onto the dragon
longsheng is three hours from yangshuo so we had to drag ourselves from bed at quarter past seven and onto a bus which would eventually take us to the rice terraces in the north of guangxi. after various delays and distractions, not least a village where the women only cut their hair once in their entire lives, we abandoned the rest of our tour group and set off for a walk up the steep rock hewn steps to the first of the viewpoints above the terraces. after an extremely, extremely sweaty clamber we got to a sufficient altitude to be blessed with a panorama of the ridged land, the green mountainsides geometrically pockmarked by years of rural endeavour.we stomped around at the top for a couple of hours before heading back down to our tour group to begin the journey back down the winding roads, a journey punctuated by some hair raising driving from our clearly impatient coach driver and a veritable smorgasbord of road disasters on the mountain roads; first a delay caused by a lorry carrying some form of hazardous goods which had crashed with such force that the entire cab was buckled in almost entirely flat and then the glimpse of an overturned minivan which had clearly approached a corner too zealously. the rice terraces were amazing but, in truth, in a long twelve hour day we only spent two hours doing what we had actually wanted to, so in retrospect the excursion had a slightly anticlimactic feel. a day of dossing before we board the overnight bus to shenzhen and on to hong kong.
posted by bicrom @ 9:30 pm
<< Home