Guilin: The Best Week of My Life- Part One

The first major stop of our Guilin trip, the 2nd trip of the fall semester and the “less academic” of our group trips, was to the Yao Village. The Yao village is nestled in a valley surrounded at every angle by miles and miles of rice patty terraces. Without a doubt this is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to. I feel like I took thousands of pictures and not one was able to adequately capture the vastness of this place.
The Yao women were dressed in hot pink and heavily laden with silver jewelry that they also tried to hawk to us for the entirety of our two-day stay. Their hair was piled on top of their heads and wrapped in cloth. They grow it until age 18 cut it off and keep it wrapped around their heads in styles depending on their status. And though they’re small women, most under or near 5 feet they proved stronger than we’d given them credit for. Our one friend Maggie took up their offer for a RIDE for the mile-long walk from the bus to the village.
That first afternoon we were free to hike the rice terraces on our own and Carlos, Sienara, Danny, Jamel, Mike, Jerome and I set off, somewhat determined to reach the top, somewhat just aimlessly wandering. Every 3 minutes it felt like we would stop to take still more pictures.

The rice terraces themselves are as incredible as the pyramids of Egypt would be. They covered every mountain in every direction and you could squint and still not find a place free of this manmade phenomenon. These have been around and not only that, but been in use, for thousands of years. Where as the pyramids are a man made wonder of the world, they sit without purpose almost marring the clean lonely face of the Egyptian desert (not that I don't like the pyramids). On the other hand the terraces, which took an equal amount of manpower and have also existed for a thousand years, longer than America has been a country, or even a concept of a country, are still functional.


After eluding the forceful selling techniques of the Yao women, or attempting to, we boarded the busses to our next local. Contributing to the fact that this was our “fun trip” instead of our educational trip instead of the many museums and tours we did on the Silk Road we here got to visit a luxurious hot springs and spa in LOCAL. Probably the nicest hotel I’ve ever been in. The hot springs were nice too; some pools so hot that I was sure if I even stuck a toe in it would sizzle and fall off.

Yangshuo was our next location and quite a drive away. On our way to Yangshuo we stopped to have lunch in a random little town to have lunch. This town was centered around some random statue, but we only had about 2 hours there and we were focused on food. To this day I think my meal in this town was one of the best I have had in my entire life. It was also somewhat traumatizing because all over the market place were dead dogs, roasted and set on tables to be sold and devoured. I let Carlos guide me with my eyes close to our chosen “restaurant,” not so much a restaurant as an outdoor patio and one man with a frying pan and a shelf of vegetables and meats. I picked out some veggies and a hunk a beef and about 15 minutes later a little fuwuyuan brought me a ridiculously delicious impromptu stir-fry. My companions didn’t like theirs quite as much, maybe it was my flat top experience that helped me create the best concoction.