Apr 6, Guiyang to Guanling via Huangguoshu Waterfall

Today we took a 3 hour drive to the Huangguoshu Waterfall.  At least half of the drive (or so it seemed) was through road construction.  Mary may never need another massage after today.  Talk about rough.  In addition there was a huge amount of buildings under construction as well.  However, a reasonable number of the buildings looked like they had been started quite some time ago and not completed. We’ve noticed this everywhere, both in the countryside and in the cities.

The upside is that the countryside scenery and sites was varied and interesting.

Murals

Vineyards

and we saw lots of people out working the fields or in carts.

We first stopped at the Duopotang waterfall.  It was not a particularly high waterfall but looked nice.  They were working downstream on what looked to be walkways through the stream.  More places for the Chinese to take selfies of themselves with a nice background.

The Huangguoshu Waterfall is the largest waterfall in Asia and is 265 feet (81 meters) high and 331 feet (101 meters) wide.  Unfortunately we were there at the end of the rainy season so the water volume was not massive.  It is probably 4 times the volume in the rainy season.  However, there was a reasonable volume and it looked lovely and sort of ethereal.  There is a walkway behind the waterfall, the Water Curtain Cave.  Unfortunately it was closed because of falling rocks so we couldn’t walk through it.

The walk to the falls included an extensive bonsai garden with fairly large bonsai plants (not the itty bitty table top ones you think of when you think of bonsai).  There were also some very large decorative rocks.

We also took a walk through the Tian Xing Bridge National Park; a pretty walk with some small waterfalls and along artificial stepping stones in the placid river (lake?).

On the way to Guanling we took a detour up a dirt road and a long hike up the side of a very steep mountain over a rough path to a site with ancient writing, Hong Ya Tian Shu.  

The writing was not Chinese, so a reward to translate was offered, claimed by a scholar using old textbooks of pictograms and other languages.  It tells a story of a local chief captured seven times by thinkers and released each time, thus gaining his loyalty.  The original writings were destroyed by erosion, so scholars re-carved it in a more protected spot.

View from the hill.