Exploring Guangxi

Exploring Guangxi
Originally uploaded by paulbrockmann.

I’ve been traveling around a bit these past few weeks and I’ve learned

some things. It’s kind of nice, getting up and out periodically. About

this blog, my latest trip to Hong Kong allowed me to view my blog

online, and I learned that when I post batches of photos all at one,

they appear smaller on the blog…as in the case of all the things

posted about Nanning, since the posts in May about Beijing and Hong

Kong. This means I’ll now try to post more individual photos, even

though it takes a lot longer.

This especially applies to the photo you see here, which I simply felt

deserved a good amount of space. This is Detian Waterfall, on the

border between Vietnam and China, about a four hour bus and shuttle

odyssey away from Nanning. The weekend after my latest trip to Beijing

— during which the vacation I was supposed to take to Gansu, the week

of July 18, got cancelled since there was work needing done back in

Nanning — I woke up each morning with a serious case of wanderlust,

for some strange reason. Following, you will see photos from the two

day trips that resulted from this wanderlust: I hopped buses and

traveled, first to a park 1-1/2 hours outside Nanning that’s known as

home to quite a large number of wild monkeys (if you discount that

fact that many of them have come to expect peanuts from the tourists

wandering through — all of whom are basically local and regional tour

groups). This was a great trip — the park is lovely, the monkeys were

interesting and it was wonderful and special for me, for the first

time, to see monkeys in a basically wild setting living and

interacting as a group.

Then Sunday I woke up still itchy to travel, and decided that since

it’s been raining a TON (enough that we launched a new short-term

flood-relief project in eastern Guangxi, of which you should have seen

photos just before this), it might be a good time to go see the

waterfall. My guidebook tells me this is the world’s second-largest

transnational waterfall (the first, of course, being Niagara). What’s

interesting here is that, unlike Niagara, there’s no border-crossing.

There are two border crossings between Guangxi and Vietnam, but both

are east of these falls. I’ll post a few more comments as we move

through the photos to come, but this is one of the nicest shots of the

falls: as you look at them, Vietnam is on the left, and China is on

the right, with that largest clump of cascades being all in China;

Vietnam has only the smaller clump of cascades, to the left.