2012 I returned to Guilin, planning to go trekking for 3 days in the Longsheng rice terraces. By bus perhaps two hours to the park entrance. I left my luggage there with a shopkeeper, the one selling smoked rat, and set out uphill - and downhill, downhill and uphill. After two hours the following would-be guides had thinned to just one, for whom I stopped and told her with difficulty, in Mandarin which she roughly understood, that I planned to walk alone and had no need of a guide. Nonetheless she followed 100m behind for an hour, then came hurrying to catch me up and ask me to slow down, I was too fast for her 'zou de manxie ba, ni zou de tai kuaile'. It was November and cool, with dark approaching quite early, as I approached a steep climb she came hurrying up again, and told me she could introduce me to a hotel ... and then hurried on ahead. She led me into a ramshackle wooden zhuang building where they asked 700 yuan for the night, so I refrained from laughing, and explained I wanted to get to the top so I could set out early in the morning for morning sun on the rice terraces. She followed me closely and took me into a villagers house where four men were puffing away in the dark and I refused again, walking on till I found a family with children where someone would cook for me, 100 yuan for meal and bed.

8 hours hiking and several thousand steps, I was having knee trouble.

The house was dirt floored, with a pit for a fireplace, but there was still electricity, a single bare light bulb and a small ancient TV set. Two young children the boy 5-6 and the girl 4-5, fiercely, savagely fighting literally tooth and nail, the girls hair dangling in the naked flames.



There's a fair bit to this story, so I'll leave two or three photos and continue later. The woman with the headwear is the 'guide' who came bursting into the room so that I said to her 'oh, I didn't realise you are family!' Of course she wan't, but more importantly, she was the local communist party representative.