AFTER nearly a year of house-sitting, I had forgotten how good it felt to need my passport again.
Since Lou left for the US, I had put personal travel on hold. I was used to having someone to make plans with, get lost with, and help figure out how to squeeze one more souvenir into our luggage without exceeding the baggage allowance. I wasn’t ready to do all of that alone.
Then, former senator Nikki Coseteng and Bemz Benedito of Verde Creatives invited me to join a group trip through Guizhou, a province in southwestern China I knew very little about.
Most of my previous trips to China had been for tech events in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. I assumed Guizhou would be my least tech-focused visit yet, and I was looking forward to it. I wanted to spend less time in hotels and launch venues and more time exploring places and meeting people.
A little reading before we left complicated that assumption. Guizhou was home to one of China’s major data center clusters. Companies whose names I knew from tech launches had operations there, though their facilities weren’t on our itinerary. I hadn’t even left Manila, and the province was already proving harder to sum up than I’d expected.
But after weeks of waiting, I wasn’t entirely sure we’d leave Manila at all. Our visas arrived two days before the flight, the itinerary the day before, and I had to get new luggage less than 12 hours before departure.
For someone who makes a living asking questions, I was boarding a plane with quite a few of my own.
Day One: Airport day with team no sleep
BY four in the morning, I was at NAIA Terminal 3. Our flight wasn’t until 8:20 am, but between packing and finishing last-minute work, there had been no point in going to bed. I would have spent whatever time I had left worrying about sleeping through the alarm.
The rest of our group arrived around six, and almost everyone had a version of the same story: a couple of hours of sleep, unfinished work, last-minute packing and enough excitement to keep us functioning. I had simply skipped the sleeping part altogether.
Team No Sleep had assembled.
Without a proper pre-departure orientation, all we knew was to be prepared for some rain. So we packed what we thought we needed and hoped we had guessed correctly. The collective wish was for ‘Tagaytay weather’- at least. What we got felt closer to a Manila evening, just a few degrees cooler. For the first time, I had also traveled without bringing any cash to exchange for local currency. I knew most of China used Alipay and QR Codes and I was about to put that to test.
China Southern Airlines flight CZ3078 would take us from Manila to Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, where we would connect to a domestic flight to Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou.
That domestic connection came with a warning for anyone bringing a power bank: China requires a clear 3C, or CCC, certification mark on power banks and units without the mark will be confiscated. That’s why I just decided to bring the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max as my backup.
We arrived at Guizhou Park Hotel in the late afternoon. By then, I had been awake for more than 30 hours. The moment my back touched the bed, I was out. Fortunately, I had set an alarm, even if it was only for a 20-minute nap.
billboards do the job socmed
Our welcome dinner gave us an early taste of the cuisine with a thoughtful touch: the dishes were prepared with less chili for our Filipino group.
Our table filled with braised pork trotters and dipping sauce, fish in a red sauce, mixed mustard salad, sizzling golden potatoes, and garlic ribs paired with crispy fried milk. Another eye-catching dish arrived in hollowed-out oranges, each filled with some sort of kakanin, topped with its own little lid.
There’s a saying that you could eat three times a day in China for a year and never have the same dish twice. I wasn’t staying long enough to test that, but our first meal made a promising start.
Guizhou Park Hotel reminded me of Century Park Hotel in Manila, and the surrounding area gave me a bit of a Malate feeling. After dinner, John Bueno and I asked the concierge where we could find the nearest mall. Just across the street, we were told. Simple enough-except we couldn’t figure out how to get to the other side. In a city with so many bridges and flyovers, we couldn’t spot a pedestrian crossing or an overpass where we needed one.
The answer, it turned out, was underneath us.
What we had taken for entrances to the subway stations also let us cross below street level. Once we figured that out, the mall really was only a few minutes away. The mall had about five floors, with a food hall near the escalator where we emerged and I found my first toy store.
Besides Blokees, there were Transformers blind boxes I hadn’t seen back home, and a few promptly became my first purchases of the trip-and I paid just by using QR codes.
Day Two: Crossing the bridge and chasing waterfalls
NOW powered by five hours of sleep, I was ready and excited for day two.
We were in Guiyang, the provincial capital, but Guizhou was so much bigger. Its mountains, valleys and karst landscape help explain both the natural attractions we were about to visit and the scale of the infrastructure built to connect them. Our first full day would take us toward Anshun: Baling River Bridge in the morning and Huangguoshu Waterfall in the afternoon.
Baling River Bridge is also called Balinghe Bridge-he means ‘river’ in Chinese. Its main span measures 1,088 metres, and its roadway is roughly 370 metres above the river. Our guide said it was one of the highest bridges in China.
If this were a DPWH project back home, I’d probably be more afraid of the budget than the height.
Even more interesting than its height was its purpose. The bridge cut the journey across the valley from an hour to just four minutes, according to our guide. The view is impressive, but the time it gives back to people who make that trip regularly may be its most remarkable achievement.
It has also become a destination in its own right. There are viewing areas and adventure activities, including a bungee facility that holds the Guinness record for the world’s highest commercial bungee jump facility, at 370.25 meters.
We saw the bridge from two very different angles. First, we stopped at a viewpoint far enough away to take in the entire crossing between the mountains. Then our coaster brought us beneath it, where an elevator took us up to another viewing area. From a distance, the bridge was a line across the landscape. Up close, its supports and cables gave us a better sense of what it took to build it.
After lunch, we continued to Huangguoshu Waterfall. The main waterfall is about 77.8 meters high and 101 meters wide, but Huangguoshu is more than one waterfall and one photo stop. It is part of a group of 18 falls.
Before we reached the waterfall, though, I was struck by how the place had been organized for visitors. There were turnstiles, landscaped paths, a bonsai display and long escalators between levels. To put that in context, I recorded a video of our escalator ride, and it took more than five minutes to reach the bottom platform. The entry experience felt closer to entering a theme park than setting off on a nature trail.
We had VIP access, so our route began in a quieter area with raincoats and unlimited drinks and snacks. For a while, we had no idea how many people were visiting that Tuesday. Then we reached the public paths. They were busy, and almost all the visitors appeared to be Chinese tourists.
The escalators spared us a considerable descent, but they didn’t eliminate the walking. There were still paths to follow, viewpoints to share and pauses while other visitors took their pictures. The only thing more impressive than the view was the 73-year-old former senator Coseteng walking way ahead of us. She was fast, and her energy put me to shame.
Huangguoshu has one feature I especially wanted to see: the Water Curtain Cave, a passage about 134 meters long behind the waterfall. Visitors who take that route can see the water from the other side of the cascade. Sadly, our guide advised against it that afternoon. The walk would take more time, and the path could be dangerously slippery. I had to settle for zooming in to try to capture what appeared to be people in white raincoats walking behind the waterfall, just like in that scene from A Quiet Place.
We returned to Guiyang for dinner and a second night at Guizhou Park Hotel. The next morning, we would trade the coaster for a high-speed train to Congjiang, then continue by road to Zhaoxing to begin the Dong village part of our journey. Our visit with the Miao community would come a day later.