Earlier this month, Zhang Mei was featured in China Daily in “A walk on the wild side.”

The article tracks Mei’s “Cinderella” story of growing up in Yunnan province, her transformative experience at Harvard Business School and working at McKinsey & Company. Journalist Mark Graham also discussed Mei’s pivotal moment when she began thinking about starting WildChina in the late 1990s. After several years in the corporate world, Graham reports, “Zhang began to formulate a plan to turn her favorite hobby, exploring the wilderness regions of China, into a viable business.”

Zhang Mei and her son in Argentina

Graham not only followed Mei’s professional life, but about how she spends her time when she is not in the office. “I love going back to Yunnan; I find living, breathing real villages more interesting. I take these amazing hikes; I still feel an adrenaline rush on every trip I go on,” Zhang says.

Outside of Mei's hometown, Dali, Yunnan

Mei also hinted at her favorite hidden treasure in China– Guizhou Province. The upcoming Sisters’ Meal Festivalis not to be missed (early April 2012) and the rich minority culture, warm people and colorful Miao villages are unlike anywhere else in China.

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Did Yunnan or Guizhou perk up your ears? Interested in having Mei as your travel consultant? Send an email to info@wildchina.com to learn more.

Last sunny Saturday, I got a call from my friend in Leishan who told me there would be a Miao New Year festival in the Leigong mountains, which includes rural Miao villages in Leishan and Taijiang. The official Miao New Year Celebration had already passed for 20 days, but the party was still going on in the villages.
 

Leishan Region

Yes, my guess was very right, this experience was absolutely a highlight. In the late afternoon, we arrived at a township via Leishan called Fangxiang, a very authentic Miao village built right on a steep mountain. I was received with open arms by the locals, and of course, they offered lots and of rice wine.

A group was dancing with a bronze drum, and there were huge Lusheng pipes. We were only outsiders at the villages, and people there dragged us to go dance with them and tried to teach us the steps.
 

We started to hike around 9am and OMG, today’s hiking is FANTASTIC, plus a beautiful sunny day. We hiked through fields, pine forests, villages, and a crystal stream where we had a kebab picnic, which was tons of fun. We hiked for almost an entire day and by the time we got to the next village, it was almost dark.

We had reached Baibang Short Skirt Miao village, where we were dragged by the locals for another evening of celebrations and a bit more rice wine. No matter whether they know you or not, they cherish every single guest. For dinner, we were invited over to the villager head’s house for dinner and had delicious fresh pork.  The dinner we had with the locals was over 15 people, including the villager leaders and their wives. While we ate, we were treated as VIP guests. After dinner, they sang to us and more and more neighbors kept coming to offer us, because they heard party leader’s home had guests.

After several hours eating, we went to see their dancing. The costume of the Baibang is very distinctive from other shortskirt Miao. The locals had been farming for a entire year, so it’s such a great time to rest and have some good food. I wished badly that you everyone at WildChina could be here witnessing. Such a great great great time. In Guizhou, they have a warm heart, heavy heritage, beautiful costumes and wonderful smiling…

Now, it’s back to Guiyang where my lovely daughter awaits… But I found my mind is not back yet, all the images in my brains are villagers, laughter, rice wine and singing,…

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An account from a recent trip in Guizhou from WildChina expert guide, Xiao. To learn more about Xiao and see a quick clip from Guizhou, please see here. 

If you are interested to see Guizhou’s festivals for yourself,  we would strongly suggest looking at Sisters’ Meals Festival which takes this year from April 5-7, 2012.  More questions? Please contact info@wildchina.com.

Looking for an unforgettable way to spend the winter holidays?  China may not be the most traditional answer, but it’s definitely an exciting one!  The colder months mark a time in the travel season where there are less tourists and scenery and festivals that are not available during other parts of the year.  Here are a few travel suggestions from our expert travel consultants:

China’s national parks. Be it Jiuzhaigou National Park in Sichuan province or the jagged peaks of Yellow Mountain at Huangshan National Park, these reserves are sure to be breathtaking.  To see snow-blanketed valleys and the misty, gargantuan mounds that inspired Chinese artists and poets for centuries, check out a sample itinerary here.

Guizhou. In this remote province of southwestern China, ethnic minorities will be busy preparing for festivals such as the Miao and Dong minority New Year.  Join in on the boisterous celebrations featuring traditional song, dance, richly embroidered costumes & old rituals like those described by Gloria (a WildChina travel consultant) in her recent trip to the area here. Also, check out this trip which highlights Guizhou travel.

