Ping’an is a Zhuang minority village roughly 800m high up in the mountains, north-west of Guilin in Guanxi province. It is famous for its over 700 year old terraced rice fields that are carved into the existing mountain peaks. From afar they look like a topographic map, snaking around the mountain ridge lines into valleys.
On yet another weekend away to try and see yet another part of this diverse country, I visited Ping’an to see its breathtaking rice terraces. We arrived into Guilin airport late at night and it took us another 2.5 hours to get to Ping’an. As it was already way past sunset, we saw absolutely nothing of the landscape as we drove there and so imagine the anticipation with which I opened the curtains of our hotel room the next morning in the hope of seeing … well, I saw absolutely nothing, again! It had rained over night, which is great for the rice fields, but had the effect of very dense, lingering and incessant mist. We could barely see our own hands at the end of our arms – that’s how heavy the mist was. Not put off by the rainy weather however, we spend our first day walking and climbing through mountainous rice terraces to see … well, again, not much more than mist. The atmosphere was brilliant though, very tropical jungle feel, which meant that we were not too upset about not seeing much. In the evening we found a small restaurant in the village with a rooftop terrace (and still no view over the rice fields), which had excellent food and also sold ‘sweet Longsheng sake’ locally produced by the owner and so the evening was saved. Just to give you an idea of how bad the vision was: here a person working in their rice terrace … they were roughly 2 meters away from me!
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