We leave Guiyang at 10am on Saturday, after a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs with decent coffee at the Shengfeng Hotel. This has been a perfectly comfortable place to stay. We get onto the national road, heading southwest towards Yunnan province. The landscape evolves again - we pass through an area of lakes, Hongfeng Hu, and then of more and more bizarre karst hill formations. They pop up from the plateau for no apparent reason, too steep to be cultivated, though many are used for grave sites. 60km out of Guiyang, we stop at an old village called Tianlong and, to our delight, discover an ancient Buddhist monastery clinging to a rocky hilltop. It also served as a fortress, and there seem to be enough fields enclosed by the stone wall at its base to feed the whole village in times of trouble. The present day village has become something of a tourist stop, but it's worth the RMB40 entrance fee since it has an unusual collection of stone houses, on either side of a stream spanned by pretty bridges. It's a lively place, with a school, shops and plenty of residents, some dressed in a blue minority-style costume though we hear that they are in fact majority Han Chinese.
After lunch at a dingy tourist restaurant, we head on to our main destination for the day - Huangguoshou Falls, the largest waterfalls in the whole of Asia. Max and Audrey noted a stop at a waterfall in this area, which must have been Huangguoshou. They were doubtless the only visitors in April 1944, but we have to share the falls with a few Western and rather more Chinese tourists. Amazingly, it took until the 1980s for Guizhou province to exploit their biggest natural wonder. Now, it's totally commercial with an entry ticket at the steep price of RMB180, aggressive touts at the entrance and lots of souvenir shops. But once inside the gates, we enjoy a walk through a Bonsai garden before descending a steep path to view the main falls. You hear the roar of the water cascading down before you get a glimpse of it, and the spectacle is indeed stunning. I'd say the falls are as much as half the width of Niagara, and that the drop is every bit as deep. As we get close the spray drenches Mike, since his free mac has fallen to bits, and he hates being pestered by the salesladies into buying a better one. Luckily it's a warm, though not exactly sunny day. We climb back to the top, thinking that it's only the remoteness of Guizhou which saves this spectacular spot from larger crowds. With the province rapidly developing its highway system, they will be there soon.
A few minutes away, we make a quick stop at another old village - Shitouzhai, known for the quality of its stonework. Some of the houses wouldn't be out of place in the south of France, but we hope that the village's modest entrance charge will help to renovate others which are falling down. Outside the village gates, couples are having wedding photos taken - not surprisingly, since the setting with a duck pond and hills behind is the prettiest I've seen on this trip. It's 4:40pm, and though we only have about 100km ahead of us before our night stop at Qinglong, our tireless driver Mr Huang seems a little anxious to get back on the road. We soon discover why.
We'd hoped to make some headway on the new highway that will connect Guiyang to Kunming, but a key section is still under construction, and we have to drive along the old national road down one side of a valley and back up the other - looking up wistfully to a half-built suspension bridge which will take at least an hour off the journey time. The bridge is an awesome feat of engineering, with an immense, high span - like the new bridge at Millau in France, which I believe is the longest suspension bridge in Europe. We really enjoy our slower drive through the twists and turns of the old road, since this is a majestic valley coming down to a broad river. On the opposite ridge we rejoin the highway for a few kilometers, but it peters out again at Yongning, a particularly desolate, isolated coal-mining town where Max and Audrey spent a night. Probably the place where they had to lean hard on the driver to find somewhere for them to stay, since the next stretch of road was going to be dark and dangerous. Well, we have a county hotel booked in Qinglong and press on. It is very foggy and the light is fading, as Mr Huang negotiates a million hairpin bends on this mountain road. We pass through endless hardscrabble villages, and watch people walking their cows along the road - a kind of rural promenade. I wouldn't have missed these sights for anything, but we're getting anxious as darkness falls and we still can't find Qinglong. Finally, we arrive in the town (now known as Liancheng), but have a very hard time in complete darkness locating the Haixin Hotel, which turns out to be by a lake on the edge of town. We're so relieved to be there that we don't mind that the rooms are basic and the dinner simple.
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