Arriving at Chongqing (through Guizhou)

There's no way around saying this - using the internet in china is a bitch.

Yesterday evening, I had a few hours to kill between arriving in Guiyang (the capital of Guizhou perfecture) and getting my train out of it towards Chongqing.

 

After eating way too much of some local - supposedly Guizhou food, but one never can tell - and finding out that Cauliflower can taste retty good, I decided to kill some of the extra time on the internet, and maybe throw in another quick update, or even better - get some of my pictures offloaded from my memory card to my portabe HD (since I could not find a computer to do this since Shenzhen, and running out of memore quickly).

 

I quickly found myself in a need for the police-trick again, but this time around - while finding a policeman, and get him to come help me was easy enough - the girl at the internet place just gave me a knowing winner smile, while she explained back to the policeman that they're not interested to bother with registering me for the one hour I'd be using the internet.

Puzzled, he just made some walkie-talkie calls, and ended up looking and me and apologizing that no - I cannot use the internet there.

 

Well, I guess in a country that allowed restaurants to put on signs such as "no dogs or chinese allowed" not to long a while back, there's only so much you can expect in terms of consumer rights.

 

I decided I want some down time, plus after the added hiking opportunities around Yangshuo, the descriptions of some of the other possibilities in Guangxi just didn't sound that much value-adding at that point (although I'm sure they're mighty nice places).

I've seen quite a number of Karst peaks in various forms by now, so seeing them around another village or a waterfall, seemed less of a must-see.

 

So I opted into running towards Chongqing, cutting through Guizhou - and as it happens, the most direct route was actually the "backdoor" route into guangxi (another route I seem to be doing upside down). So there I was heading back to Dong-minority country in Sanjiang - west Guangxi, and from there on into Guizhou.

 

The road were as always beautiful to the extreme (and so possibly saved me some of the need to actually visit some of the places enroute, such as the Dragon backbone rice terraces, or the villages just next to Sanjiang, minus the opportunity to take proper pictures there).

It was a day of bus-hopping. Starting in Yangshuo, after a dumpling breakfast I first took a bus back to Guilin, which turned out reaching the train station, rather then the bus station. Hopping on to the bus station, I got a 4-hour bus ride to Sanjiang - passing by longsheng (and the famous rice terraces area), and from there, moving from the east to the west bus station, was just on time to get the sunset-shift bus heading into CongJiang in Guizhou.

 

The next day I spent with Emma and Nick, a young Australian couplet I met on the bus to Congjiang.

We headed in the morning up the local hill to an ancient Miao village called Basha, where the locals are still holding on to some ancient customs and cloths - being in the holiday season, it still felt a bit touristy - although there is basically no proper transportation to this place. Still, it was lovely, and after we toured the place and got back to Congjiang, we still had time for a lazy lunch before taking the daily bus heading to Kaili - the local big-city.

 

On the bus, I made friends with Lingzi - a Dong girl from one of the villages in east Guizhou that now lives and works in Kaili - which is surprisingly looking like a proper city. The road getting there, however, felt nothing like a city - at most part, it falls under what I normally categorize as ass-buster road for bike riding. This one was not a pleasant ride.

We spent the evening with Lingzi, and met some of her friends - she even made a call, and they ended up coming with a pickup truck and shoving us around to find a cheap-enough hotel.

 

On the next day, I'll have to write separately, as it's time to move out ...