Xijiang pt 1. The Scenery

This weekend I took a trip to Xijiang with Erin, Don, Jen, and Shirley. Xijiang is the largest Miao minority village in China. I took so many pictures that I have to split the blogs in 2 parts. This one will be about the scenery in and around Xijiang.

 To get to Xijiang we first had to take a train from Guiyang to Kaili. After arriving in Kaili we drove 30 minutes to the village. This picture is in the Guiyang station right before we walked down onto the train ramp. The train was pretty full and my group got to sit with each other so it was a nice 4 hour train ride.

 The scenery between Guiyang and Kaili was absolutely stunning. It was filled with open landscape, mountains, and landscape upon landscape. We passed over many villages and towns. This picture was taken right after we came out of a tunnel. It was a pretty cloudy day, but when we came out of the tunnel the clouds parted allowing some sunlight to hit the valley in the distance.

 This picture was taken about 45 minutes before reaching Kaili. I was sleeping at the time but Erin nudged me to take a shot of this landscape.

 At this point we had already left Kaili and on our way to Xijiang. This picture was taken when we started entering actual Miao country. Miao people build their houses out of wood. You can see here that the houses on this cliff, over their rice paddies, are wooden. This is the type of architecture I would be seing from this point onward.

 This little Miao village we stopped at on the way to Xijiang was on the river bank. Here you can see where the villagers planted rice and corn for the season.

 This is Erin. She is my boss and the person that invited me on the trip. I picked up that she is not from the Miao minority, but she did grow up in a very small village. She told me how she would work on the far all the time and how she lived her life in the village. She said she did not like that life style too much so she almost scored perfect on the Chinese college entrance exam and went to a great school. From there she came to work at GFC and now, at the end of the semester, she is going off the Chengdu to work for a big cooperate company.

 This is another view of the first Miao village under the sunset.

 The waterfall is the same as the one in the picture with Erin. This water fall was really interesting. It feeds the river that the village uses. Also, it does not come off of a slope you can really see. It has the illusion of just appearing like magic.

 This is the entrance to Xijiang. From the entrance it is a 5 minute car ride to the village itself. People can walk, but on a hot day it seemed better to take a car.

 This is the main street of the village. The village has become quite a large tourist attraction these days. I feel like this took away from the experience since it felt like there was less culture involved in the village. You can see more wooden houses built up the mountain side.

 This was the view from my hostel window. The hostel was the highest point on one of the mountains in the village. It took 15 minutes to climb there since there were no roads that cars could drive on. There were only little gravel and stone paths that we had to climb.

 This is another view of the village at night. All the lights are from houses in the village. This is only one village, one very large village.

 Morning time came around and this is what I woke up to. It seems unreal to me, even the picture looks like it came out of a fairytale. The fog was rolling off of the other mountain side and the sun was just rising over the mountain range. You can also see a good view of the houses in actual light here.

This is Don. Don and I shared a room for the night. He was relaxing in the morning taking some pictures for himself.

 Erin enjoying the sunrise. She was just as amazed as I was. I have to note that these pictures do absolutely no justice for the actual scenery. The landscape and everything in it was not something to just be looked at, but rather stared at for a long time to be able to soak in even a little. I could have just stared at everything for hours.

 As we left the hostel, the sun came out again and hit the valley.

 On the far side of the village was the farmland. The mountain in the distance and more past it have been turned into rice paddies. It is literally a jaw dropping landscape.

 Throughout the thousands of acres or paddies is this little stope pathway that forks off. This pathway is how the farmers get to their own little paddy and then further on leads to the mountain.

One last pictures of the farmland as I walked away. It really only settled in when I thought about it on the drive back to Kaili for the train.

The next series will come soon with pictures of what we did.