We stayed in Kaili for a couple of nights, and another friend, Dan, came to join us. We went to catch a bus to a village of a different type of minority to see their market. In the bus station, we asked about which one to get on, and were told by an official-looking man who was directing buses around that there would be one very soon, and we could sit down in some plastic chairs to wait. It was 9.20. Every so often we would ask again, and be reassured that it would be here very soon. At 10, the man came over and told us that the bus would arrive at 12. He didn’t seem to think we’d mind waiting for it. But we established that there was another bus station with more frequent services, so we hopped into a taxi to get there. The station was in a more grimy part of town, and as we waited for our bus the traffic in the streets around tangled itself into a gridlock. Big trucks emitted clouds of black smoke, while cyclists pulling trailers of cages with dozens of chickens squished impossibly inside tried to squeeze in-between and through the standstilled traffic and make it over the crossroads. Most vehicles had been abandoned by their owners, and we realised that our bus would not be arriving any time soon through this mess. People were having their hair cut on stools lined up along the street, and a grinning market-man lifted a pig’s head up for us to see, as blood dripped into the puddles below. After a wander we waited at the bus station until our transport eventually arrived. Passing the pig man, we saw that the animal was no longer there, someone must have bought it. The bus ride was 2 hours long. It was grimy and filthy and men sat with big chickens clucking away on their knees. The market was fun, with lots of interesting stalls and lots of interesting people, a lot of whom were dangling their live chicken by its legs by their side. One had a huge goose or something instead. By the river, a small boat ferried people across the 30 metres or so to do their shopping and back again. We stayed for an hour then returned to Kaili, where we collected our things and caught a bus to ffice:smarttags" />Guiyang, the capital of the province.

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The next day we took a bus to Anshun to see China’s biggest waterfall. We walked along a nice path, down lots of steps to see it and then climbed back again. Had we not been feeling so energetic though, there was a covered escalator running down the hillside to carry people to the viewpoint and then back up the hill. The town felt very poor and grimy, but was nice enough. They had obviously been making an effort there, as three hotels from the budget section of the guidebook had been done up and had quadrupled their prices. Eventually though we found a decent hotel with affordable rooms and after my friends helped me to argue the price down a little we ate a quick dinner and they left to catch their train to Yunnan province. Alone again. The TV in my room had China’s English language channel, so I watched economic programmes about how important China is, and travel programmes about how beautiful China is, and ate chocolate, and had a bath for the first time in 6 months, although not for long as the plug had a hole in it for some reason which I could not fathom.

The next day, due to yet another power cut, I missed out on a nice cup of coffee and went for a wander around the town before taking a bus back to Guiyang. Partly for lack of budget accommodation in the city, and partly because I quite fancied another night with my own TV and a comfortable room, I made my way to a mid-range establishment found in my guidebook. At the reception, I asked how much a single room was. 200 yuan. Can I have it cheaper please? Yes, you can have it for 140 yuan. This country really is bizarre. But then a German man popped out from behind a pillar and suggested I meet another girl who was staying there alone, maybe we’d like to share? She was Irish, as I discovered when she returned from looking at a room, and seemed very nice so we decided to share a twin room for which we paid 59 yuan each, not bad at all. After a walk and some dinner, the German left to catch a train, and Wendy and I spent the evening wandering around a bit more, searching for an internet bar which we eventually found. She left early the next morning to catch a train, leaving me to enjoy having a nice hotel room and watch English language TV for a while. But not for too long, as it was a glorious day, around 20 degrees, so I went for another walk along the river. Guiyang is a very beautiful city. You were occasionally reminded you that you were in one of China’s poorest provinces, as hungry grubby children gathered to stare at you as you ate dinner, or homeless men sat warming themselves by fires in piles of plastic bags and boxes. But it’s a very clean city, with lovely open spaces for people to gather, such as the People’s Square (they have one with that name in every city) which was all grassy with palm trees, lots of people flying kites, Louvre-type pyramids on the corners (housing escalators leading down to Wallmart below), and a big stone Mao towering over the scene from the side. The river was clean and sparkling, and many people were relaxing in the parks nearby as I took my stroll along to a temple-like structure on a bridge, before having a quick bowl of noodles and heading off to the airport.