Jinghong, Yunnan. Tropical and warm during the next few months, Jinghong is the capital city of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, a province in southwestern China.  When WildChina travel consultant Jenny visited, she said that she spent most of her time in the ethnic minority villages of the Dai and Aini people.  Here, the communities are tranquil, and the people are dressed in in traditional clothing, not because they are putting on a costume but because it is still routine to do so.

Hiking through the lush, tea terraces from village to village is one way to experience the local lives of the Dai and Aini people, but another way is to take advantage of their warm hospitality and choose to do a homestay.  In Jenny’s words, the architecture and accommodations are basic but the experience was ‘cozy and unforgettable’.  The home she stayed in was two stories, as most homes are in that area. The first floor served as a garage for farmers’ carts and equipment, and the upstairs served as the living quarters.  Over a seemingly outdated wooden stove, the host family cooked a delicious meal of Dai food, which is a unique Chinese cuisine that is marked by fresh, tropical ingredients and a Southeast Asian influence.

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For more suggestions about China travel during the winter months, please contact us at info@wildchina.com.

Photos by WildChina travelers & Anhui News

Patti Waldmeir, WildChina traveler and Shanghai correspondent for the Financial Times, divulges her interactive experience in China’s Guizhou province with locals and WildChina guides who helped her family embrace the history and pride of the region.

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“Mommy, please don’t eat the brown one!” My 11-year-old daughter was pleading for the reprieve of my lunch: a hunk of stir-fried dog haunch that I was determined to stomach, whatever the consequences to her psyche or to my digestion.

Brown-coloured dogs, it seems, are tastiest – or so we were told on our recent trip to one of the least visited, but most spectacular, tourist destinations in China: Guizhou province, a land of karst and culture unique in an increasingly tourist-glutted mainland. Shanghai, Beijing, Xian and Chengdu are rapidly becoming staples of international tourism but Guizhou is an altogether different kind of China: older, friendlier, prouder, and purer. For those who enjoy tourism but hate other tourists, it is a paradise.

One glimpse of Xiao Hong’s dog diner, in the Guizhou town of Panjiang, where almost every restaurant is a canine one, is enough to dramatise the difference. Eating dog is controversial in the rest of China – in April, animal rights activists liberated nearly 600 dogs bound for the wok after ambushing a lorry just outside Beijing – but, in Guizhou, dog is still a valued delicacy. Dog meat from Guizhou’s Huajiang town was recently declared part of the town’s “intangible cultural heritage” and the provincial government promoted Guizhou dog meat at last year’s Shanghai Expo.

My host, the tour company WildChina, does not normally offer dog on its menu of visits to the karst mountain scenery and ethnic minority villages of Guizhou. But I insisted: if dog is good enough for the people of Guizhou, it is good enough for me. Then I told the children.

I had already warned my two squeamish pre-teens that this would not be our usual China trip: a tour of famous temples and sacred mountains by way of low-rent video game parlours and seedy Chinese amusement parks. This time, we were going to visit the “real China” – Tiger Mom could not have said it any better.

So I left one child cowering in the back of WildChina’s minivan – sucking on a Sprite, munching Oreos and refusing to look out of the window – and marched the other one straight past a wok of simmering puppy paws to the counter where Xiao Hong was waiting to carve up some dogmeat.

I was half hoping she would offer something other than brown dog: in the rigid hierarchy of Guizhou canine cuisine, brown comes tops but is swiftly followed by black, Dalmatian and white dog. But brown dog was what she had, so I banished thoughts of our own brown mutt back at home in Shanghai – the infelicitously named “Dumpling”, himself rescued as a puppy from a cooking pot – and tucked into a fragrant canine casserole laced with mint and garlic shoots, “smelly beans” and Guizhou chilli sauce.

Like termites, caterpillars, mopane worms, goat guts and all the other gross things I have eaten in my life, once was enough for me for dog meat: the taste just isn’t good enough to outweigh the notion of eating Lassie. But once will not be enough to visit Guizhou: I have been wandering the world for nearly 40 years but seldom have I had the sense of travelling so far back in history.

All the guidebooks drone on about the intricate embroidery and elaborate hairstyles of Guizhou’s many ethnic minorities – members of the 55 minority cultures recognised by the Chinese government (and celebrated whenever Beijing wants to trumpet its diversity). I imagined an endless array of fake cultural artefacts, produced by minority tribesmen pretending to engage in authentic traditional practices, right outside the tour bus stop.

