Guigui Family Tour to Zhaoxing Dong Village

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? Our first stop when entering Guizhou is Zhaoxing Dong Village. It was five o'clock in the afternoon when we arrived at the parking lot of the scenic spot. As soon as we got off the car, we felt the dryness and heat of the plateau area. The exposed skin feels like it is being roasted by fire, but breathing is very comfortable. The air here is very good, fresh and dry.

Zhaoxing is a town, and the town area is the main scenic spot of the entire Dong Village. The entrance to the scenic spot is still about 3 kilometers away from the village. We reached an agreement with a B&B owner in the parking lot. Her car will pick us up and enter the village. We will check the house first. If it is not suitable and we want to find another house, we will give it to her. 10 yuan fare.

? After entering the gate of the scenic spot, you are faced with an abandoned commercial street. The houses are built in the style of the Dong village. Because it had been vacant for a long time, the house quickly deteriorated and became a dilapidated scene. But under such blue sky and white clouds, it has a different flavor. The word "Na Lai" is written on the gatehouse. The owner of the B&B taught us how to read it and said it means "Hello" in Dong language. In the car, the boss told us that the entire Dong village was named Lu, so we joked: "Can we call it Lujiazhai?" The boss smiled and said nothing. Entering the gate of the village, we first saw the commercial area, including souvenir shops, restaurants, supermarkets, drum towers, small markets, and we also saw the post office. The facade of the post office was uniformly painted black. Ouyang said this was the first time he had seen a post office whose facade was not green. The owner of the B&B said that this is the center of their town, and people from the surrounding villages come here to buy and sell things and do business. Therefore, this place is not entirely built for scenic spots, but the lives of local people are also here.

Exiting Zhongchen Street is the residential area. Lujia Inn is 20 meters away from Zhongchen Street. What is surprising is that as soon as you turn in from the alley, the strong atmosphere of ethnic minority life rushes towards you. The elderly grandmother, with her hair tied up and her head wrapped, was sitting on a small stool outside the door of her wooden building, picking vegetables and doing needlework. There were also a few urchins playing on the ground, all with black heads and dirty faces. At first glance, he looked like he was about to be taken home to take a shower in the evening. There are a few earthen stoves beside the road, with tall chimneys erected, which are so black that they look like they are only used during festivals or dinner parties. Now the stove is covered with sundries, and there is a small tablet beside it, and several aunts are watching the news around it. The setting sun shines on the windows of the Lu's Inn, casting the shadow of the window lattice on the coffee table in the hall. It's so quiet.

The inn is a newly built house. It is built with three floors of red bricks and reinforced concrete, and then wooden boards are pasted on the outer walls to make it look like a Dong building. There is no rooftop on the roof, only a simple ventilation room, which is strange. What's surprising is that the boss hung all the sheets and quilts inside to dry them. It can be seen that the weather here is really dry and the temperature during the day is really high.

Before the sunset, we took a walk along the river in the village. At the beginning, the stockade was built on both sides of the river. People did daily washing in the river, and women also washed their long hair. Nowadays, most of the Dong wooden buildings on both sides of the river are over a hundred years old, but they are still strong. There are no insects or corruption on the pillars and door panels. It is amazing.

This place no longer looks like a tourist attraction. We are more like outsiders who accidentally broke into the village and watched the daily life of the people in the Donglou Corridor Street. The workshop that makes Dong cloth is no bigger than the one next door. The noisy machines are placed on the corridor street, and there are several large dyeing vats lined up next to them, with blue slurry in them. It is said that pig blood is added to the dye of Dong cloth, and it needs to be beaten repeatedly to make it durable and shiny. The machine beats it very hard, which shows that the Dong cloth has high toughness.

There are several wind and rain bridges along the river. On the bridges are old people, children and big yellow dogs enjoying the cool air. The yellow dog always lies lazily in the middle of the bridge. Pedestrians will not move from their place when passing by, and they will not even bother to look up. We also lay on the bridge railing and watched the scenery. There was less smoke from the kitchen, but the aroma of the food continued.

