China has three weeklong holidays when virtually the entire country shuts down. With no school and no caregivers, they are prime times to go exploring, but because 1.3 billion other people have the same idea, many expats prefer to stay put or leave the country. We have largely ignored this line of thinking, most recently setting off for the South Central province of Guizhou during last week's May Day celebration.

It was not an obvious destination. As China's poorest province, with a per capita income of $614, Guizhou lacks many amenities a vacationing family of five might normally seek -- swimming pools, established tourist sites like caves, even established hiking or biking trails. Few people we know have been there.

But lush mountains and ethnic-minority villages dominate the province, which my Chinese teacher called his favorite in the country. The deal was sealed when a colleague of my wife, Rebecca, said that he knew an excellent English-speaking guide. We booked a four-night, five-day visit less than a week before departing. The expat-oriented travel agent in Beijing laughed out loud when I requested five tickets to Guiyang, Guizhou's capital.

We were greeted at the airport by guide Huang Duan ("call me Howard") and his driver, Mr. Li. We checked into adjoining rooms at the four-star Trade Point Hotel before heading out to dinner. Arriving at the little restaurant, we were followed by a pack of curious onlookers. After a delicious, spicy dinner, the entire wait staff crowded around two-and-a-half-year-old Anna, wanting to hold her, kiss her, pose for pictures with her. It's a pattern that would be repeated over and over.

"Many of these people have never seen anyone who looks like Anna, except in pictures," Duan explained. "They think she looks like an angel."

The next morning we piled into Mr. Li's van for the three-hour drive to Kaili, a much smaller, poorer and dirtier city, which is the capital of the "Miao and Dong (minority groups) Autonomous Prefecture." Outside of town, we turned off the main road and headed up a twisty mountain road that soon became so bumpy, rutted and crumbled that I feared we might bust an axle. Huge dump trucks overloaded with coal rumbled downhill. We passed a power plant and then towering heaps of ash and slag. It was not beautiful. Both the trucks and the ruts vanished once we passed a mine, however, and the scenery grew ever more stunning.

We drove through otherworldly vistas that would become familiar over the next few days: deep green mountains, with even the steepest slopes covered in terraced rice paddies. Men plowed the muddy fields with water buffalo. Women chopped tall grass with hand-held scythes, loading the green stuff into wire baskets balanced on either end of a long wooden pole carried across their shoulders.

It was fascinating and beautiful but as the day wore on I watched the kids wilt in the rising heat. I felt a stir of panic by the time we climbed into the van for the bumpy, sweaty ride back from a ramshackle village where women followed us waving batik shirts and purses. We were worn

out, the kids were restless and I wondered if we would make it three more days. Our anxiety only deepened during dinner at a soulful local place as the kids decomposed and eight-year-old Jacob seemed on the edge of a complete collapse.

The next morning, the kids ate the Trix and instant oatmeal we brought with us, while Rebecca and I breakfasted on spicy noodles and dumplings, and conferred with Duan. We asked him to slash a third of each day's activities and allow more time for the kids to ramble. It was a suggestion that turned the trip around.

Heading south, it took 15 minutes to get beyond the town's grimy ring of light industry. A wee-hours rainstorm had brought the countryside even more to life. The boiling river and rushing waterfalls, which seemed to appear around every bend, fascinated our boys.

We visited a large Miao village, where we joined Chinese tourists watching a traditional flute and dance show, the women clad in colorful hand-embroidered dresses. We bought the kids wooden swords that would get quite a workout over the next few days. Later we drove further into the boonies and were the lone visitors in a remote Miao outpost, where we viewed traditional houses that feature pigs, chickens and water buffalo on the first, stone floor and several generations on two top, wooden floors.