But that was before I met Xiao Zesheng, our WildChina guide – a Guizhou native with no more tolerance for counterfeit culture than I have. He marched us off through the rice fields – balancing precariously on narrow dikes separating paddies of mud and dung and water – right into the farmyards and courtyards of villages apparently untouched by much technical innovation since the water buffalo. In the process, he showed us plenty of traditional embroidery and elaborate hairstyles but they were all worn by women chopping wood and planting rice fields.

Guizhou women sport intricate hairdo's, even while performing hard labor

Xiao and Nancy Tan, who is WildChina’s Chinese-American guide and has a broad Tennessee drawl and an unerring knack for keeping pre-teens happy, squired us from the realm of the “Old Han” and the Bouyei people, to sample a few of the sub-groups of the Miao (known in the west as Hmong), described graphically by their dress or headgear as the Long Skirt Miao, the Short Skirt Miao, the Long Horn Miao, the Big Flowery Miao and the Gejia (officially, a Miao subgroup).

The Huangguoshu waterfall

They collected us in the provincial capital of Guiyang, about a two-hour flight from Shanghai. The highlight of our half day in Guiyang – a relatively charmless city, like most of China’s minor metropolises – was watching city workers dumping mud into the Nanming river as part of Guiyang’s attempt to be named one of China’s cleanest cities. After a lightning visit to the 78m high Huangguoshu waterfall, we drove to Kaili, a convenient if unprepossessing base for three days visiting the minority villages of south-east Guizhou. No one goes to Guizhou for the hotels: ours, the Heaven-Sent Dragon, was the best in town (even if hotel housekeeping seemed to think vacuuming the rugs to be an unnecessary luxury). Our last night, at the newly built Leishan International Hotel in Leishan confirmed the impression that Guizhou people would rather dump mud into a river, than take it out of a carpet by vacuuming.

Leaving Kaili one morning – Kaili means “let’s go to the rice paddy field with the water buffalo” – Xiao took us to do just that: scarcely 100 yards off the main road, we came upon a group of women, knee-deep in a field of mud laced with dung, planting rice seedlings. “Come in and join us,” they shouted – so we did, stripping off socks and shoes to slip and slide into the muck beside them.

Patti and girls planting rice seedlings

After marvelling at the squeamishness of my Chinese-American children – adopted as infants from unknown Chinese birth parents who may also have been farmers – the seven planting matrons collapsed in laughter at our urban inability to insert a handful of rice seedlings upright, at the right intervals, under water. “Don’t waste,” scolded the matriarch of the paddy field, gently, as one child dropped a precious seedling without realising that it would yield half a pound of rice at harvest.

Patti's daughters exploring terraced fields

Soon the children were scampering off to watch a farmer ploughing with water buffalo and to stomp in cow pats with bare feet. After a pit stop at a local farmyard, where an octogenarian villager welcomed us in to wash at his water tap, we had to spend several minutes politely declining the planting ladies’ invitation to lunch. For in Guizhou, hospitality is the default: from almost every villager, a smile, a greeting, an invitation to rest or chat or drink water. One diminutive grandmother of the Old Han minority, descendants of Qing dynasty warriors sent from distant Nanjing to defend the empire’s borders in Guizhou, even thanked me for taking her picture. After nearly three years in Shanghai, with its relentless focus on the making and spending of money, I can think of nothing better than plunging knee-deep in an agrarian cesspool, with such friendly natives.

A backstreet in Zhaoxing in Guizhou

Of course, it is easy to confuse poverty with charm in Guizhou. Its people are among the poorest in China. They farm on seemingly vertical hillsides, terrace their fields nearly to the top of every available mountain, and plough by hand or with a draft animal – backbreaking work. They carry crushing loads by shoulder pole; beat laundry with a stick in oft-polluted waterways; and every grandma seems to have a sturdy toddler strapped to her back – offspring of the children she has lost to labour as migrant workers in a distant city. And they eat dog, not just because they like it – but because starvation is not something distant and medieval but a part of living memory. Many Guizhou people lost family members in the man-made famine of China’s Great Leap Forward; they still bring it up in conversation.

But more noticeable than the poverty, is the pride: in one village, a young man is making paper, from bark stripped from local trees. A blacksmith makes an axe; a middle aged man beats cotton to make a bed quilt; a potter, the sixth generation of his trade, fires bowls from clay glazed with charred rice bran and quicklime from the nearby hills. Outside every doorway is an old man or woman stripping bamboo shoots for dinner, or knitting, or sharpening a scythe with a whetstone; an Asian version of the world according to Bruegel.