From Chengyang we hitched back to Sanjiang (we didn't mean to, we thought it was a taxi minivan, but he didn't want any money so I guess it counts as hitchhiking). From there, there were no direct buses to where we were headed, so we took a bus for 4 hours to a place called Congjiang. We were told that there were no buses to Zhaoxing from there, but then we found one, and got on it. It drove for an hour back along the road we'd just come along, which was a little annoying and amusing, and then went away from the river that we'd been following for so long, up through some mountains, onto a road that was so bumpy it felt like the bus would be thrown off it, and so narrow that we were surprised it didn't fall off it. We got to Zhaoxing and found the hostel place recommended to us by the Americans' hostel owner in Chengyang. These minority people must have their chains of connections as well. It was a nice little place, clean and not slanting, and even had a computer with internet connection (although that didn't work very well).

Zhaoxing is the biggest Dong Minority village around. It was very nice and even had a few shops (including of course a TV shop). There were people sitting along the streets selling hacked up bits of the animals they'd slaughtered, including quite a lot of little dogs. There were lots of live animals around here as well, and we saw a large cow running away from a laughing little boy who was chasing after it through the dirt track running through the centre of the town. There were also an enormous amount of fireworks on sale, and lots of children playing with them. One of the guys said that in our country children aren't allowed to play with fireworks, to which the response was yes, but Chinese children know how to play with them safely. No-one seemed to be worried, and mothers smilingly bought their 3-year olds big rockets and smaller banging things of various types. Carl was still feeling under the weather, and the American girl Rachel wasn't 100%, so Ali, American Robert and I left them by the fire and went for a walk. We climbed up the side of the valley Zhaoxing is in, through another village and eventually up a very muddy and very slippy path through an orchard which had a very Meditteranean feel. It's so beautiful, and so incredible how they've made all of these hillsides into rice terraces. It must have taken so much work, it's hard to imagine. We took another route down from the top to avoid the slippery mud, and got to another track, where a little man drove past on his horse and cart. We left the track again, and descended the hill by taking the little paths which encircle each rice terrace, jumping down from one to the next, saying hello to people who were driving their cattle up the hillside on the tiny little paths, who were carrying vegetables around in little baskets on poles, or were tending to the fields.

The next day, yesterday, we were off again. We got up before the sun rose to take a 4 hour bus to Liping which was crazily crowded. We got on at the first stop, so we got seats ok, but when it filled up we weren't exactly comfortable - Ali beside me had some Chinese girl who sat herself on his knee without even glancing at him for assent, and her friend used my legs to rest her arms. It was fair enough though, there were so many people that they didn't have any choice. We were rammed in and after a while couldn't see the little TV at the front which was playing really funny old Chinese movies. At one point, on some dirt track out in the mountains, we had to stop because there were big piles of stones in the middle of the road. The driver got out, shouted to the men who were moving stones up the road, and then proceeded to try and get them out of the way. The workmen came over and moved the stones around - not out of the way, just moved them to a different shape of pile. It was really funny watching them, and if we hadn't been squished into a corner in the crowded bus we could have got out and helped them to clear the way much quicker than by just throwing stones from one pile to another. But eventually they managed to arrange them so that we could just drive over the top of them. At Liping we luckily found that the only bus heading in the right direction was leaving in 5 minutes time, so we jumped aboard and made ourselves comfy for the 8 hour drive over yet more mountain roads with precipitous drops and insane bends. To our pleasant surprise, this was a real bus rather than a little falling apart vehicle with lots of seats in it. It's really beautiful in this province (Guizhou). There are so many little villages, amazing rice terraces and lovely mountains. But eventually we entered the city of Kaili and came back to the 21st century. Here, there are roads rather than tracks, no mud at all, anywhere; there's neon lights and fast food and real internet cafes and taxis that aren't made of motorbikes and tents. Finding that our hotel had heating of a kind came as a huge surprise to us, and a hot shower was also kind of nice. Despite these nice little comforts that cities bring however, I think that even just spending a week in the countryside has turned me from being quite indifferent towards this country to liking it rather a lot, and if I did decide to come back, I would much rather stay in a little village, even if it did mean having to use a little hut over the local pond as a toilet.

