Sisterhood Meets the Bai People

Iona

This morning we got breakfast at the Landscape Hotel around 7:30 this morning and were ready to check out of the hotel by 8:30am. Carrie went over our itinerary with us during breakfast; we were planning on driving the van three hours to Shaxi Village, but she suggested that we add a stop at Xi Zhou. Xi Zhou was a village full of Bai people, whom we had learned about from Carrie who had a lot to tell us since she comes from a family of Bai ancestry. It was really interesting to learn more about the traditional customs and beliefs, and something that stuck with me is the opinion of the Bai people: if a young adult chooses to stay in the village, then it is a reflection of a lack of motivation. Staying with your family for longer than necessary is discouraged, which in turn leaves the village deprived of young adults to work on the farms (their main source of income is agriculture, not industry, so this poses as a problem). In an attempt to bring back more young adults, the government has put an effort into creating more small stores that would attract people to work there and stay local rather than going off to the cities— even though this is what the Bai belief encouraged... I’m not sure how a deficit in young individuals wasn’t going to be inevitable given that having the children move out of the village once they came of age was desirable. Anyways, super interesting town full of traditional Bai architecture that was very pretty.

After spending an hour or so walking through Xi Zhou, we parted with Carrie and continued with our driver for two more hours until we stopped at a restaurant to meet out next guide, Ivan, and have lunch. He ordered food for us and it was a great break in our road trip, nonetheless, we continued our journey to our destination which was Shaxi village.

The landscapes we saw on our drive over were stunning and we did a lot of driving on the side of hills before winding down to the valley which was where Shaxi is located. Shaxi means sandy place and has about 16,000 inhabitants, again many Bai aspects were reoccurring throughout the architecture and clothing of this village, though there are other minorities here as well.

We got to our hotel which is very spacious and we are very happy to have comfortable beds and the room to do our laundry. The sisterhood decided today was the day for some serious laundry to get done, we had been doing some small washing after each day, but were getting to a point where jeans and leggings and hoodies had to be washed so it was chore time! We spent a solid two hours washing our clothes and hanging them up on travellers clothes lines that we had purchased before the trip. I also risked it and put some of my clothes outside in the hopes that they will dry in time for tomorrow as I need my leggings and shirt and quarter zip for the hiking that we are doing tomorrow...

After laundry happened it was around dinner time so we reconvened with Mrs. Waterman around 6:30pm to go out in the town. We got dinner at a local restaurant and stayed out until around 8:30pm which we all acknowledged was a late evening for us so we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the morning!