Whose hometown is in the dream?

世外桃源I told my friend, I might go to Guizhou to run a small café in a lovely Dong village. They treated it as a ‘day dream’. Who will be your consumers? Are there enough tourits? Well, their points may be correct. I don’t think Dong people will enjoy coffee. Any way, if I have enough money to run my café, it will not be for earning money. It is just a way of enjoying life, in a peace.

 It is not just who dream to live there. It is also a dream for natives, since most of them have left there to find jobs outside far away.

 

 

Beautiful places always hide in mountains. Guizhou is described as ‘no more than three days for sunshine, no more than three miles for flat’. Mountains and hills occupy 92.5% of fields in this province. Not enough filed is for farming. Traffic system is not good enough to connect every village, especially the minority ethnic groups. All these features constrict the development of local economics. But people need to improve their life conditions. They want their next generation to have better life. So they go out to earn money.

路边5Every Dong village is beautiful and peaceful; some are too quite to let me believe that no people are living there. It is a little bit scary. You might think you are really in a dream. Young people are not easy to see. The most common picture of there is that some children are playing around some old ladies.

For some popular villages for tour, there are some young girls and boys offering performance to tourists when off their class, such as Sanbao and Zhaoxing. Sanbao is near the town so it is easy to be reached; well Zhaoxing is famous because it is the biggest Dong village.

15th August, according to the Chinese Luna calendar, the moon shows its most beautiful face during the whole year. Outside the village of Sanbao, Duliujiang River is flowing quietly. We were sitting on the riverside – a Dong young man, two other visitors and me. The Dong was singing with guitar, under the beautiful moon……I never regretted to travel alone. But if there is one who can share this nice feeling with me, it is also fine…

 

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Yintan, a village inside the mountains, but gets a road, although it is a narrow and tough way. Several trucks were parking on the road, so the space left seemed just could be for two wheels in one side of the car. The driver had a look at the road then to speed up. I stopped him and got off. I must admit that I was scared. I walked along and got on again when he passed all trucks.

When I entered in the village, the feeling was like coming into a dream. It was not real. There were wooden houses, streets, Towers, just as a normal Dong village…but there was no person. Finally some children appeared. They were playing and laughing, which made the place even more looked like an illusion. Turning to another lane, old men appeared. They were sitting together inside the tower, smoking. All of them, young and old stopped their business and began staring at me. But they were friendly. They showed nice smile to me.

Going inside, the whole village was having the nap in this warm afternoon. Dogs were sleeping on the road everywhere. Cats were resting in the corners. An old woman was dyeing her new cloths besides two big jars of Landian Cao (Baphicacanthus cusia), which were her magical blue dye.

 

路边15Then my feeling of illusion came back again. The world was so quite…

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