The bus from Longsheng to Sanjiang was long and bumpy, and we arrived at around 8.30pm. Sanjiang is, according to the Lonely Planet, one of those places where you go to only to get somewhere else. This was true for us, and we really didn't want to stay there, we wanted to get to a place called Chengyang. Since there were no buses running at that time, we piled into one of those little covered things on the back of a motorbike that I very badly described in my last entry to get there. It was very funny, the three of us with our big rucksacks squished into a little tent thing, and the man in front on a motorbike with a very small engine (the motorbike is also in the tent thing - like a horse and cart but a bike and cart, then a tent over the top... I'm really not making this clearer I know). It's only 19km but it took an hour cos this thing isn't the fastest means of transportation. We were dropped off, in the pitch dark, at a little wooden house. The owners came out and told us we could stay there, and as we didn't know how to get to the hostel we were looking for, and it was pitch black and getting late, we had a look. We bargained a little and decided to stay, in a freezing cold triple-bedded room in the loft.

I'm not sure what the name "Chengyang" actually refers to - whether it's the beautiful covered wooden bridge built by the minorities with no nails, or whether it's the area that includes about 5 little villages - but it's a lovely place to go. Unlike Pingan, it didn't feel like the whole place was geared towards tourism, and it was more like real-life. There were a few little women on the bridge during the day, trying to sell beautiful hand-stitched bags and things, waiting for the buses which brought a few Chinese tourists to see the bridge and then away, but even those tourists there were hardly any of, and they didn't venture far beyond the bridge. As for Westerners, there were us 3, and then 2 very nice Americans who spent several hours on the first evening explaining to us that it wasn't actually fair that everyone in Asia had a go at them, cos the reason they were not in America was because they hated the place, so there was no point in telling them how awful it was, as they already knew from their first-hand experience, of which they told us many examples of bad Americanism. That was us told - a pre-emptive strike, in case we had been thinking of attacking them for their nationality. They really were very nice though, and we ended up travelling on with them to the next couple of stops as well, as we were taking the same route.

Over the bridge and into the villages, it was like going back in time. There were little ladies doing their washing in the river, waterwheels irrigating the fields, animals all over the place and wooden houses that were slanted like they were about to fall over. In the middle of the villages were big ponds. Some had little wooden huts on stilts over them as I suppose the houses didn't have toilets. There was no door of any sort on these huts, of course, and just a hole in the floor so that everyone around the pond could see what your body emptied into the pond a couple of metres below. There was actually a very nice, clean, non-slanted WC building in one of the villages, but it was locked and I suppose it could only be opened if some group of tourists came along and had a tour of the area. Not for the use of the locals - they could use the pond. Thankfully, our little guest house had a toilet, being a guest house and not just a family house, so we didn't have to experience the local way of doing that kind of thing.

Two things reminded you that you were still in the modern land and hadn't accidentally been transported back many years. One was the satellite dishes that could be seen here and there. TV is such an important thing around here. In towns which are big enough to have a few shops, almost invariably one will be an electronics store with huge tellys, which always looks totally out of place. Even in the poorest houses there will be a TV set. The second were the cool teenagers. The teenage girls wear bright jackets, the boys all had brightly dyed red hair and some wore flares. They strutted around the place looking too cool for school, cooling ignoring us and most other people. 

