeeper and his old school friend Mr Liao, and a telecoms engineer on business for a week from the nearest big town, Liuzhou. They got happily drunk on rice wine poured out of a tin teapot and Mr Liao’s dog Little Black went to sleep under the table.
I haven’t been able to send emails sometimes so am catching up now.
