Here’s another Miao village, called 郎德 “LangDe”, but it’s a lot smaller and quieter than XiJiang which I visited the previous day. Really it’s more of a hamlet.

According to the Lonely Planet guidebook you can only reach here by taking the 凯里 Kaili to 雷山 Leishan bus and hopping off on the main road at the “lower” village and then walking 2km up the valley to the “upper” village. This isn’t true as there’s a local hourly minibus that goes direct to the village from the same bus station in Kaili and takes a very picturesque, if mildly terrifying, back country route through the mountains. The return schedule isn’t clear and is possibly just “when the driver feels like it”, but I certainly managed to get one back around 16:30.

凯里 Kaili was the town where I was staying these few days, by the way. There’s not a lot in the town itself, but the transport links are good, there’s some interesting night markets, and a free “minorities museum” for rainy afternoons.

You can hike up the mountain behind the village via an incredibly steep and slippery path. The scenery looked almost alpine, apart from all those 梯田 terraced fields.

Some of the houses have been turned into museums, including one full of weapons used by a 19th century revolutionary warlord, one Yang DaLu according to the information panel, who apparently wasn’t famous enough to make it onto the English language Wikipedia.

There didn’t seem to be any restaurants, or at least none that were open in the winter, but luckily I made friends with this slightly batty old lady who made me some kind of hotpot lunch for 50元. Unfortunately she also forced me to drink a whole cup of her homemade 米酒, which is a sort of lethal rice wine, from a large tank in her living room – despite my protests of “我快醉了!”. I refused to buy a bottle. Anyway I managed to escape and decided to walk off my slight tipsiness by exploring down the river valley towards the lower village.

This is halfway down the landscaped path between the two villages. The lower village is on the main road and a bit more modern but the bridge over the river is very elegant.