After the 2nd night, I awoke soon after 7 and decided to get up and make the most of the day, rather than staying in bed til 9 as had become our habit. I discovered that I could get hot water from the gas heater in the bathroom, so had my first wash of quite a few days before heading out for a little explore. I found a track leading to a village we hadn't walked through the previous day, and followed it around a hillside to the outskirts of the place. This village had a lot more ducks than the others, waddling around and swimming up the streams at the sides of the track. I felt like I was really intruding here, so stood at the edge looking for a few minutes up at all the huts built up the side of the hill, and the women carrying firewood and vegetables around in baskets on poles, deciding not to go in. But then a little old man came along and I said a friendly hello to him, to which he responded by waving me on into the village. I made my way over bits of wood over ponds, up random stone steps and along narrow paths, up and around the houses, with giggling children running away as I approached, or hiding behind the oldest and bravest of them. Each village has a drum tower, and I walked up the hill to this one. An old man was carrying firewood inside, and again my 'ni hao' was met with a beckoning hand. Inside the drum tower, his friend gave me a cup of hot water (or very weak tea) and we sat down around the fire, which the first man filled with the wood he had been carrying and lit with the help of a plastic bag, as I winced and wondered if there was an easy way to explain to him that lighting fires with plastic bags wasn't really a good idea. After a few minutes, the hot water man produced some pieces of paper with lots of names of people and nationalities written on it - he wanted a donation for repairing the drum tower. Many people from all over the world had written their names and given 10 yuan to this cause. It was funny to think that in this little village in the middle of nowhere, many travellers had already been and looked, that these people had seen many westerners before. It was also kind of nice to know that they were making use of us intruders to get something that was needed and wanted by the villagers. At each of the covered bridges around the villages there is a little sign saying that if you donate something to help them restore their bridge, you will have your name carved - in stone if you give 10 yuan or more, in wood if you give less. I gave them 10 yuan to help fix the holes in their beautiful drum tower, and they wanted to engrave my name, along with others, in a beautiful stone. My name is far too long to fit, but I wasn't really too bothered anyway, said goodbye and made my way back to where we were staying to wake up Carl and Ali.

The adventure's going well, despite being a little spoilt by the weather. Yesterday we took a rickety bus up some mountains to a little village which is supposed to be a great place to go to see lots of incredible rice terraces built into the mountains, stretching up 800m. It was a nice little place, with women wandering around in their colourful minority clothes and lots of wooden huts. You could imagine it'd be a really wonderful place in the spring or the summer, but now it was cloaked in mist, so you couldn't see 10m in front of you. Therefore, we couldn't see these incredible rice terraces that we'd gone all that way for. There's so much building going on there. It's marked out as somewhere where tourism is to grow, so a lot of the wooden huts will be guest houses and inns. When we were there though, there were maybe only another 5 tourists in the whole village, being low season. As soon as we got off the bus, the touts crowded round us, and we followed a little woman up a long twisty mountain path from the road to her wooden hut in the village and haggled a bit before agreeing that we'd stay there, as it seemed as good a place as any. It was strange wandering around the place, as there are so many new buildings and so little people, but I spose that in the tourist season there will be more people around. The animals were so sad, and I almost resolved to become a vegetarian again - pigs standing shivering in the rain, tied in place by a string round their leg, with no lovely mud to roll in (although there was an awful lot of mud everywhere else, all over the paths and our clothes). There was also a huge pig lying on its side, dead (I hope), being blowtorched in the middle of the street. I guess they were taking the hair off it or something. It was a strange sight. The chickens seemed happier though, and some jumped around the eatery floors, under the tables and onto the chairs, unaware that they'd be on top of the table on a plate the next time someone ordered chicken noodles. I was looking forward to some good grimy Chinese food again, after 5 days in Yangshuo with civilised Western meals on offer. However, the inn where we ate dinner catered for the tourists, and therefore had a very similar menu to the places in Yangshuo, with pizza, Mexican burritos, Indian curries etc on offer, which was a shame. We met an Australian girl there and sat for a few hours by the fire, exchanging some friendly banter with the owners and drinking delicious home-made ginger & honey tea. It was cold leaving the fire behind and tramping up the little stone steps through the village to our own lodging. It was even colder in our room, where despite the extra blankets we still couldn't get warm, and tried to blow steam rings with our breath to amuse ourselves for a while.

