We said goodbye to our hotel in Yangshuo. Nick and I agreed it was probably the best room yet. We had been worried about coming to China because there is no Airbnb here, and we vastly prefer that to hotels. Luckily, there are two bedroom suites and “aparthotels” instead. This one had two large bedrooms overlooking the gorgeous mountains.

The hotel organized a driver for us the for the day. Usually we go the cheap route and get taxis, but the rice terraces we wanted to visit were 2 hours away and we had all our luggage with us. We set off at 10AM and arrived at the base of the rice terraces mountains just past noon.

Through a translation app he told us “there are minority women here in this village who never cut their hair. It is 2 meters long and they do a performance, would you like to see?” Of course we said yes. He drove us up to a small town and walked us past many women with their 2 meter hair piled up on their head, but unfortunately the performance was cancelled for today. We briefly looked at the theatre it would have been in.

Here is a photo from the internet of what we would have seen:

Millie was disappointed that we couldn’t see it, which set off some whining that never really stopped. We drove up windy mountain roads and all felt pretty queasy when we arrived at the rice terraces.

These terraces have been here for a thousand years, providing food for the surrounding villages. They went as far as we could see.

We took yet another anxiety-inducing cable car up to the top. This was our 4th cable car in China and I think we have more planned.

It was very, very hot. And very, very humid.

The views were breathtaking as you can see in the photos. My favorite part was walking down to the terraces and seeing exactly how the rice grew. They was an irrigation system under everything with water running below the paths and into the rice.

I picked a few grains off the plant and peeled the shell off. I chewed up the dried grains straight from the plant. I have never thought about rice much, but I would have assumed there would need to be some sort of drying process after harvest. But nope, it was just like a grain of rice from a store-bought bag of rice.

Just like everywhere else, there were lots of women everywhere having their photoshoots. I’d guess over half of the visitors were dressed up for photoshoots.

We walked around a bit but didn’t last long in the heat and intensely bright sun. Millie was not feeling it and kept telling us how bored she was. So we headed back down in the cable car.

We met our driver at the bottom and he drove us another 2.5 hours to downtown Guilin, where we’re staying for the night so we can catch a train in the morning.

We walked out for dinner. Millie ran ahead in the busy pedestrian area to get some energy out after spending most of the day in the car. We got noodles, dumplings, and a rice bowl. She said “that’s amazing, we saw rice growing today and now we are eating it”. So even if today was “the most boring day ever” I know that all this stuff we’re seeing is changing her perspective, one grain at a time.