江头洲村

With only a guide book in our hands we have decided to reach this village eventhough our chinese is quite limited. Since the taxis didnt want to go for below 200 RMB we have decided to take the bus adventure. First two buses you pay 2 RMB. First we took bus 99 to xinjiang square from guilin train station, there we changed for bus 301 and we went with the bus to Lingchuan (30 minutes drive with bus 301 frimn xunjiang square) after you reach Lingchuan (ask the bus driver is it Lingchuan stop - for this trip go prepared with all the names written in chinese). After reaching Lingchuan cross the street - and there you need to stop a grey minivan and ask him to go to Jiuwu (5 RMB per person). After reaching Jiuwu there is 10-15 minutes easy walk to Jiangtouzhou. You will see no tourists there - bring your own food there is no restaurant there.On the entrance to the village we wanted to see this confucius college for which locals charged us 20 RMB per person which I consider too much but we did not know what to expect. There are no explanations its just quite good kept wooden infrastructure but overpriced.After that we enjoyed walking around this village a lot, in this village I felt really sad that my chinese was not better, cause we were invited for lunch to local home - but didnt know how to properly respond. Since Guilin in our opinion didnt have any attractions worth visit we decided to take adventure trip here.

I visited in 2009 so this might be out of date, this village was interesting but a bit off the beaten track. We ended up hiring a taxi for several hours from Guilin which wasnt too expensive (I think Y120 from memory) and Im glad we did because not speaking Chinese I doubt we would have navigated public transport. Its not an organised tourist attraction in the sense there's no particular signs or booth and we didnt see other people (lucky our driver waited 2 hrs), but we were met out front by a local who couldn't speak English but showed us around (Im not sure if guide is compulsory, I think so, and its only fair to provide some income for them if you are traipsing around their village). There was some interesting architecture and people going about daily village lives, we also did a short walk around a rice paddy and hung out for a bit, all in all it was worth the trip. No shops I can recall so bring food and water.

From research, the buildings in this village are up to 1,000 years old. Some seemed to be empty and others looked like they could still have people living in them - some were difficult to tell the difference.To get there, leave the train station in Guilin, turn right until the end of the road, right again & get the 301 bus to Tan Xia lu kou (lo kou means crossing).Then cross the road and on the corner, there's a few clapped out vans aka mini buses which go to Jiuwu (ask your hostel or hotel to give you the name in Chinese and the mini bus folk will let you know when you're there).Walk along the road, through the big white arch way and you are there.So, the village itself is fairly quiet. It's difficult to know how many houses are occupied but there are some people out working the fields.It's non touristy so very quiet. We took a walk over the river and there was a local school which taught English to the kids so we had some of them walking with us at some point while practicing their English.There was no sign of a shop in the village but when you get off the mini bus, there's a few places to eat and drink so stock up before you go.

Even though it is not a main tourism spot but visiting the village for the purpose of photo taking is not a bad idea. Didn't expect that the photos turn out to be so attractive.