I came to Shanghai, China in 2011 to teach English and since then, there hasn’t been a dull moment. From all of my experiences, my trip to Guilin is one of my favorite experiences. While in this area, I went with some friends to visit Dragon’s Backbone rice terraces. We had a hotel reserved in the Dazhai area of the terraces, so we took a bus to Dazhai from Guilin. On the way up, there was so much rainfall that it caused a mud slide, which caused the road to become completely blocked by all the dirt. It was a little difficult to figure out what was happening since the bus driver only spoke Chinese, but it turned out that we needed to walk over the land side where another bus driver would come and pick us up. When we finally arrived at the terraces, we were completely lost. From the point where the bus dropped off to our hotel, it ended up being about a 2 ½ hour trek up and down the terraces to get there. I guess it was just lucky that two of us were carrying backpacks. Our friend without a backpack had one of the Chinese sherpas take her bag to our hotel for only 40 RMB.
