Chengyong

28th, 29th September
Next another bus journey, 5 hours on a very bumpy unsurfaced road to the next town sanjiang. Then a shorter bus to another Dong village Chengyang, to spend two more nights.
Here their big attraction is a big traditional style bridge.
I did some more walking through a network of really small villages, and up the overlooking mountain.

Zhaoxing

Next morning got a bus which said it was going to Zhaoxing,
it actually just went to Luoxiang which meant an hour and a half walk with all my bags in the mid day sun.
Zhauxing is the largest village of the Dong minority, still really small.
It is a little more tourist developed (spoilt?) than Xijiang.
The village is located at the bottom of a valley, again wooden buildings prevail.
The old Dong women spend alot of time beating dark blue die into fabric with a wooden mallet.
I went for a long walk up the valley and up the mountainside to another, much less visited Dong village. I found a path back down through all the rice fields, really nice, peacefull and pituresque.
On the second evening I was treated to a performance of traditional music and dance.
This was primarily for local consumption, I was the only foreign tourist attending.
The dacing was really good quality, quite athletic, beats the tibetans sleave waving line dancing I'm afraid.
Most of the performances seemed to have the theme of occasions when young guys and girls have the chance to meet each other, some had pantomime like phisical comedy.
One was titeled "no music no love" and featured 5 guys on the hunt for girls, when they found 4 girls, 4 of the guys got out their musical instruments to impress. The last guy just hit on each of the girls in turn and was shoved, fliped and stabbed with an imaginary sowing needle, let that be a lesson to ya.

Rongjiang

After two nights in Xijiang my stomach wasn't feeling too well.
The toilet consisted of a shallow whole which didn't go anywhere, the contents must have been shoveled over to the pigs next door.
So it was time to move on, a bus to Leishan where a less than helpful bus station simply stated that they didn't have a bus to the next town. After standing in their office for a good while they got a taxi to bring me to the corner where you can get the bus. Got a bus to Rongjiang a reasonably large sized chinese town. Here I realised that the atms weren't going to work, 35 euro for a week and hundreds of kilometers of bus journeys, you wouldn't dream of trying it at home but in this part of china, well it should be ok. I tried to get a place to stay for the night but the cheap places kept on turning me away because I was a forigner, finally one of them relented, all around here you get loads of "hellooooo"s and exclamations of "lawei" or forigner.

Xijiang

Xijiang in only 2 or 3 hours along a dirt road which clings to the mountainside, from Kaili, but it seems a world away.
The village pituresquely covers a hilside overlooking a valey of rice paddies.
The paddies climb up the side of the mountains either side.
The village is tiny and really quiet, and surprisingly since it is listed in the guide books it has very few tourists.
Xijiang is the largest village of the Miao minority.
China has 55 peoples or races, 92% of the population is han chinese which means that all of the others are refered to as minorities.
The Miao women ware an artificial flower in their hair untill their thirties after which they change to a tea towel head dress.
Getting off the bus I was invited to stay in a homestay and to eat dinner with them, very convenient and nice to stay with a local family.
I went for long walks through the rice fields and terrices up into the surrounding mountains.
It is rice harvesting time, which means that the feilds quite active.
The men carry really big wooded boxes into the feild, then cut the rice with a hand sycle. They then whack the bunch of rice grass against the box so that the grains fall out. Everyone carries the rice back to the village, ballanced on two sides of a long peice of wood carried on the sholder. It's amazing the loads that people carry. The old women and young kids get a bit of a laugh getting the foreigner to carry their load for a while, so I was roped into service. I wouldn't like to try carrying what the men had.
Then the rice is dried on every available flat peice of road, square or rooftop, all this with no machines.

To Guizhou

So time to hit the road again.
I got an overnight train to Guiyang in Guizhou provence.
Sleeper trains in china are rows of bunks three high, always pick the top one.
It means that you wont have people staring at you all night, you're too high.
Arrived in the morning in Guiyang and after wandering a bit, decided what else can you do when you're exhausted from traveling all night but travel some more, so got on a bus to Kaili a few hours further west.
Kaili which is still a big town is quite near several pituresque minority villages.
There was a bus leaving straight away for a village that I wanted to visit which was in the right direction for me called Xijiang so I hopped on the bus.
I neglected to use an atm in Kaili which was a bit of a mistake.
There should have been a big sign on leaving the town reading, "you are now leaving the international banking system, no working atms for the next 4 days worth of bus journeys", but that only occured to me later.

