The Dragon's Backbone

Longji, the Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces, is an area of national pride to the Chinese. It is mountainous country famous for the beauty of the rice terraces that were carved into its hills 700 years ago. Ironically, it is a very poor rice cultivation area, producing only one crop a year so the government subsidises it to keep it in shape.
Rather than catching a complicated series of public buses to Longji, we hitched a ride with a day trip tour. The agent we booked through assured us the tour would drop us at Ping An, Lonji's main town. But, not really suprisingly, when we were on our way, the tour guide told us we weren't going to Ping An, but another town called Dazhai. This was an occasion where what appeared to be an inconvenience turned out to be a bonus. If we hadn't gone to Longji with the tour group, we would probably never had made it to Dazhai and the town was a highlight of the visit to the terraces.
Whereas Ping An is a quiet, scenic, but super-touristy town (it seems almost every second building is a hotel), Dazhai was a more traditional villiage. In both towns, all new buildings are built in the same style as the older ones (see first pic) and about the only way you can tell the difference between homes and hotels is the smell - most of the homes keep their animals, cows, pigs etc under the house.
In many ways Dazhai is as much a tourist town as Ping An, but whereas Ping An is the destination of overnight visitors, (often Westerners as it is the town mentioned in the guidebooks), Dazhai is the destination of Chinese tour group day-trippers. One of the biggest differences I have noticed between China and the South East Asia countries I've visited is the nationalities of the tourists. In South East Asia, outside of national holidays, all the tourists are foreigners. On the other hand, in China, most of the tourists are Chinese. One of the beautiful things about China is that Westerners still seem to be a novelty, there are plenty of stares and I've lost count of how many Chinese tourists have had their photo taken with me.
Anyway, when our bus arrived at Dazhai, following a drive though a beautiful ravine, within which flowed a crystal clear river fed by waterfalls tumbling hundreds of metres down the mountainside, we were swamped by women in traditional dress, with wicker baskets on their backs. The women wanted to carry our luggage up to the village for us. Through a mixture of wanting to save money and wanting out of principal to carry our own bags up the hill, we declined their offers, but they followed us up anway.
We decided to join with the tour group for lunch and a demonstration of traditional dancing, singing and a display of the local lady's hair. The ethnic minority group who live in Dazhai are famous for their women's long hair. They cut their hair only once in their lives, at 16 to 18-years-old, and keep that hair, which they wrap up on their heads with the rest of their hair. There are different ways of wearing the hair for unmarried women, married women with no children and married women with children - all of which were demonstrated to us at the show. Probably the best element of the show was that all the women were normal village women. Later that day, when we were walking though the terraces, we had one woman, who was working in the field, still in traditional dress, call out to us, saying we had seen her earlier.
After lunch we went for a walk up through the terraces and the women who had offered to carry our bags for us earlier followed (second pic). We somehow, unwillingly, had ended up with a guided tour, with them grabbing mum's arms to assist her (again, unwillingly) up and down steep climbs. That walk, and another walk we took (alone!) that evening were beautiful. It was great seeing Dazhai Villiage in the evening, post tour group.
In the morning, we jumped on a public bus to Ping An. The journey included a change of busses and we ended up at a bus stop for about an hour. During that time we were entertained by a woman who wanted to show us her hair (for a price) or take a photo of her child (for a price), an old man, who stopped to watch the show and a young woman on her way from her family home at Yangshou, to her employment at Ping An, who brought out her English/Mandarin phrasebook and got us to coach her on pronunciation.
In both Ping An and Dazhai there are no vehicles in the village. Everything is carried or, occasionally, carted on horses. The buses drop you off at a certain spot and you have to walk the rest of the way. When our bus arrived in Ping An it was swamped with more ladies wanting to carry our bags up into the village and men, who wanted to carry us up into the village. Well, actually, the men never offered to carry us in their little carriages they hoist onto their shoulders (fourth pic), they only swamped the Chinese tourists, it must not just be us, but all Westerners who really don't like the idea of being carried.
When we finally made it up the hill to Ping An, we scored a room with a view (fifth pic) and spent the rest of the evening exploring the town and enjoying the local culinary specialty of bamboo rice.
The next day we set off in the rain (yes, it was raining AGAIN) to explore the terraces and surrounding landscape. The walk took us along small flagstone paths across high ridges, through misty forests (sixth pic), and past countless local people working on the rice fields (seventh pic).
From Longji, we headed to the city of Guilin, (final two pics), where we spent a day exploring the city, then got aboard the 27 hour train for Xi'an in what was going to be the first of a hell of a lot of a lot of train trips to come.