Guizhou Trip

We a had a five day break from classes (last Tuesday until Sunday) so I went with two other girls to Guizhou province in southern China. We took the train there for about 30ish hours and flew back. We visited three different province in southern China. Guizhou is partly famous for having many non-Han Chinese ethnic groups and that attracts a fir amount of tourists. The first place we went to was a small town called Zhenyuan. When we arrived, we didn't know where to stay or what to do there so we asked a girl who worked at the train station. She helped us find a place to stay then invited us out to dinner and showed us the town. It's on the edge of a (very green) river and you can pay 3 mao (about 4 cents) to be paddled across the river. We stayed there for one night and visited a Buddhist temple that is built in the side of a mountain.
Then we took a bus to Xijiang, which was very clearly a tourist attraction and the largest Miao vilage in China. It is pretty isolated and before raods were built, it took one day of walking to bring salt to the people. We went to a tea shop and drank tea for a while and talked with the owner, who was a little outrageous. We also met two ridiculous (and very grubby) British students on the bus to Xijiang. They did not speak a word of Chinese and said they had just spent two months in Vietnam and were going to trak around China. The next day we went to a traditional Miao dance show and then climbed the smallish mountain that the village is built on. As we climbed the village became less tourist-y and more like the houses people live in. People were leading donkeys up the steps with bricks and other building materials to develop and build further up the hill. The village has been developed extremely quickly for tourist visiting purposes and all around people were building houses, etc. Also, since everything is made of wood, there are signs everywhere telling people to protect the homeland against fire. All the hills around the village are terraced for rice paddies and the occasional cabbage field. The views from the top were amazing and flowers were beginning to bloom too. We spent two nights there then took a few buses to another village called Qingyan. The village has a walled in portion (the ancient city) and the real city outside. One of their specialties is lots of different kinds of tofu, which sounded good, but actually was not. They have lots of chou dofu (smelly tofu) which you can smell from a great distance, as well as blow-torched (black) tofu, smoked tofu and some sort of cheesy weird tofu.
So, we spend a long time outside of the city walls and I think since it was Sunday they had a massive market with endless stuff. For example: clothing, shoes, lighters, baskets, hats, jars, animal parts of all sorts (bowls of pig blood, pig feet, eggs), baby ducks...
Guizhou is one of China's poorest provinces and it is clearly evident. Everything is pretty dirty (muddy, because the climate is wetter and with more trash on the ground because there are not armies of people sweeping it up everywhere). Also, there are pretty much no foreigners. We were a massive spectacle and people would just stop walking and look us or look really confused when we could speak Chinese. At the Xijiang dance show, we spend probably half an hour having out picture taken by Chinese people. blahhh. Once one person asks to have their picture taken everyone else stsrts and it never stops. Having only seen the developed cities of Beijing and Chengdu, it was very different to see how the other half of the population lives. Also, compared to Beijing, Guizhou is very inexpensive; I spent approximately $14 on four nights of lodging and about 30 cents on breakfast, for example. Returning to Beijing, everything looked really clean and modern.
(Sorry about the weird format-I'm not sure how to make it prettier.)
More photos: http://s591.photobucket.com/albums/ss353/klebling/