This morning the mist still shrouded the hills, so we decided it wasn't worth staying another night. After a little walk up to the top of the hill to 'Vievpoint 2' where all we could view were walls of mist and little minority women trying to sell us postcards of scenery we couldn't see, we headed back to the bus stop to catch a bus back to Longsheng town, where we are now. Ali and I stayed here a couple of nights ago, wanting to see somewhere new rather than stick around in Yangshuo while Carl recovered from eating something that his stomach didn't like (could have been that Western food was a shock to the system after such a long time on a diet of rice and noodles). That time, we went for a walk to see a little minority village on a bridge (which turned out to be made only for the sake of the tourists and therefore was not interesting at all), and on the way back took a lovely little path over rice terraces and between cottages, until we were surrounded by about 12 growling dogs and decided we'd be better turning round and going back to the road to get back into town. The town is not very exciting, but it's very Chinese. It's grubby and dirty and there are lots of strange vehicles driving around, like motorbikes with van things on the back (not very easy to describe, I'll take a photo). If you come to China and only visit big cities like Shanghai and Chongqing, you may think that this country is very well developed and not all that poor, but in towns like this, you really feel like you're in proper Asia, where McDonalds hasn't reached and there are markets full of squawking animals and grubby little children running around and women selling the veg they just picked from the fields (it's only the women, men don't seem to do much in this country except sit around and play cards and mah jong). But obviously they still have internet here, through the back of some buildings, up some little stone steps, and into a dingy little place with peeling paint and loads of teenagers playing CounterStrike or chatting on webcam to other teenagers who're probably sitting in equally dingy little internet cafes surrounded by battle sounds bouncing off the walls. We're just killing some time before catching another bus to a place called Sanjiang, which is supposedly more off the beaten track and there are more colourful minorities and interesting little villages to see.

No dog hotpot or snake bile wine - just some carp fish with special Guilin sauce, and some rice noodles. Not so exciting, but very tasty all the same. Gift shop man, who said he was part-owner of the stone gallery (whether he is or not is another matter), instead of taking my phone to give fossil man directions to the restaurant where we were eating, told him not to come. Not very nice, as he'd already arrived at the train station to meet up with us. Gift shop man and his friend said that they were the bosses and he was just an employee, but I'm not sure why that means I didn't want to eat with him. His talk on fossils brightened my day... Anyway, so the evening was interesting. Gift shop man spoke no English, and my Chinese wasn't doing very well, so it was a little difficulty communicating until we established that we both spoke Japanese, from which point there was no problem. Then the 3 of us went to karaoke in his friend's friend's swish hotel, which was rubbish, so we left and went to a very swanky karaoke place - best in town, supposedly. There, we were joined by another group of people, about 10 of them, none of whom could speak any English beyond "hello", but all of whom were somehow fluent in Japanese. I never realised that language would come in so useful when travelling in China. One of them was the head of tourism in Guilin, who was paying for the whole evening for all of his friends. This came to the equivalent of about 300 GBP, which is an awful lot in China. Not only was there karaoke and lots of snacks and brandy (which I sensibly drank only a very small amount of - don't worry, I'm keeping my wits about me), but there were "KTV girls" (hostesses) who came and played dice games and sang and chatted sweetly all evening. It was very interesting to sit and watch this Chinese night out, and now I have the Guilin head of tourism's phone number, so, as Gift Shop man's friend wouldn't stop telling me, I can ask him for anything and must use him as much as possible, as he's rich and powerful and you should always use people who are rich and powerful.

Now I'm in Yangshuo which is a stunningly beautiful place. Obviously there's not that much to do, as if there was I'd be out doing it, rather than sitting writing this. But hopefully the weather will brighten up tomorrow and I can go up the river on a raft, climb a limestone peak, cycle to some minority villages or go swimming in a cave...