Don't Fall In!

Day 3 Jianshui

We shook the village dust off at our hotel in Jianshui, a small historical town which used to be a thriving trade center in Yunnan. These days, it's a little quieter and relatively tourist-free, so we stood out all the more as we wandered around the town, and I had several more pictures taken of me.

We saw the second largest Confucious Temple in China, built during the Yuan Dynasty in 1325. In the evening we wandered around Chaoyang tower, a three-tiered Ming-style gateway that used to mark the eastern entrance into the city. There were a lot of people in the square doing this exercise-type dancing which mainly consisted of simple arm movements in time to the music, and we laughingly joined in only to find ourselves surrounded by locals taking pictures of us five minutes later! We're just too conspicuous here in China!

The Confucian Temple

  

And the Chaoyang Tower

Day 4 The Hani Village

Alternating between hotels and homestays, our next stop was the village of the Hani people, 5 hours farther south. The Hani are a subgroup of the Akha people who can be found in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand in addition to China. We went up, up, up into the mountains, where  the village was nestled among the incredibly terraced rice paddies, which made for some spectacular views.

 

 

The villagers met us with dancing and music and we ate lunch with our host families at their homes, which were scattered and squeezed in wherever they would fit along the mountainside. I stayed in a group with five other girls this time, and we had to work for our food and hike a dirt path a long way up to get to our house.

Our welcome parade

The Hani people speak their own dialect which is much different than Mandarin, but the children learn Mandarin in school, so we communicated with our family by speaking in English, then translating it to Chinese for the young girls in our family, which they translated into their language and back again. It felt like a game of telephone!

The little girls were 10 and 11 years old, and after lunch, they grabbed our hands and tugged us all the way to the rice terraces, which we wandered, climbed, and balanced on for the next two or three hours. This had to be one of my favorite moments of the entire trip. The scenery was absolutely, indescribably breathtaking. That is, it was when we were able to look around - balancing on the narrow edges of the terraces was no easy feat and I had to keep my eyes on the ground whenever I was walking in order to keep my balance. After I wobbled precariously a few times, one of the little girls firmly took my hand and began guiding me around. She was so worried I would fall, it was adorable! I spoke with her with my very limited Chinese, and she took to calling me "jie jie," which means "big sister" in Chinese, and which I thought was really sweet.

The balancing act

Trying sour candy!

After our hike among the rice paddies, we headed to a village house for dinner. They served us rice (surprise) and a lot of vegetable and meat dishes. They also insisted we try baijiu, which is the popular alcoholic beverage of Yunnan. It's 40-60% alcohol and it tastes like something that was fermented in a gas can for twenty years. I thought it was absolutely disgusting and tried to avoid it as much as possible, but sometimes the locals would serve it to us and then just stand there until we drank it!

During dinner the village women sang for us, and then someone brought out a guitar and we sang for them. We had another community party that night where more singing and dancing took place, and then we headed to our houses to sleep. We had to climb pretty high to get to our house, which was a little scary in the dark, but we managed. I didn't get much sleep that night, but the stars and the sunrise over the rice terraces made up for it! We left after breakfast and were on the road again, heading for the town of Jinghong where we would celebrate Chinese New Year's Eve!

Dinner time!