Around Chongzuo: White-Headed Langurs, Cliff Paintings, and a Stone Forest
 |
| Taking a boat ride along the Ming River to see ancient cliff paintings |
Chongzuo is a small city (by Chinese standards) in Guangxi, just a couple hours away from Nanning, where a friend of mine lives. Last fall during the national holidays in October, Anna and I went to stay with our friend Joey, a chef and restaurant owner who lives in Chongzuo. In my last post about cooking adventures, I wrote about learning to make Vietnamese and Chinese spring rolls with Joey, which you can read about here.
Aside from cooking, Joey was kind enough to be our personal tour guide to some of the Guangxi landmarks around Chongzuo. Although Chongzuo may not seem like the most exciting city at first (it's mainly an administrative hub for the Guangxi government), it is actually surrounded by gorgeous countryside and quite a few of the best-known tourist attractions in the region.
The first thing we went to see were the Zuojiang Huashan cliff paintings, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the largest cliff paintings in all of China. To see the paintings, you park at the entrance to the area and buy a boat ticket. The boat takes you down the Ming River for quite a ways, around 30 minutes, and then usually visitors are allowed to disembark and look at the paintings up close from some boardwalks underneath them. Unfortunately, when we went to see them there had recently been a rock fall and according to the guide it was too dangerous to get out and see them from the boardwalk. So we had to make do with looking at them from the 2nd level of the boat, but considering how huge the cliff is and the number of paintings, we could still see quite a lot. Please forgive the quality of my photos, I only had my cell phone and the zoom is not great.
According to Wikipedia, the paintings were made using a mix of red ochre, animal glue, and blood, with the oldest ones being up to 16,000 years old and the newest about 690 years old. I have to admit I feel rather skeptical about the claim that that some of them are 16,000 years old, and the source for that information on Wikipedia led me to a broken link... so take that with a grain of salt. Regardless, some parts of the cliff painting are undoubtedly very old, and the scale and the vibrancy of the color is truly impressive. It is definitely worth seeing, and the boat ride along the Ming River was also really nice.
Next we went to the Chongzuo White-Headed Langur Ecological Park (also called Nongguan Ecological Park), a nature reserve for a species of critically endangered langurs in Guangxi. Langurs are a kind of monkey, and these ones are black, with long tails, and white heads that have a tufty, pointed appearance (like a little white faux hawk). They like to live on the karst mountains that are so common in Guangxi. From what I understand, they spend the night at the peak of the mountain, descend in the morning for food, rest in the shade all day, then ascend to the peak again around sunset. We arrived just in time to catch them climbing the steep sides of the mountain at sunset, and there was already a group of nature photographers set up along the road to capture images of them. They are very agile climbers and a lot of fun to watch!
 |
| White-Headed Langurs (Photo Credit) |
 |
| Enjoying the sunset in the Nongguan Ecological Park |
Our last stop on Joey's grand tour, was the Chongzuo Stone Forest. I have to admit, it didn't look like much when we first entered the park, just a few twisty rocks and some trees, but as we went in further, the rock formations became bigger and more maze-like, with lots of twisting pathways through them, and the park ended up being a lot bigger and more interesting than I initially expected. It's probably not as impressive as some other stone forests in China, like the much more famous one near Kunming in Yunnan Province, but if you're in the area I think it's a fun, peaceful place to spend an afternoon. Apparently a movie was filmed in the Chongzuo Stone Forest back in the 80's or 90's, and you can see some pretty funny photos of the actors in outdated fantasy style costumes in some areas of the park. The entrance fee was about 35 RMB.
Comments
Post a Comment