Kunming again

So Kunming proved yet again to be a great place to take a break from traveling.
Most of my time was spent in the hostel, much of it in bed, and of course eating.
Kunming is a bit of a cross roads for travelers and I met up with some really cool people that I met earlier on my travels and a load of new people too.
The best of times!
We even met up with the police man we met the last time who treated us to even more meals out. Specialities such as ducks tonge, and cow stomach included.
He explained to us how a police mans income in China was so small that they had to have "other buisness" to supliment their income, and that keeping track of who to give "red pocket" money to (chinese equivalent of brown envelope) was a real pain.
It had to be a present at a child birthday, all very above board.
Anyway everyone moved on from Kunming there was still time to do some random wandering through the streets. You can wander all day through a chinese big city and never run out of interesting buisey everyday life sights.
Here someone welding, there cooked dog for sale, there someone cycling by with a tonne load on his bycicle.

Photos

And finally due to popular request, more photos.
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And here are some of the old ones
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Crazy traveling

Well the reason to leave Muang Ngoi finally came,
you have to have enough money to reach a place where you can get more money,
and I was getting short.
So I had to start retracing my steps to get things that I left behind on the way.
So 9am boat meets 11:30am back of truck meets 3pm bus to Luang Prabang arriving around 9pm, what a transport roll.
Next morning 8:30am bus to Mengla China using my double entry visa,
meet directly with a 1:30pm bus going overnight to Kunming arriving 8am.
Arrive with 1500 kip (worth 12 cent) 1 us dolar, and minus 27 Chinese yuan I borrowed off a guy on the bus, got to an atm, wuhoo rich again.

Muang Ngoi

So another 2 hours up river,
This time to a town that isn't acesable by road, river only to Muang Ngoi.
When I got here it immediatly struck me, why would you ever leave.
Get off the boat and step right one step and you can rent a bungalow overlooking the river, with hamock for 80 euro cent a night, the view is really spectacular.
A great place to realax for a while, read a book, watch life unfold by the river.
Everyone goes down to the river to wash clothes teeth and bathe.
Two boats arrive each day, bringing an average of about 8 tourists a day, this is low season.
The village folk gently look for their custom, no pressure.

The bugalow is an all natural contruction, wood, weave and thach, as are most of the houses around Laos.
You don't have to do nothing of course, we took a trip by boat and walking up a river to another waterfall.
You can also walk to caves and the surrounding villages and there are loads of cool giant milipeids on the way.
I walked to the next village, should be two hours but took me four with detours and my dodgy knee. This village is really remote, only walking paths, not even a horse or mule, two hours to the town with river access etc. There are more villages beyond but I didn't feel up to another three hours in slippy flip flops.
I decided to rent a bungalow in the first village, called Banna.
At 40 euro cent a night it wasn't too much of an expense to rent two bungalows at the same time. It think they take the attitude here that they'll make their money back by charging alot for food. Even this, obviously stratigic, village had it's collection of US bombs.
I was the only foreigner staying the night in the village, the kid of the house was playing with giant horned bettles a bit like you would with toy cars, you know racing them and crashing them.
The dad got a cooked one for dinner,
they invited me to eat with them, good Lao food, sticky rice, you roll and squish it like dough, then dip it. Young bamboo which is really delicious, and crickets for a bit of protein I guess, the Bettle was only for the dad.

Walked back to Muang Ngoi the next day and they were having a festival, we were invited to eat and drink with them.
Lao-lao is the local distilled rice drink, strangly a bottle cost the same as a bottle of beer at 80 euro cent.

Nong Khiaw

So the next leg is an 9 hour boat journey up river to a town called Nong Khiaw.
Sure you can get there by bus faster and cheaper but where's the fun in that?
There is a bridge just after you leave, and then at Nong Khiaw 9 hours later.
Loads of kids playing at the river bank as we go by and the scenery is great.
Nong Khiaw is tiny and quiet, kind of like every town in Laos.
We walk out to the caves where some of the comunists ran afairs when the americans were bombing, sure enough there was a big bomb crater at the entrance.
And boy did the americans bomb Laos, shhh, it was a secret war but they made Laos the most bombed country on earth.
All of the tinyest villages have loads of man sized bombs. They use them as fence posts garden ornaments and a source of scrap metal to make knives etc.

Anyway on the walk it started raining and all the leeches came out, yuk.
Big ones like an earth worms crawling end to end, creepy, and big balls of tiny ones, they crawl up your shoes, into you socks and leave nice little bloody wholes in your ankles when they leave.
It gets really slippy when it rains and I fell over, sore knee in pain lieing in a load of leeches and stinging ant, fun!
Anyway took it easy a read a book for the afternoon.

At night the bridge is guarded by guys with machine guns.

Laos medical services

So Luang Probang proved to be a nice place to hang out.
I went on two day trips to waterfalls,
one obviously had more water than normal as it was flowing through the picnic table area. Since there are medical services here I decided to get my knee checked out.
So they took an x-ray and determined no broken bones, sprain they said, fine.
The experiance did seem to be more about extracting money than anything else, ahh well I made my contribution to the Laos medical services, and even got skipped to the front of the queue.