rough guides, jumpers and outer mongolia

.... is all i'm going to write about subjects non china today so that all those in 'the colonies' don't feel so confused. though i will say that i am sure the landlord was the type of kid who rushed home from school so he didn't miss a minute of rentaghost...

as mentioned in the last post, in the vein of john major, this week has been our back to basics week. after the major cities and sites, we've got so far off the beaten track that the tracks themselves weren't even made yet. from saturday till friday we saw only 8 other westerners (and all of those within a 20 minute burst). i know it was 8 because, true to form, i'm keeping a spreadsheet so i don't lose count.

back to basics means spending most of the week on buses. but that is half the fun. most of the time the buses are half empty and we are the prime attraction. only this morning all the people on the bus amused themselves by repeating back my (clearly incorrect) pronunciation of the place we were heading. we've got used to the unmade roads. unmade is definitely better than being made as we found out to our cost during a very unpleasant 3 hour stage. never a country to do things by halves, the chinese had decided to upgrade the entire track from longsheng to sanjang. rather than start and then complete a small section of, say, 10km, instead they were digging up the entire 100km all at once. this meant for the whole 3 hours we were basically driving through a ditch, whilst clearly trying to maintain maximum speed and drive headfirst at all oncoming vehicles.

the main reason to go to longsheng is to see rice fields. though you can see rice fields all over china, they are apparently best in longsheng. as we found out. while on this topic, i had better admit that i had to have it explained to me by ms love why rice fields have to be flat and can't be on hills. apparently rice only grows in water and it needs to be flat for water to not run away. amazing eh?

so, rice fields on the sides of hills we went to see. without getting too national geographic on everyone, the local people are all from a tribe called yao. these yao people are unique for many reasons but principly because they grow their hair to ridiculous lengths. and at the rice fields, most of these yao people spend their days asking tourists if they want them to unravel all the hair so they can take a photo. unfortunately for the ones we meet, we had already seen the unravelled hair at the bus station when a ladies hair fell down unintentionally. so thankfully we avoided paying for that one.

as with all tourist attractions in china, no matter how remote, you are always guaranteed to find millions of chinese tourists there - dutifully wearing their team baseball caps and following their leader with a megaphone and umbrella. no sooner had we reached ping an when the mountain was covered with several school groups out for the day. clearly these school kids found the prescence of 2 fully fledged westerners more exciting than a bunch of cleverly constructed rice fields on a hill. first one got up the courage to ask for a photo and then the floodgates opened. we must have both stood there for nearly 15 minutes whilst at least a 100 or so queued up to get their photo taken with us. everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame somehow...

fresh from the impromtu photo session we set about walking through the hills to a nearby village. a particularly persistant yao woman finally worked out we weren't about to pay her to take her 4 metres of hair down, and instead - showing business acumen previously unheard - realised that we might instead need feeding. by now our defences and nothankyous were worn down, so we ended up following her across miles of yet more rice fields and going to her house for dinner.

on our arrival the whole family was excited to see today's prize catch - not westerners money, but actual westerners themselves. we sat and watched whilst they happily cooked up a feast on the fire stove. everyone was very insistent we drunk the sweet alcohol that they produced from a used water bottle. with defences low and stomachs full, we eventually succumbed fully and are now the proud owners of a silver bracelet and bright blue pencil case. all made by yao people...

anyhow, today we arrived in yangshuo, which is about as close as china gets to a backpacker town. there is chocolate cake, steak and pizza on the menu, the cafe down the road is showing the entire first series of friends tomorrow, and the internet is free. and even the yellow t-shirt is in the laundry and due to bounceback shortly.