Scholarly Pursuits

I actually woke up before my alarm, guess I'm just used to early mornings here! Breakfast was noodles, and then it was time for a day trip to an ancient stone village, tea plantation, and scholar mountain, which has amazing views of karsts. I also realised that this is my last full day in China; tomorrow we are going to Hong Kong, which is part of China of course, but not really treated as such.

Surprisingly only Alfredo, Del, Tina, Julia and I were going on this trip, where everyone had expressed interest before. Simon and Pat have been a bit ill though, and Christine has a bad knee so maybe that's why there were drop outs. It was about a 40 minute drive to the village near the ancient stone village, up some windy roads into the mountains (basically a few karsts stuck together).

The ancient stone village was built around 1400, during the Ming dynasty. The story goes that the 2nd Ming emperor was the grandson of the first emperor, not the son (he was the son of the emperor's favourite son, who dies youngish). This caused dissatisfaction amongst some of his uncles, in particular one from Beijing who marched to Nanjing, the original dynastic capital, and deposed him. The emperor was nowhere to be found though, and there are numerous theories about what happened to him. One of the most convincing though is that he fled here to Yangshuo; the uncle in control of Guilin (the provincial capital) was favourable towards the emperor, the village had walls and watchtowers unlike a typical mountain village, and golf coins from that era were discovered there too!

The village was actually inhabited until 3 years ago, but everyone moved to the foot of the mountain as in the dry season the village has no fresh water and a long trek had to be made down to a river. There are plans to restore the village, but I'm glad I came when it is a ruin; even a faithful restoration would make it nothing more than a reproduction, and knowing the Chinese the limestone bricks used in construction will be replaced with cement because it is cheaper, and leds will probably be involved too...

The remains of the village walls

They might want to restore it, but I think it's nice like this!

David, our guide, likes his filters it seems. The extra person is a random Dutch girl who is also doing the trip

This very large spider was visibly building its web. Very cool. Or terrifying if you are mum

After that we moved on to Scholar Mountain. It is known as Xiangong in Chinese, which means husband, as it supposedly looks like a man in traditional wedding dress from the side. There were more than 400 steps up, and it is a hot day, but how many steps do they think I climbed this holiday?! It was easy enough. The views from the top were stunning, and it had cleared up a lot from the overcast earlier, which was great as we were afraid we wouldn't be able to see much. Also this view is on the 20 yuan note, albeit in reverse (from in the valley looking up). That makes 3 money locations I've seen now!

Not perfectly clear, but the way they disappear into the haze is nice too

I was there too

I get the feeling this isn't the first panorama David has taken

After that it was off to the tea plantation, where we would be having lunch. William told us it was included, but it wasn't, which is a bit annoying. The food was good though, and the restaurant had great views.

After lunch we went off to pick some tea. The number of leaves connected to a shoot determines what sort of tea it will be made into; there aren't different types of tea plant for black, green, oolong, white, etc tea, which blew my mind a little! I decided to pick the shoot plus one leaf, used for black tea, and we slaved away under the hot sun for 30 minutes before being recalled. We got to keep the tea, now I'll just have to YouTube how to process it!

Tea as far as the eye can see!

I felt like I was a natural

There was a selection of insects too. They don't seem to wreck the tea though

If you haven't figured it out yet, whenever I say "spot the cricket", it is almost guaranteed to be dead centre, as I was trying to get a photo of it in the first instance, but it was camouflaged

After that, we had a tea drinking ceremony, where we tried white, green, black, oolong, and flower (osmanthus) teas. Oolong was my favourite, and osmanthus my least favourite, despite their lovely smell. After refreshing at the hotel, we went out and tried the local delicacy: beer fish. It was alright, just seemed like fish though really.

Finally, we went for a walk down West Street at night. Boy is it different! Busy, all lit up, and every shop has music blaring at you to entice you in, a far cry from the sleepy daytime souvenir shops!

There's a few people out and about. Just a few mind!

Tomorrow is my last full day here, and I'll be travelling to Hong Kong, the city with the most skyscrapers in the world!