8-Day Guizhou Grand Traverse: Waterfall, Karst, Dong and Miao

Your guide meets you at Guiyang Longdongbao and takes you into the city - the airport sits about eleven kilometers from the center, which is one of the small mercies of a provincial capital that has not yet learned to sprawl. Guiyang is built on karst, at 1,100 meters, and it is the only provincial capital in China with a forest park inside the city ring; the first thing visitors notice in summer is that the air is cool and the sky is not the color they expected from southern China.

The afternoon belongs to Jiaxiu Pavilion, built in 1598 on a rock in the middle of the Nanming River and reached by a seven-arch stone bridge. It is the emblem of the city and a genuine Ming structure, rebuilt several times after fires, and the reason the surrounding quarter has been the literary address of Guizhou for four centuries - the provincial examination hall once stood on the bank opposite. Then Erqi Road, a snack street that runs behind the old bus station, for the introduction Guiyang deserves: siwawa, the rice-flour wrap you fill yourself and drown in sour-spicy broth; changwang noodles with pork intestine and congealed blood; and love tofu, grilled until the skin blisters.

Huangguoshu is 77.8 meters high and 101 meters wide, the largest waterfall in Asia by volume in flood season, and it is not a single sight but a park of three: Doupotang, the wide curtain where the 1986 television adaptation of Journey to the West filmed its closing sequence; Tianshengqiao, a karst water-and-stone forest downstream with the Silver Chain Falling into the Pool cascade at its far end; and the main fall itself, which you can walk behind through Shuilian Cave, a 134-meter passage with six openings cut through the travertine.

The order matters. We start at Doupotang while the tour buses are still at the gate, work downstream through the lower half of Tianshengqiao - the upper half is a pleasant walk with no payoff, and skipping it saves two hours of queueing on stone stairs - and reach the main fall in the afternoon when the light comes over the rim and the spray throws rainbows. The park ticket is valid for three days and the shuttle bus is compulsory, since the three sections are several kilometers apart and private cars cannot enter. Bring a poncho for the cave; you will be wet, and you will not mind.

Dragon Palace is a karst cave system with a river running through it: you board a small boat at the entrance and drift through a sequence of chambers lit from below, with the roof anywhere from three to thirty meters above your head. It is the largest water cave of its kind in China and the boat trip runs about forty minutes; the elevators at the far end save a stiff climb. Entry is 60 yuan, the shuttle 20 and the first-cave boat 35, all of which we fold into one ticket so there is nothing to settle at the gate.

The afternoon is Tianlong Tunpu, thirty minutes away - the best-preserved of the Ming garrison villages, with stone walls, a working temple hill and a Dixi opera performed on a stone stage by farmers who have inherited the roles. In the evening, back in Anshun, walk the old city wall and eat the local specialty: Anshun rice noodles with a fermented soybean paste that tastes stronger than it sounds, and small pot-sticker dumplings fried in a beaten egg.

Xiaoqikong is a 12-kilometer river valley inside the South China Karst UNESCO property, and its color is not a filter: the water runs over a bed of travertine and dissolved limestone, which scatters light the way it does in a glacier lake. The route follows the river past the 68-level cascade, the water forest where trees grow straight out of the streambed, the Marshland, and Wolong Pool at the top end, and the seven-arch bridge that gives the place its name was built in 1835 by a local merchant family.

The park is 45 kilometers of road and walking in total, and the shuttle bus is compulsory - we include it. Our standard plan enters at the west gate and works downstream to the east, which is the direction that keeps the sun behind you and the crowds ahead; the alternative is the reverse, and it matters at eleven in the morning in July. The west gate also puts Daqikong, the larger and quieter gorge next door, at the end of the day rather than the beginning.

Maolan is a 200-square-kilometer nature reserve of conical karst peaks covered in primary forest - the same limestone topography as Guilin, but forested, which is rare enough that UNESCO includes it in the South China Karst listing. Walking the valley floor is easy; the climb to the ridge above the Stone Forest takes about ninety minutes and rewards with a view of hundreds of green cones disappearing into mist.

Yaoshan, on the road back, is a Yao village of the Baiku branch - the 'white trousers' Yao - whose women wear a costume that takes two years to make and whose men traditionally carried powder horns for hunting. It is a living village with a tourism economy attached, which means performances at set times and a ticket; your guide will tell you plainly which parts are ritual and which are staged, and the difference is worth knowing.

Zhaoxing sits in a basin in Liping county, 95 per cent Dong, and its layout is the reason it is famous: five residential clans, each with its own drum tower, its own flower bridge and its own opera stage, so the village reads as five villages sharing one river. The towers are named Ren, Yi, Li, Zhi and Xin - benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trust - which is a Confucian naming scheme applied to an animist Dong institution, and the cultural layering is the interesting part.

The Xin tower, at the 'stern' of the boat-shaped village, is the tallest at 11 tiers and 24.37 meters, assembled from more than ten thousand wooden components with no nails and no metal fasteners at all - the structure holds by mortise and tenon and its own weight. In the evening, if a choir is singing, you sit in the tower yard for the Dong grand song: polyphonic, unaccompanied, with a high improvised line over a sustained drone, imitating birdsong and running water. It was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, and hearing it in a drum tower rather than a theater is worth planning a trip around.

Xijiang has 1,468 households and more than 6,000 residents, 99.5 per cent of them Miao, which makes it the largest Miao settlement in the world. The houses are diaojiaolou - wooden stilt structures built into a hillside so steep that the roof of one house is level with the floor of the next - and there are more than six thousand of them, plus seven wind-and-rain bridges across the Baishui River at the valley floor.

We arrive in the afternoon, check into a guesthouse on the viewing-terrace side, and walk the old street and the Ga Ge old lane before dinner. Dinner is the long-table banquet: a single board running the length of the courtyard, ten dishes, rice wine served in the 'high mountain running water' cascade of bowls, and a choir of Miao women singing to whoever is sitting at the head. Then the reason everybody comes - the lamps. Around eight, the houses light up and the whole hillside turns into a slope of orange points, best seen from the terrace above the village with a camera on a wall and the shutter open.

Your guide collects you at the hotel and drives you to Longdongbao, about half an hour outside the center depending on traffic. If your flight leaves in the afternoon, we can hold the morning for the provincial museum's textile halls or a slow breakfast at a century-old changwang noodle shop - tell us your flight time and we build the morning backwards from it.