新疆 Day 3 – Rustic Charm

In the morning we rose early and packed our stuff to leave the hotel. Our driver took us to a spot where we could catch another bus to go into a different mountainous region. As the bus lurched its way along the narrow road, we could see glimpses of the mountains and valleys through the trees. When I woke up from a nap, I was greeted with a brilliant view. The side of the road dropped into a deep valley, vast and green, surrounded by mountains that rose up and sloped gently, covered with grass and trees. It reminded me of some vague impression I have of Lord of the Rings (though I’ve never seen the movies), or some other romantic, fairytale scene like that.

 

Our bus took us into that valley, where a relatively small village was situated. We made our way among the wooden houses, down dirt roads littered with animal defecation, until we reached a bridge over a rushing river. On the other side of the bridge was the way up the mountainside, going to the lookout point. Our guide told us that the government had placed restrictions on this village, forbidding them from building in stone or brick in order to maintain the traditional log-house feel for tourists to see. The local people get around this by putting up walls in brick and then covering them with wood on the outside. Most of them are of ethnic minorities, living off business from tourists who pay for tours, souvenirs, and meals. 


The dialect the locals speak is pretty, with rolling and bubbling sounds that are a little bit like what I remember of Russian. Their Mandarin is accented, and hard for me to understand, although they can understand our Mandarin perfectly. They tend to swallow syllables when they speak, making Mandarin flow more smoothly than it usually does.