But this is China, the land of economic development on steroids, where highways and railways and whole cities spring up, where yesterday there was nothing but paddy fields. Maybe next year, the sight of ladies planting rice in their embroidery will be gone from Guizhou. Maybe later it will be the water buffalo and, eventually, even the dogmeat. Either way, this is a world that cannot last for ever.

Patti and her daughters

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To read this article in the Financial Times online, click here. To learn more about our journeys to Guizhou, please visit our website or email us at info@wildchina.com. You can also watch this video, which introduces our guide Xiao.

Photos from Financial Times article, by Nancy Tan, a marketing associate of WildChina, and by Patti Waldmeir and her daughters.

On Monday, the Dragon Boat Festival was celebrated in cities throughout all of China.  Myth says that the holiday commemorates the death of a famous poet and statesman Quan Wu, who committed suicide by drowning himself in the Miluo River.  Locals who admired him supposedly tried to prevent the decomposition of his body by paddling (dragon) boats in the river to scare fish away.

Today, the holiday is celebrated with jubilant water races that are fun for everyone.  Races in both Beijing and Hangzhou happily welcome experts, beginners, foreigners and locals to partake.  Time Out Beijing found that one can even receive proper training in the sport at the Golden Sail Water Sports Club.

Our local partners in Guizhou province that the festivities will last even longer than the one day because actually, June 6 marked the Han Chinese holiday.  In the minority Miao culture, the Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated on the Qingshui River and commemorates a different folk story – that of a hero named Guya, who killed an evil dragon.

By tradition, there are three dragon boats, one is 17 meters long (mother boat), the other two are 10 meters long (child boat), all the boats are made from fir, each with a carved dragon’s head on it’s prow. Before the dragon boat sets out, somebody sings an auspicious song to the boatmen, wishing them a bon voyage, the crew row the boat from one village to another. When they approach a village, they fire guns to announce their arrival. The villagers set off firecrackers and go to meet them, and then pleas are made to the dragon to bestow happiness on each community.

After lunch, the boats stop ashore alongside the river bank. Pigs, goats, ducks and geese are presented to the crew and headman, the boatmen eat glutinous rice balls and meat on the boats, without the aid of bowls and chopsticks. It is said that after eating food from a dragon-boat, one will be safe from disaster and everything will proceed smoothly.

Throughout this Miao celebration of the festival, horse races and bullfights are held, families gather on the bank to eat and gossip, and the nights are filled with songfests.

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This year, these celebrations will last from June 26 to June 30.  To inquiry about journeys to Guizhou to experience the festivities first-hand, please contact us at info@wildchina.com.

Photo by Time Out Beijing & WildChina local partners

As noted earlier, China is already the world’s number-three destination for international travel. Many travelers nowadays have already made one or two trips to China, but more often than not, they’re visiting the coast, possibly venturing inward to check out the Terracotta Army in Xi’an.

But China is more than just a handful of sites in the country’s east. In fact, China’s west has just as much – if not more – to offer travelers who are looking for unforgettable experiences.

If you’re planning a China trip this year, we encourage you to look beyond the traditional travel destinations to China’s wild west. Here are some of our picks for places to visit in China’s west in 2011:

Yunnan: Land of diversity

Few places in the world pack as much variety into one area as the province of Yunnan, which offers a mind-boggling variety of landscapes ranging from jungle lowlands in the south to Tibetan highlands in the northwest.

Yunnan’s ubiquitous mountains have historically isolated groups of people from one another, which is one of the main reasons that the province has China’s highest number of ethnic groups. With 26 ethnic groups including Han, Tibetan, Dai, Bai, Yi, Hani, Hui, Mongol, Naxi, Lisu, Yao, Lahu and countless subgroups, Yunnan is a rainbow of different ethnic traditions, clothing and cuisine.

The mountain towns of Dali, Lijiang and Shangri-la are home to unique cultures whose lives are still steeped in ancient traditions. Down south in Xishuangbanna, tropical weather, tea plantations, spicy food and the lazy Mekong River await.

Guizhou: Still undiscovered

Guizhou Province may not attract as many visitors as its neighbors Sichuan, Yunnan and Guangxi, but it certainly deserves consideration when making plans to travel to western China. Beautiful mountain scenery and a distinctive spicy and sour cuisine are some of the highlights of a trip to Guizhou. But as in many other parts of China, the big draw for us is the people.

