Travel Journal

Discovering new countries, always starting over again when visiting an unknown territory, exploring its customs and attempting to understand its language, can be both very exciting and unnerving.

And so I arrived in Nanning, provincial capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, exhausted after a long train journey on two different trains from Hanoi, but excited to be in China, or Zhongguo, as the people here call this enormous country.

It was early on a Saturday morning, but the square in front of Nanning’s train station was already filled with people, opening their shops, having a smoke, reading newspapers, chatting, or exercising those interestingly slow gymnastics of tai chi. After a 15 minute walk from the station, I checked into what turned out to be a 2-star hotel, using mainly handsignals in communicating with the receptionists, who spoke no English.

Then, I went out to explore Nanning. I hadn’t known what to expect of China, but it certainly wasn’t this. This city with its new high-rise buildings, its center with luxurious shopping malls and huge department stores, cinemas, nice cafes and restaurants. It was like walking in Singapore, but everything was of course in Chinese, those extremely complex characters, completely incomprehensible to me. Hardly anyone spoke any English, the Mandarin phrasebook I carry with me proved invaluable. The funny thing is, once people see that I don’t understand what they’re saying, they write it down for me, but in Chinese. Nice, but not very helpful.

In this city, I also had my first taste of true Chinese food, not the westernised versions I’ve had in restaurants back home. Even at the cheapest of restaurants or food stalls, the taste of the food is so much more refined than in the other countries I’ve visited. It is absolutely delicious, and there are so many kinds of cuisines to explore in this huge country.

After spending a couple of days in the city, frantically trying to learn at least a little Mandarin, and recovering from somewhat of a culture shock, I was about to go further north in the province. I made my way to a brand new busstation, 3 kilometers from Nanning’s center, servicing the northern lines, and got on the most luxurious coach I’ve ever been on, including during my travels in Europe and Australia. I was astonished to find, for the first time in eight months visiting other countries in Asia, seatbelts for every passenger. After checking the tickets, a coach stewardess in uniform handed out lunch packs, drinks and snacks, and while we were heading to the city of Guilin, the newest movies from Hong Kong were shown on the LCD screen in the front. After a smooth four hour journey, I arrived in Guilin, and got on another coach to the village of Yangshuo.

Located on both sides of the famous Li-river, Yangshuo is a beautiful yet very touristy village. A little relieved to find a disproportionate amount of Chinese who spoke English, I explored the village, and gazed at the surroundings consisting of karst hills and peaks. Yangshuo is completely hemmed in by them, and one even had a pagoda on top, although it is baffling to think how anyone can get up there, seen the near-90 degree angles of the rock walls of the peak.

I went on a boat tour of the Li-river, and looked at the extraordinary scenery, the most unusual mountain ranges I’ve ever seen. They consisted of bizarrely shaped karst peaks everywhere you looked, covered with lush forests and bush. It is no surprise that, over the past centuries, so many writers and painters have been inspired by this unique landscape. A week later, travelling on a bus that would bring me further east, I saw the same scenery around Yangshuo once more, and this nightly landscape was even more bizarre. Backlit by the moon, the unusual shapes of the peaks and hills were perfectly outlined. This didn’t resemble a real landscape, it almost seemed as if a painter had gone to great lengths to paint an ever changing mystical landscape on my window.

After a couple of days, I went back to Guilin, and took two buses that brought me to Ping An, a tiny village high up in the mountains. I had to walk the last kilometer to the village, as cars, motorbikes and bicycles were not allowed in, and couldn’t drive on the tiny rocky path anyway. I checked into one of the highest situated hotels, and the view from my room was the most stunning I’ve ever seen, of dozens, no hundreds of levels of rice terraces carved out of the mountain. This was done some 700 years ago during the Yuan Dynasty, and ever since, huge quantities of rice and corn are grown here by the ethnic Zhuang and the neighbouring Yao people. After a short walk to a viewpoint higher up, even more of the rice terraces were revealed, what the locals call Dragon Spine Rice Terraces, because of the shape. Some farmers, tiny figures in this vast landscape, are planting rice. There are many waterfalls and small brooks, and the locals have used bamboo to build a complex irrigation system, with water continuously flowing into the rice terraces at the top, which then cascades down to the lower levels.

The village itself is quite picturesque, with very large wooden houses connected by a small, occasionally steep rocky path, with bridges over the brooks and near waterfalls, where Zhuang women, wearing traditional clothing, are washing vegetables. A Zhuang man, carrying a knife and some other tools in a woven basket on his back, is guiding a large ox on the small path. The man is wearing the conical hat which I associate with Vietnam, although there, only women wear it. But it rains a lot here, and the hat is very effective as an umbrella. On his shoulder, he is carrying a plough, which he will attach with ropes to the ox and use it on one of the terraces, to prepare for the planting of rice.

It is very peaceful here, quiet in this village, the air fresh and cool. Sometimes buildings and landscape are suddenly enveloped in clouds, and everything is white and faded. On clear moments, I made several walks to the lookout point, and just sat there and gazed. It is a stunning and breathtaking scenery, these terraces, the deep valley, the green mountains opposite.

But it was time to move on, as I did, heading to the large city of Guangzhou, in neighbouring Guangdong province. A city of millions, I couldn’t have picked a more different environment, but such are the contrasts in China.