Oktober | 2014 | Steffi and Tom on the Road

The rice chamber of china is located in Gunagxi.

Three hours by bus from Guilin are some wooden villages glued to the mountain sides. These villages are home to the rice farmers of Guangxi that shape the land into green layers.

The villages around Longsheng are framed by the yellow turning rice.

No way to reach these islands of rice by any kind of machinery.

It’s incredible for how little money you can buy rice in the supermarket considering that all the work here is done manually under lots of effort. The villages and rice fields are connected by slim stone paths, which is lovely to look at but a burden for transportation. Everything is transported on the horse or human back.

The main transportation form between terraces and villages are braided baskets carried on the back.

The rice is grown on slim terraces, as slim as 0.3m not allowing for any kind of machinery. And then all the tourist that are to lazy to carry up their luggage and beer themselves ;).

Women waiting to carry up the luggage of tourist. The have a very funny way to set their hair. Traditionally the only cut their hair once in their life between 16-18, so gets pretty long. Therefore its is simply curled around the head and made into a bun at the forehead.

However, this place beautiful and you can easily spend a few days hiking around the little paths or just sitting on your hostel terrace enjoying the view. In October, when we visited the rice is turning yellow giving the fields a perfect horizontal stripe look.

Bamboo rice 1: Cut some bamboo wood. Single out compartments. Empty them and prepare stoppers from corn cores.

Bamboo rice 2: Fill the bamboo with a mixture of rice, meat, fruit and peanuts. Close the bamboo and roast it over open fire.

Cut it open (be careful you will get black fingers) and enjoy.

My dinner ended when I found these in the chicken I ordered. Couldn’t keep Tom from eating.

For our time in Guangxi we made Guilin our base. Already upon arrival we were hit by the heat confirming that we caught the summer again. 30˚C and pressing humidity. Luckily almost all hostel rooms contain air condition.

Guilin seen from the top of a cast mountain.

Guilin has it’s very own charm. This little Chinese town (only 4.5 million inhabitants) spreads it’s arms between forgein looking cast mountains and the syrup like Li river. The water can be found everywhere in the city being home to ancient pagodas, fisher and their boats and in case also serve as a wash for scooter, cloths, babies or dogs.

The moon and the sun pagoda, you may guess which is which.

Fisher at the shores of Li river. Hobby or profession, we don’t know.

Scooter wash. We didn’t dare to try the local fish that are served everywhere in the city.

Two other remarkable things are the bakeries all over town that sell delicious bread (also because it is real bread) and the „Ampelmännchen“ (The only english translation I found was „little light man in traffic lights that indicate when to walk“). When we encountered the first we thought somebody programmed them wrongly because it was rather humpingly jumping than walking. After a while we actually got the impression somebody made a statement for „more tolerance with disabled people“ because each Ampelmännchen had a different kind of motion disorder.(MVI_7483). From here we took a trip to the rice terraces around Tiantou and a idyllic bike ride to Yangshuo along the Li river.

Fisher boats or actually these were rather house boats, since people are living on their boats.

Steffi and Tom on the Road

With Tommy traveling in the trains of this World.

Archiv für den Monat: Oktober 2014

There where the rice is grown

Guilin and it’s cones