The Miao, Gejia, Dong and Yao villages in Guizhou’s mountains are home to some of Asia’s most unique cultures and friendliest, most welcoming communities. Many of our clients rank our Guizhou village immersions among their top China travel experiences.

Sichuan: More than pandas

Sichuan is one of China’s most distinctive provinces, known for its spicy food, stunning mountain scenery, beautiful women and China’s ‘national treasure’ – the giant panda.

Sichuan’s capital Chengdu is a modern metropolis set on the west end of the fertile Sichuan Basin, a region that kingdoms battled for in ancient times. Chengdu is considered the capital of Sichuan cuisine, one of the most famous and flavorful of China’s culinary traditions.

The historical importance of Buddhism to Sichuan is evident in Chengdu at the Wenshu Monastery, located in the city’s center. Not far from Chengdu lie the Buddhist holy mountain of Emei Shan and the world’s largest seated Buddha at Leshan.

Sichuan has fantastic natural beauty as well, with the mountain forests and fantastic aquamarine lakes of Jiuzhaigou in the north and gorgeous mountain scenery at Minya Gongga in the province’s west.

Xinjiang: Silk Road echoes

Xinjiang is simply massive. It comprises roughly one-sixth of China’s total territory and boasts some of the country’s most stunning mountains and deserts.

At the crossroads of Asia, Xinjiang has been home to many different ethnic groups, from the caucasoid peoples whose mummies date back to more than 3,800 years ago to the Turkic Uighurs who moved into the region from present-day Mongolia 1,100 years ago to today’s growing Han population.

Islam is the dominant religion in Xinjiang, where extremism is rare and moderation is the norm. Due to its location on the old Silk Road, Xinjiang has also been influenced by Buddhism.

For visitors to Xinjiang, the local cuisine is often one of most pleasant surprises. Featuring rich stews, tasty breads, a large variety of noodles from flat and wide to easily spoonable diced noodles and even salads, Xinjiang cuisine is a delicious world away from typical Chinese fare.

Sometimes all it takes is an unexpected moment – a snapshot of daily life – that brings a trip into focus.

I witnessed such a moment during recent travels in Baibi village, an isolated Miao community outside of Kaili in Guizhou province. The largest ethnic minority in this rugged southwestern province, the colorfully clad Miao people have a reputation for kindness, hospitality, and gregariousness.

I spent three days in Baibi working on a community service project with a spirited and driven group of high school students from Hong Kong. We built a retaining wall out of concrete around the edge of a rice paddy, paving the way for the creation of a new fishpond – a crucial food source in a place where protein is in short supply.

After the students put the finishing touches on their project and we gathered on the road to depart, an elderly Miao woman approached our group with a giant smile on her face. Using a mixture of Mandarin and her local Miao dialect, she explained to our local guide, Jacky, why she was so content.

Jacky told us that she was happy about the sunny weather and our presence in the village. Jacky, who is half-Miao, then explained that she was about to start singing: “Miao people have to sing to show they are happy!”

Right on cue, she closed her eyes, tilted her head back and broke into a slow croon that might have seemed mournful if not for the smile still spread across her weathered face. Students, teachers, and villagers alike stood motionless as she sang, and when she finished she distributed bags of sunflower seeds as gifts. For all we had heard – and experienced – of the famously friendly Miao culture, nothing brought it home like the infectious elation of this village elder.

Hiking in tea tree forests, watching rare local festivals, and meeting locals of the fabled Ancient Tea Horse Road: our press trip participants have been on the road in Guizhou and Yunnan for 9 days in a whirlwind of adventure.

(Photo: Kathy Dragon)

Wish you were here? The next best thing is following our journey. Here’s how:

– Read the WildChina blog for first-hand accounts of the trip

– Follow us on Twitter @WildChina to read to-the-minute tales from our adventure

– Check out our Guizhou and Yunnan Flickr albums with photos from the road

If you are interested in a future press trip, please send us an email to info [at] wildchina [dot] com with the subject line “Press Trips.”

“There are so many natural and beautiful, but backward villages here. It is my dream to help my people.”

There is something really touching about the simplicity with which our WildChina guide, Jacky Xu, explains to me his reason for working on rural education projects in Guizhou.

Villages in Guizhou, while beautiful, often lack infrastructure and educational facilities needed to foster learning communities.

