Well I’ve made it to Guiyang. I’m in the Miracle Hotel (sic). It’s really hot and I’m having a day off. I am watching the sun set over the city.
I didn’t send a blog for a few days, so this is a long one to catch up. Back down in south east Guizhou, I decided to visit a village near Congjiang of tree-worshipping Miao minority people who shave their heads and carry guns. People in the town had told me about the place, which is called Baise.. Guns sounded a bit scary but it sounded too interesting to miss. Actually the whole thing turned out rather creepy. I left the town on a corkscrew lane which led into deeply wooded hills. There was a pig abattoir with two men outside playing chess amidst absolutely piteous screaming of the poor pigs. I kept hearing them as the road zigzagged up. Finally high up in the woods it was quiet, and suddenly I met solitary short men on the road, walking, wearing wide blue trousers, and blue coats buttoned across one shoulder. They had blue turbans and shaved heads except for a long topknot. They didn’t have guns but they had curved daggers in curved scabbards woven from rushes, dangling from their waists down their backsides. They each had an embroidered pouch around their waists. They were quite friendly, fortunately. I also met two of the Baise women, barefoot carrying baskets on shoulder poles, wearing smocks with green and blue diamond patterns. They couldn’t speak Mandarin and looked scared of me. I finally came to their village, of wood houses on the hill top. Children suddenly poured out of school, all the boys with shaved heads and little topknots. They were hurtling about, one was doing handstands down the lane and flipping over again onto his feet. The girls were hand in hand in quiet twosomes, with long hair down their backs, or in loose pony tails. They were wearing minature versions of the green and blue diamond smocks. They had silver chains dangling from their ears, or just coloured cotton. They looked like elves. They were really shy of being photographed, and couldn’t speak much Mandarin.
The boys all flocked round to look at me and finger my bike, which I try to stop them doing. The local authorities (I think) had put up signs for toilets etc and built a wooden ‘gun room’ as part of efforts to encourage tourism, but the villagers didn’t seem to be getting involved. I tried to get some tea or food but there was no shop. Noone spoke much to me. I left. Enough. It was a creepy place actually, all on its own in the wooded hills, kind of mediaeval.
I went back down to Congjiang and took the long winding road along the Duliu river upstream to Rongjiang. There were flocks of white egrets on shoals in the river. It was beautiful but it was really hot in my face all afternoon, and I’d done over 100km by the time I arrived in Rongjiang late and really tired at 6pm. A huge thunderstorm crashed all night with sheet lightning and forked lightning very bright over the hills.
The next day was grey damp and cool. I rode from Rongjiang to Tashi. First up the river to the village of Pingyong, where I ate a lot of sort of doughnut things with crispy bases and sesame seeds. The baker had just brought them. I hadn’t seen bread things for ages so went a bit mad and bought six. Then the road left the river, and I climbed up through wet paddy terraces. There was a flower like pink phlox, some yellow ones like spindly buttercups, lots of green ferns and moss and tiny pink alpines of some sort on the rocks. As I got higher there was white clover, little dog roses, cow parsley and ladies smock, a bit like somewhere in north Wales. There were pine trees and honeysuckle. I went over a pass and then descended a bit to the village of Tashi. There was a guest house run by Mrs Zhou, a chubby Yao minority lady. Her whole family gathered outside sitting on stools in a circle for a riotous barbeque of pork and beef with lots of chilli peppers and rice wine and everyone toasting everyone. The local public security officer was Mrs Zhou’s brother in law, so he was there (took down all my details on a note pad, which took ages), and two teachers from the village school. I lost track of how they were all related. Mrs Zhou is round faced and very jolly and got very drunk.
The next day I rode from Tashi uphill almsot all day to Leishan. There were two long hard 20km climbs, winding on and on through ever tinier terraced fields, with the odd village steeply ranged up the mountain slopes. The river got smaller and smaller and then at long last disappeared, and so I left behind the last small river of all the rivers I had been following that flow south to Hong Kong. It was cold, suddenly windy. The road went high around the mountain side to the top of the pass, a notch I could see way above against the sky. I walked the last bit, the cold rain and wind bashing off azalea flowers and rhododendrons scattering them on the road. The cloud was moving really fast so that one minute I could see hundreds of brown and green terraced fields below me back down to the valley, and the next it all disappeared and there was just white mist. As I went over the top of the pass there was a weird moment of sun so I could see in a small patch aound me bright red azaleas, pink roses and white roses, reddish fresh maple leaves, and pale yellow laburnam all bright and wet in the sunlight. Behind me in the white mist was the land that drains to the Pearl River delta and all my friends in Hong Kong. Ahead now was the next huge stretch of land, where the rivers flow north up to the Yangtze, but it was all in mist too. I rode on. I punctured three times and got slugs all over my bags which was rather disheartening. Very tired stopped for the night in the small town of Leishan.
I rested for a day in Leishan to fix the bike and rest my knee which was sore. There were little alleys where old men put their songbirds out to sing in cages with cloths over. In the post office there were pens on strings and big brown pairs of glasses on strings next to them. Men have brown wooden shotguns which they leave propped up against flour sacks.
The next day I had an easy ride downstream along the Bale river to Kaili. Men were fishing with rods and there were cabbage patches everywhere. Stopped at the Miao village of Langde. Men dressed in blue ankle length gowns solemnly walking in a circle blowing ‘lusheng’ bamboo pipes. A sort of walking pipe organ of a very primitive kind, one man per pipe. Women in fantastic costumes indigo cloth with embroidered arm and collar panels with birds leaves flowers in green red yellow. Silver headdresses. The village houses here are different from the three-storey wood cabins further south. Here people have low comfortable deep brown wood cottages, with little carved of gates leading into some kind of central courtyard. The windows are lattice in a geometric pattern, with a couple of red and blue panes. There are pots of red geraniums and huge red amaryllis. They hang sweetcorns strung along the eaves. Some houses are wood frame with cream coloured wattle and daub panels. People are growing some rice still, but there are also little fields of wheat and I think barley, and there’s a crop that’s already been harvested that people have stood up in little triangular stooks. There are chocolate coloured cows and horses with fluffy foals. The few water buffalo around look dirty and sort of prehistoric in comparison. I stayed in the town of Kaili which was much larger than I expected and had english language schools and fast food shops and women wearing nice smart town suits.
Finally I had another easy day to Majiang. First gently upriver along the Qingshui River then into a shallow gorge with rocky sides and streams and waterfalls running down to the river. I saw two excitingly big birds flying with a great long spotted tails across low bushes into the forest, which were maybe forktails, or pheasants of some kind. Not quick enough with binoculars to see properly. Also saw a longtailed shrike sitting on a wire fluffing its feathers. I think that one is right - neat black mask on its face, brown back and dark tail.
I stopped in small place on hilly plateau 10km from Majiang, which turned out to be a Shui minority village. A man mending a motorbike told me. Chatted with Miss Luo a young Buyi minority woman running the shop. That made two new minorities in one day. She invited me for lunch which we ate on wooden stools in the dark back room of her shop. Horses and carts were clip clopping by. I stopped for the night in Majiang, which had a superb open market with stalls of spices, dried roots, pepper of all sorts, pieces of cinnamon bark and ?aniseed root, ducks and chickens in wicker pens, courgettes, red onions, bunches of chives and spring onions, potatoes, apples, pears, oranges, and cartloads of stuff I can’t remember.
From there I caught a bus the last leg to Guiyang. Arrived with hammering headache. Food poisoning, not nice, so resting a bit here.
