We pass a few small villages on the road but we decide not to enter and keep riding, I believe both out of nervousness and also indecision. We pass one village and we decide amongst ourselves "the next village we come to we are riding through no matter what." Not long after we find ourselves at the entrance of a small village named Miaobei Village, and being bound by our previous agreement, in we go. As we pass the threshold and enter the village, one thing becomes very apparent, there are no people! The streets are empty and all the houses we can see down the street also appear to be empty. Did the zombie apocalypse start while we were on the road? As I start recalling all of the zombie fighting rules that I will need to survive I am brought back to reality by my friend who tells me its time to ride down the road some more and see what's up ahead. As we get to the next intersection I see a pig peeking at us over the wall of his pen in the building across the street from someone's house, he looks pretty cute so it is time to go over and take some pictures, especially with me making V's with my hands like everyone in China likes to do. Time to move on again, we are coming up to a corner in the road, so I can't see around the corner, but I can see that the road is covered in red. When I first saw all of the red from far away I was guessing maybe it was rose petals but I really had no idea. Upon closer inspection it turned out all of the red was from fireworks, for some reason people had been blowing up thousands and thousands of firecrackers on the street. That got me thinking as we were riding around the corner of the road where once turning the corner all of the pieces of the puzzle came together at once.

Around the corner in a small public square there were hundreds of people all gathered together around tables eating dinner! Many of those eating saw us turn the corner and were staring at us like aliens had just landed in the middle of their village. After a short time of awkward staring and wondering what to do next, a middle aged woman and young man come out of the crowd to talk to us. They were extremely nice and after we shared some introductions they began to explain to us what was happening in the village that evening. To our relief the young man was college aged and was at home visiting for the holidays, his English was good and between his knowledge of English and our knowledge of Chinese, we were able to communicate rather effectively. What we found out was this was a small village made up of people coming from the Zhuang ethnic minority and everyone that lives in the village is surnamed Li. Zhuang is the largest ethnic minority in China behind the Han people who obviously make up the majority. The special thing about this night is they were celebrating a wedding, the marriage of a man in their village to a woman from another village. Much to my surprise however, is that neither the bride nor the groom were present at the dinner, they had not arrived in town yet, the middle aged woman I was speaking to turned out to be the older sister of the groom. As a total surprise they invited us to stay with them for the evening and join them for dinner, they even offered to give us a place to stay overnight, which as you will come to find out would have been an incredible offer to have accepted if we didn't have to return the bicycles that evening in Yangshuo and catch the late bus back to Guilin.