After spending the last three days doing what tourists would do, it was time to do something many tourists usually wouldn’t do: visit a rural village. The last time I stepped foot in a village was twelve years ago when I was last in China and visited my dad’s home village, Taishan. This time, I got to see our tour guide’s village. To get there, we took a relaxing two hour boat ride there (cue “I’m on a Boat”).
The village was what I expected. Lots of farmland, farm animals and dogs running around, etc. Of course, this village had a ton of water buffalo. We got to meet Jessie’s family, which was nice. The family runs a convenience shop (possibly the only one in the village) and it seemed strange seeing cup noodles in the village.
Water buffalo!
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After an exhausting ourselves the past two days, we sort of expected to be tired at the end of every day in Guilin. Of course, we could see that just by looking at the itinerary. Not that I’m complaining; the Guilin trip was wonderful. Of the four NYU-sponsored trips, we did name the Guilin trip the “exercise trip” (Guizhou was the “community service trip”; Gansu was the “adventurous trip”; and Hong Kong was the “metropolitan trip”).
The exhausting part of the day was rock climbing. Uhhh, rock climbing? My fear of heights certainly doesn’t sound good here…
Scaling the Great Wall
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Like with my Beijing posts, I’ll have brief daily recap for each day of the trip and then have separate posts for anything that requires more detail. (And no, I haven’t forgotten about Beijing. I’ll get to those eventually, but I’ll be drowning in work this week, so those might have to wait.)
Anyways, I had no chance of being late for our 5:30 AM meet-up because I pulled an all-nighter. Tired, but excited, I hopped onto a bus to Hong Qiao airport for our early morning flight to Guilin. At the Guilin airport, we met up with our tour guides for the trip, Jessie and Moy. Luckily, we had some time to rest on the bus during our two hour drive to Yangshuo.
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