29 March 2007-3-30
Today was mainly taken up with traveling as we had to
fly down to Guilin in order to start our next trek. A
small lunch was served on the flight with that rarest
of luxuries here, a bread roll. There were many small
deals made as students and teachers swopped treasures
from their plastic trays. Mrs Little was delighted to
exchange cucumbers for tomatoes and some of the larger
boys did all they could to persuade others to give up
their food.
There were two busses waiting for us at the airport,
one to take the excess baggage down to Yangshuo, the
other to take us to Longsheng. We had to stop part
way there to change to two other busses that were
small enough to make it round the short roads up to
Ping’An.
Ping’An has a population of perhaps 800, with large
wooden houses clinging to the steep hillside and
surrounded by small rice terraces that stretch along
the slopes like the contours on a map. There is a lot
of building going on in the village at the moment.
The main structure of the houses appears to be made
without the use of nails. It is a fascinating place to
walk through. The narrow paths between the houses are
covered with polished, roughly shaped paving stones,
made slippery in places by the deposits of passing
ponies or seepage from the paddy fields above.
It was a steep walk from the road head to our guest
house. Some of the students’ legs were obviously still
tired and there were a few groans at the number of
steps involved.
We had been invited to look around the local school –
four classrooms and a small boarding house overlooking
the mountains. The classrooms were simple, with a
blackboard and rough wooden desks and chairs, but it
smelt and felt well cared for. Joined by two athletic
local students, the boys played basketball for a while
in the playground.
Our guesthouse looked very new and still smelled of
freshly cut wood. Four floors perched almost
impossibly on long stilts and shaky foundations. This
isn’t an earthquake zone … I hoped. Looking at some
of the similarly constructed, but obviously old,
buildings in the village put my mind at rest.
Sound really traveled in the guesthouse – we could
hear every footstep, every whisper. This
notwithstanding, many of the students said they got
their best night’s sleep yet. Maybe it was something
to do with the air.
My bathroom (well, the one at the end of the
corridor), was a squat toilet. I overbalanced and
grabbed the sink. It came off the wall, much to my
horror. Emergency plumbing whilst squatting isn’t my
forte. Sadly, I did exactly the same on two subsequent
visits, which made me question the gradient of my
learning curve: flat, obviously.
After dinner the women from the village put on a show
of traditional dancing and singing in the school yard.
They were dressed beautifully in traditional
costumes. There were dances about the yearly
agricultural cycle – planting, harvesting, tending,
grinding, winnowing. They encouraged the staff and
teachers to get up and dance too. The whole group
participated in a courtship dance, where they linked
hands and ran around in a circle. A boy in the middle
had to select the girl he wanted and then, carrying
her piggyback, had to try and escape the circle. A
bamboo dance caused much amusement. The students had
to step up and down quickly between long bamboo poles
that were being slapped together by parallel rows of
women.
