Canned Culture

Xijiang - Guizhou, China - May 14

Day three in the idyllic village of Xijiang (Shijiang), with population 5,400 of Miao minority people. Our first day was spent people-watching + hanging about the market that commences every five days. Men were selling + smoking tobacco from long, bone pipes. Women were selling produce, or embroidering, or haggling over the purchase of baby ducks + chicks. A market OBVIOUSLY not happening for the sake of tourists, which was just as well since there were only five or six of us around.

The day before we'd taken a bus to the smaller village of Langde, also picturesque, and were fully surprised an hour later when groups of sedans began pulling up, followed by a tour bus. Soon, villagers were coming out of the woodwork bedecked in festival finery and assembling along the steps leading to the village as yet MORE buses pulled up and camera-toting Chinese tourists emerged to music + fanfare. Darin and I looked at each other - HUH?! and had to laugh, it was all so staged... but that was just the beginning. We followed the music to the town square and were then witness to a song + dance performance with cameras furiously flashing. Meanwhile, young children were picked up and posed with and cameras were pointed right in peoples' faces as if they were mannequins. Agh! We HAD to get out of there! And to think that people had actually paid alot of money for the experience too! We hung out on the town bridge, eating our picnic lunch + waiting for it all to end. We got a good laugh later when we saw all the ethnic dancers shuttle onto one of the tour buses and head out of town. They weren't even villagers!

The scene here in Xijiang is about as opposite as can be. No one's wearing costumes, but they ARE colorfully dressed in the traditional style and with so much character that you'd think you're on a movie set. There's not much music but for the laughter of children, the man who walks into town every morning banging his gong selling who-knows-what, the chatter of the old men's caged songbirds + the burst of firecrackers. Yesterday we went on a hike up into the terraces above town. We sat and marveled at the feat of engineering it took to build these functional + aesthetic masterpieces as women hauled past loads of compost in baskets, men plowed fields with buffalo with a wooden yoke over their shoulders + the myriad of other tasks necessary to grow the bounty of food they need to survive - Old school! We're certainly not feeling any rush to leave this magical place.



Chengyang - Guangxi, China - May 22

We just crossed into a new province after two weeks in one of the least visited in all of China. We've already found that we need to start asking prices as things are more expensive here and overcharging more common. Also, it's the first time since Yunnan where we've had to pay admission into anything - And even just to enter a village or walk through the terraces which we've been doing for free, as it should be. I guess it's a good primer for going back to the wolves in Vietnam, the one thing we did NOT like about that country.

Chengyang is actually a collection of seven separate villages linked together by old bridges with rice paddy buffers in between. Yesterday I meandered through homes with chickens darting across my way and old men playing cards on the bridges, which actually double as sheltered hang-out spaces that catch the afternoon breezes and provide a respite from the heat as much as from the rain. The village's main claim to fame is the stunning "Wind + Rain Bridge", built without nails and one of the oldest + finest left in the Dong region. It's all a bit fairytale-like, especially in the evening with the twinkling of fireflies and racket from frogs + crickets as we sit along the river and watch the last of the light fade from the sky. It's another place where we feel we could stay indefinitely, but for the increasingly persistent call we're hearing that we need to start working again.

And SPEAKING of work... There's such a flurry of building happening here - New homes, guesthouses, roads, stone walkways... Even the admission fee is a new occurrence from what we're told. We've been speaking with the young owner of Yang's Guesthouse, a town native whose entire family helped fund him to attend university in Guilin city. Now he's back, and after obtaining a loan, and with the endorsement of the Chinese government to promote the village for tourism, he + other locals are jumping on the bandwagon and looking to better their livelihoods through the tourism boom. That all sounds good on paper, but Chengyang is another fragile place that won't be able to maintain it's charms if the needs of the larger tourist market - The Chinese - are met. While we were there, his other guests complained that there was nothing to do there, that it was a broken town. "There's no music, no girls, no KTV (Karaoke Bars)". I wonder why they would've even come here in the FIRST place if that was what they were after!



Yangshuo - Guangxi, China - May 25

So THIS is what the Chinese want! What a scene! We've seen the song + dance perfor- mances, we've seen the row upon row of tourist trinkets, but THIS is something new altogether. There's a carnival atmosphere here with live music + outdoor dining , strings of hipply designed bars pumping out dance music, girls all dolled up... And people, many of them twenty-somethings are out on the town. We talked to one young guy from Guangdong province that quit his tech job to come check things out and is thinking of relocating because the business opportunity looks so enticing. He says many people from his province come here just for the weekend. And come they have... In droves. What a shock for us from the sleepy backwaters we've been frequenting. My initial thought was "I didn't come to China for this!", but then I had to remind myself that this is China too, and it just keeps hitting home what a study in contrasts the country is.

Check the "link" for more photos from Guizhou Province