Barmy BaMei: May 2018

The entrance to the village with boat for scale.

A long weekend rolled round so Lora, Audrey and I decided to visit the relatively unknown village of BaMei. 

BaMei has claimed to be the inspiration for a  fable written by poet Tao Qian in AD 421, in which he described an idyllic hamlet isolated from the rest of the world, where man and nature lived in harmony.  No-one knows for certain if this is indeed true but after visiting I would say it is. 

BaMei is about 30Km from GuangNan which conveniently has a stop on the newly constructed high speed railway line from Kunming to Guilin. The train station is miles out of  town, over an hour on the subway from my house, but the journey is under two hours, so it is still faster than getting the bus. 

One of the "window" in the cave. 

The original plan was to spend the night in GuangNan and then get the bus to the village the next morning. However, as with all plans, I messed up and we had to rebook Audrey's train ticket of the following morning. Lora and I stayed in a hotel in the center of town and we grabbed a taxi from the station the next morning. 

The village square. 

Once you arrive at the entrance to the village and buy tickets, its a lengthy process to get in. 

First you walk down a small dirt road to a bunch of horses and grumpy drivers.
Then you bounce down a road to the river. Once at the river (after posing for pictures) you clamber into small rickety boats and head off on the river into the cave. We were in the boat for about 20 minutes, 3km, through a huge cave. At points it was lit by "windows" in the cave roof, and at other times it was pitch black. Lora chose this time to tell us of the horror movie filmed in the cave and how no-one survived the monster living in the water under us. 


Our boat driver had a sister who owned a guest house in the village, so she met us and took us to her place. It was basic but clean, cheap and reasonable comfortable. 

From the top of one of the restaurants. Pretty much the whole valley. 

The village is surrounded by peaks on all sides, so it is quiet and (except the river) cut off from the rest of the world. I had been told it was largely undeveloped and still had its connections to traditional China. I was misinformed! It's still nice and quiet but the entire village is guesthouses and restaurants. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do other than sit and take in the green of the surroundings. we found beer and a quiet place and chilled for the afternoon. 

As our train was early afternoon the following day, there was no need to get up early. We ordered our chicken for lunch then pretty much carried on from where we left off the day before. The village is spaced out along a small track about a mile long. It's basically a one way system, horse and boat in, walk that way to get out. We wandered along the road and found the next boat, chilled for a little bit through another cave and thought that was it. We were then faced with another horse, slightly confused we got in and carried on, only to find another boat with ore caves. All in all the village trip involved three boats, 2 horses, 2 taxis, 2 trains and 2 hours on the subway. 



There is nothing to do there in terms of activities or entertainment but for me, sitting in the green countryside was plenty good enough. A very fast trip but completely worth it.