Starting in Dengfeng, I had a long way to go to get to Guoliang. Which way? No one was really sure… I’d asked around, but nobody had ever even heard of the place. I had a vague idea of how to get there from Lonely Planet, but it’s never a good idea to rely entirely on an out of date guidebook. The problem is that cartographers failed to place Guoliang accurately on maps for years. Journeying there is so convoluted and includes so many twists and turns that no one was able to identify exactly where it is. I figured my best approach was to just get closer to the general area, then there would surely be someone around who knew the way…
So from Dengfeng I caught a bus to Zhengzhou.
In Zhengzhou the ticket agent couldn’t understand me, so with a massive line of anxious, demanding travellers behind me I had to pull out the guidebook and find the characters for the town that was next on my convoluted route, Xinxiang.
Once in Xinxiang, I asked a man on the road how to get to Guoliang. He told me to go to Huixian first. Problem was finding where the bus picked people up. I couldn’t manage to get into the station due to traffic and pushy people, and I wasn’t sure if I caught it on the north or south side of the street. So I wandered in circles for a while.
On the bus to Huixian I asked the bus’s ticket collector about getting to Guoliang. They offered to help me once we got to the station. At the station there was a table sitting in a parking lot, with 4 or 5 people crowded around ready to sell me a ticket. I asked if I had time to go get a snack, they said yes. I went to get my snack and after putting a bag of chips in my hand all the sales people were yelling at me from across the parking lot to hurry up and get on the bus. I sprinted to the bus to find that there were only two other people on board and we wouldn’t be leaving for at least another 5 minutes. The bus filled up as we drove along the country roads, and little old ladies nearly fainted when they saw that there was a white girl on board.
The next destination was a town at the base of the mountains, at which point I would have to transfer to some other type of vehicle to get up to Guoliang village. Problem was that around 7pm the bus that I was on came to a sudden stop and the driver announced that this was as far as he was driving. The park (Wanxian Shan Geological Park, where Guoliang is located) is closed for the day and we’d have to come back tomorrow to get in anyways. Conveniently, (isn’t that always the case in Asia…) his ‘friend’ climbed on board to offer us discounted rates in her hotel. So I got a room and crashed there for the night, having no idea where I was other than the fact that I was close to Guoliang.
Now the road from the base of the mountains up to Guoliang is no ordinary road. It is commonly rated in the top ten in the category of “World’s Deadliest Roads“. The mountains here are sheer cliffs, so prior to the 1970’s the only way in and out of Guoliang was a staircase known as the ‘Sky Ladder’.
Lucky for Guoliang some crazy guys in the 1970’s decided to build a road in and out of town. Due to the fact that the town is on top of a cliff though, it couldn’t be just any road though, it had to be a tunnel. So these crazy guys set out to hand carve a tunnel along the edge of the cliff.
I’d been hoping to take a taxi, or even better catch a ride with a deranged man on a motorcycle to go up the tunnel. Alas, to prevent insane Chinese driving on these roads, the park requires that you ‘Park & Ride’. So I caught a ride up in one of their little green buses.
The town of Guoliang itself is gorgeous! And the area is one of the most beautiful mountain landscapes I have ever seen (keep in mind I’m Canadian and I grew up with many road trips to the Rockies). Due to the challenges of getting here tourism hasn’t really taken off too much and I doubt it ever really will. The main people drawn to the town are art students and photographers. Cobbled streets, stone homes and sheer cliffs make for beautiful images. There are little hikes to do all over the place and in season every family in town sets up a little guesthouse and restaurant. An extraordinary paradise.
The Great Gallivant 