We started the adventure on Thursday with a 3-hour bus ride to Dragon’s Backbone, which is a beautiful and scenic part of the countryside in the mountains with rice paddies terraced into the mountains. The last hour of the ride was on this crazy, winding, one-car-wide, sometimes-dirt road that would rival the road to Hana on Maui. The driver would blare his horn around every blind corner and turn and then whip the bus around that corner so fast! Professor Meng Hua (an LDS Chinese friend of the BYU MPA program that works at Xiamen University) and her four-year-old son, Bowen, joined us for this trip to Guilin and just as our bus arrived at the end of the windy road, he lost his lunch all over himself and one of my classmates sitting next to me. Thankfully, I still had several Wet-Ones wipes left so they could clean up.
After that bus ride, there were only footpaths and lots of stairs from that point on to the villages and to the top of the Dragon’s Backbone. The villages, paddies, and views were soooo magical! There were streams running and tiny little rice paddies dotted throughout the villages. The restaurant we ate lunch at served yummy food. The views were spectacular. We hiked along a little “no visitors” pathway where I got a picture of me standing in the rice overlooking the other paddies. The women in these villages are known for their really long hair, which practically goes to the ground.
(I had a little trouble uploading photos to this blog post so go to my Flickr account to see more photos.)
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