The people here are really not in a hurry. We passed by several B&B restaurants and the bosses didn’t even bother to recruit us during the meal market. When we accidentally broke into a restaurant, the owner also said that it was a private restaurant that only entertained tenants and did not accept outside meals. This is too Buddhist.

An old man set up a three-legged stove in the corner of the room and cooked a simple dinner in a small iron pot. Pork belly, boiled eggplant, fried bamboo worms, and steamed glutinous rice at noon. For a simple meal, the uncle said he could drink two glasses of white wine. Bamboo insects are a good drink. The aunt used the remaining charcoal fire to roast the chili peppers, and the aroma was overflowing. We wanted our aunt to cook us a simple meal, but she smiled and said, "The house is too narrow to receive guests, and it's rude." We said we didn't mind, as long as we could eat, and we could pay the market price. Pay the money. But the aunt still waved her hands, pretending to be smiling in her wrinkles, and said with a chuckle: "No, no, no. That's not polite."

The gluttons were hooked out, and we went to have dinner. I found a restaurant on the central street that seemed to be crowded and sat down, and ordered the fried konjac cake with beef and bacon recommended by the boss. We really couldn't stand the strange smell of the beef soup. The bacon was neither chewy nor fragrant. The two main dishes were a waste, but the scrambled eggs with tomatoes and shredded lettuce were eaten up by several children.

At night, the streets become lively, and the aunts doing square dancing are the same across the country. The bar also started singing, and the lanterns along the river lit up, giving people a feeling of reality and fantasy.

The drum tower of the five regiments of benevolence, righteousness, etiquette, wisdom, and trustworthiness was quiet. There were no lanterns hung and no performances. Only a few uncles and aunties were enjoying the cool air and chatting inside. We sat down and chatted with the uncle at the Rentuan Drum Tower. The uncle said that this was their conference hall, where all the clan affairs, weddings and funerals were held. They are not particularly welcoming of tourism development because the gate limits their access time. For example, now, villagers cannot enter or leave until 11 o'clock at noon. They have to farm, which is very inconvenient. Moreover, the tourism company did not pay dividends to the villagers. Most of the shops and hotels were run by outsiders, and the locals did not benefit much... Listening to what he said, I suddenly realized that this is the same world, and we live in the same world. superior. Survival is cruel, people everywhere have their own anxieties, and the pressure of life is everywhere. Seeing that remote villages isolated from the outside world also face problems in education, medical care and livelihood.

The next morning, we walked specifically to find the elementary school in this town, because there were certificates of merit from the innkeeper’s children on the wall of the inn lobby. After asking people along the way and walking through more secluded alleys, we arrived at Zhaoxing Town Central Primary School. The campus of this school is very big, much bigger and more impressive than ours. The teaching building, canteen, and library all try to maintain the style of the Dong building, but with a stronger modern or Chinese flavor. The anti-epidemic slogans were still prominent, and the campus was quiet after the teachers and students left. There were three or two people who lived on campus playing basketball, and there were several cars parked at the door. Outside the door is a road that leads to the village further away. When we were going down the mountain, we followed an old man who came from the village on the mountain to go shopping in the town. He enthusiastically introduced us to the situation here in Guizhou dialect. Where is the town government, where is the hospital, where it was originally, and where it was later moved... Niu Niu understood that the "gai" he meant was "street". He also said that there are several more villages along this road heading into the mountains, which are more remote and not as beautiful as Zhaoxing.

Breakfast was eaten on Central Street, including barbecued glutinous rice, oil tea, rice noodles, noodles and porridge. I tried the BBQ sticky rice and was blown away. The pork hind leg meat is cut into large thin slices, grilled over charcoal fire until fragrant, and served with local sour chili sauce. Pickled cabbage and fermented bean curd are wrapped in glutinous rice, and the oil is rubbed into the glutinous rice. The sour, spicy, salty, and sweet flavors are all in one bite. So delicious.

The children still ate the noodle soup and slurred after a meal, feeling full. Ouyang found a kind of glutinous rice cake, wrapped in a layer of bean flour, which was soft and bouncy in his hand. It was very refreshing and not sweet when he took a bite. He said it was much more delicious than the Paidangsi in our hometown.

In Dong Village, we saw the scenery at dusk, night and morning. We were satisfied and left.