Entries about longji

Dazhai has got to be the most stunning landscape I've ever seen. Green mountains, rolling hills, covered in perfectly formed rice terraces. I hope the photographs do it justice.

It's a 3 hour bus ride from Guilin to the bottom of the rice terraces in Dazhai. We were greeted by the local women, who were offering to haul our bags up to the top of the terraces to our scenic hotel on their backs. Luckily we left our big bags at the train station storage and so were able to manage ourselves. It was a fairly steep walk up to our hotel, winding through cobbled paths that ran between the paddy fields. Everywhere you looked the scenery was breathtaking. Our hotel room also looked straight out onto the terraces...what a view!

We spent the day wandering through the terraces and taking in the scenery. The craftsmanship of the terraces is amazing; apparently they were first sculpted in the 12th century and have grown & grown from there. We saw them in their summer when its all green and lush, but apparently they look spectacular in autumn when the tips of the rice is bright yellow ready to harvest and also in spring when they flood the terraces and the sun glistens on the mountains. The next morning Jason had me up at 5am to watch sunrise (I moaned a little).....but it was so worth it...stunning!

We decided to just spend one night in Dazhai as we'd managed to cover most of the rice area already. So spent a night back in Guilin instead. Guilin is a relatively big city that has some rivers running through it and is surrounded by karst mountains; but to be honest,because we'd been spoilt by the scenery in Yangshuo and Dazhai we didn't feel we needed to pay to see them up close in the city too. We needed to be in the city to catch our flight the next day. We just walked and browsed through the shops instead. But we did have an eventful evening trying to find a restaurant...

So we wanted to eat local Chinese food for our tea and the hostel receptionist advised us to go to a street just around the corner. The start of the street was OK, with a few bowls of fish outside the restaurant for you to choose which one you wanted for your food...but it got worse...the next restaurant had people choosing what chicken they wanted to eat and the waiter wafted it in front of my face to take it into the kitchen to be killed. Then the next one had ducks and HUGE lizards/fish things (I'm not really sure what it was) for you to eat. Then it was the rats (I hate rodents!!!!), they were enormous, like they'd been fattened up ready to eat, munching at the cage they were kept in. Snakes too...ergh! Just as I was at the peak of me freaking out, deciding whether I should be vegetarian, a waiter took a fat fish out of its bowl in a net, swung it over his head and bashed it right on the pavement by my foot. It happened so quickly, I just heard this thud and then there was this wriggling fish next to my feet on the floor. I'm sure the man did it on purpose... Jason had to drag me away in horror. Awful.

Anyway, we're off to catch our flight now...