Since 2008, Jacky has worked on various community service projects in his native Guizhou, where he grew up in a rural village. Fully aware of the challenges that children in these communities face, Jacky has focused on education projects to create a brighter future for them, both by leading student groups to work on rural infrastructure projects, and by being a community volunteer.

While he’s collaborated with students and villagers alike to improve countryside roads (giving children access to schools), and volunteers as an English teacher during the low season months of November and December, his biggest current project is to rebuild the elementary school in Nandao Village.

In Nandao, which is separated into Upper and Lower sections, a good education is challenging to obtain. Each day, children as young as 5 years old must all make the long walk to a decrepit school – essentially just an old house – that lacks heating and proper school equipment.

“I see so many children in school shivering all day,” Jacky says, “and I want to help them.”

This coming spring, the children of Nanduo will get a better schoolhouse – and hopefully, a better future with it. With the aid of Hong Kong charities, Jacky will coordinate the school’s reconstruction with generous donations of  materials and helping hands.

“This is my biggest wish,” Jacky says. He hopes that Nandao, and other rural villages in Guizhou, can become nurturing learning communities for the young children who inhabit them.

We can’t wait to see how Nandao transforms.

Among the Miao people of Guizhou, there is a festival that only takes place once every thirteen years. The Guzang festival is a two-plus week celebration honoring Li Rong, the ancient leader of the Miao people.

The first day of the Guzang festival is a fairly laid back affair along the lines of an opening ceremony. It is followed by the local shaman circling a mountain with a male duck on the second day and the slaughtering of many pigs and a massive feast on the third day.

We were lucky enough to be in Kaili on the first day of the festival, and we decided to head to Beigao Village, where the local shaman is a friend of our Guizhou guide Billy Li.

Before arriving in Beigao we had to pick up some party favors, which included three large rolls of firecrackers to be set off in announcement of our arrival. We also purchased a male duck, which we would give the shaman.

Once we had prepared everything, we hit a trailhead about one hour’s drive outside of Kaili and started hiking toward Beigao.

During the three-hour hike we followed a clear stream uphill for the first couple of hours, using stepping stones to cross it several times.

The last leg of the hike was a steep ascent consisting primarily of narrow switchbacks. As we gained altitude, the vistas became increasingly spectacular. A village at the top of a mountain across the valley became visible, and Billy told us that every morning children from Beigao would descend their mountain and walk up the other mountain to go to school.

After a few stops to enjoy the stunning scenery we eventually made it to the entrance of Beigao Village. Billy lit a roll of firecrackers to announce our arrival. The nearly two-minute series of explosions created plenty of noise and smoke and also drew a large crowd of children who were curious to see who we were.

The village shaman, Mr. Li, came down to greet us. He thanked us for the duck and led us up into the village, where young Miao women were waiting for us with small bowls of rice wine, the traditional Miao greeting for guests.

After a quick three bowls of rice wine, we were buzzing in the warm sun. We were welcomed by the rest of the villagers at the village basketball court, where we were treated to traditional singing and dancing – and another round of rice wine.

The village’s women were all dressed in traditional Miao costume, with silver adornments a major feature. On the side of the court, young local boys waited for the festivities to move elsewhere so they could get back to playing basketball.

We were invited into the home of Mr. Li the shaman, where we sat around a long table and chatted with the young women who had given us rice wine. We discovered that despite Beigao’s remoteness, several of the girls no longer lived in the village – they had moved to coastal cities to make money, much of which they sent home.

During a delicious home-cooked meal of stir-fried pork and cabbage and spicy and sour fish soup, the shaman encouraged us to drink more rice wine, which we drank in increasingly small sips. The young women burst into song once more, captivating all of us with their beautiful voices.

After the meal, one of the women who had cooked for us exonerated us to stay an extra couple of days for the upcoming feast. Unfortunately, we were not going to be able to catch the height of the Guzang festivities this time around.

It was time for us to make our way back to Kaili via a bus that was waiting for us outside the village. Nearly the entire village walked with us to our ride. We were given hearty handshakes by the men and – you guessed it – rice wine by the women.

Driving away from Beigao we were once again struck by the friendliness and generosity of the rural people of Guizhou – and the potency of their rice wine.

The next morning we discovered one of the members of our group had left his hat at the shaman’s home. We wouldn’t have time to go back and get it this time, but we now had the perfect excuse to hike back to the village next time we were in Guizhou.