Longji and Chinese tour tourism

Hello again after what seems like ages! First of all, I am very sorry, that you all haven't heart from me in such a long time, either via the blog or via emails but we have traveled quite a bit those last weeks, we have had tons of weired experiences and Internet is really, really rare here in Tibet! Yes, I am writing to you from the top of the world now but before we get to this part of the story, there are still some other experiences to share with you. I definitely wanted to tell you about our wonderful day as a tourist group traveler and that's where I'll pick up the story now - about three weeks ago.

The idea was quite simple. We were to take a bus for three hours, spent 4 hours on the rice fields of Longji and drive back to Yangshuo for three hours. When we got up at 6.30 in the morning, we had our first wonderful surprise: after days of beautiful blue sky the rain clouds had finally caught up with us and this promised to be a day with awesome views... Nevertheless, we got into the minibus with about 20 other tourists and off we went. Our guide spoke some unintelligible English and, after a while, made us understand that we had to pay 50 yuan per person as an extra. It is always nice to book an all-inclusive tour for 170 per person and then to find out that you are supposed to pay a little extra of 50 per person! We thought this day started out well and refused to pay. The guide told us that we were going to visit a village of minority people and that we had to pay the money in order to visit the village. As we had not intended to visit any minortiy village we decided not to pay and stay in the bus. Some of the other tourists actually went, visited the village and came back deeply frustrated because all it was was a group of tradtionnally clothed women attacking to sell ugly postcards and jewlery. We were rather furious because the whole stop had taken up almost an hour - time we had planned to spend at the actual destiantion, the terasses.

Well, on we went and, to our surprise, had to get off the bus soon to wait for another and then drive on. More time lost, but hey... In the end we finally got to the village situated amongst the rice terasses (see first picture of this post) and were keen to start climbing the hills even though it was raining but our guide told us it was time for lunch, so we had to go to a restaurant with everybody else. The restaurant was a terrible place, much too crowded, and nobody understood English. It took ages for us to order some food and to get it. A sandwich would have done the job much quicker and, as we found out, would have been eatable. We ordered "wild vegetables with pork", only the pork was missing completely and the vegetables were a little "too wild" for our taste. I guess the picture explains everything and I don't have to add that we did not eat at all! Bon appetit!

After this nice lunch our guide told us that we had to be back at the bus by 2.30 pm which left us with exactly one hour to visit the rice terasses. In order not to strangle him, we started running up the hills and were, at least, rewarded with some cloudy but truly great views of this strangely artifical landscape. It is so amazing what people have done here over centuries! I had to think of our WWOOFing experiences in New Zealand and how we had struggled to level four tiny steps for a stair - I don't even want to imagine how long it took the people here to create all those rice terasses. Apparently, they now do not keep the terasses as a source of rice anymore, they have become a tourist attraction and are therefore kept well in shape but I didn't really care. It was a fabulous place with fabulous views and even our weather gave the whole a special tough. We would have loved to climb several different hills to get different views of the valley but unfortunately, we didn't have enough time. We thus took hundreds of pictures, watched the local women in their dresses, even saw two of them release their long black hair that toughes the ground (they are in the guiness book of records for the length of their hair) and then rushed back to the bus.

Somehow we couldn't understand why we had to leave so early but it soon became obvious when our bus stopped in front of a pearl museum. A little woman gave us a 10 minute tour through the museum, explained to us that the Southern Chinese pearl was the best in the world (who would have doubted that?!?!) and afterwards we had 30 minutes to spend in the museum shop in order to buy pearls! You can imagine how eager we were to spend about half of our travel budget on a pearl necklace and I can assure you, the other tourists didn't feel much different. We thus returned to Yangshuo rather wet, hungry, bored by 7 hours in a bus and 1 hour in a stupid museum/shop and frustrated because we had spent only one hour at our actual destination which turned out as fascinating as we could have hoped for and where we would have liked to spend a whole day! Well, we took it with humor in the end, afterall, it was a good lesson about how we prefer to travel and what better not to do in China!