Fuddland
(龙头山) — Dragon Head Hill — is a gorgeous little place. You make the gentle climb up through an orange orchard, with some other fruit trees such as the Chinese strawberry tree, locally called (杨梅), dotted around the place for good measure, which is sure to look spectacular when the oranges are almost ready for picking.
Just at the top is an old, pretty unmaintained temple. The overweight caretaker was asleep on a bench as we approached, but he got up and made a few token gestures with a broom as we looked around. Although the temple isn’t up to much, the view beyond it is fantastic: miles and miles of fish-farms and rice paddies stretch out in every direction, to the horizon and beyond. You can get a pretty good idea of just how many individual plots there are if you look on Google Maps at our approximate location and start to zoom out.
After a while, exploring the hill a little off the beaten track, we headed back to the ring-road and started walking along the side of the road, hoping to flag down another tuk-tuk, but none was to be seen. As we walked, and throughout the day, I was struck by how undeveloped the area is: this is supposed to be one of the major sight-seeing areas in the province, and yet the small villages that we passed through were pretty rundown, and as lunchtime approached our bellies were surprised at the apparent lack of restaurants.
Eventually, after thoughts of food were put on hold by the sight of a large dead dog hanging from a tree, I saw a minibus speeding up the road towards us and flagged it down, asking to be dropped off at the ferry terminal on the north side of (东山). From there our plan was to catch the ferry to (西山). As we got to what looked to me a lot like a ferry terminal, one person outside the bus told us we had arrived, but others on the bus told us we had not. A bit confused, we stayed on the bus for a couple more minutes drive, during which time an older Chinese man piped up in English and told us that the ferry would cost us a hundred yuan. But my guidebook, which I double-checked and showed him, said it should cost only five yuan per person, and whilst you can generally expect prices to have risen slightly in the couple of years since the book was published, we couldn’t believe a 2000% increase, even here! We were starting to suspect we were being taken to a different docking area for a much more expensive ride.
But we pulled up on the side of the road just a short distance from the first terminal, and I embarked on a really quite tiresome conversation with the woman running the minibus — we kept going round and round on the fact that Rose and I wanted to go to , and we didn’t want to take the road as it meant going all the way back to the mainland and back out again along the bridge to the island. We’ve found, on our winding trip to (九华山) as well as talking to this woman, that some people can’t understand that the journey can be as much a part of the trip as the destination: we wanted to take the ferry because we thought it would be nice. At one point Rose and I realised that my guidebook probably had a typo, and it was supposed to say fifty yuan per person, which would tally with what the old chap had told us, and on second thoughts sounded pretty reasonable for a half-hour ferry ride. But now the minibus woman was fixated on the fact that we’d previously said the ferry was too expensive, and kept suggesting we take the land-based option.
Having established that the place we’d passed through earlier was indeed the ferry terminal, and still confused about why we were told at the time that it wasn’t, we just got off the bus and started to walk back along the road. But the minibus woman started following us, telling us to hurry up, which we were in no mood to do, being really quite hungry by now, as well as hot and bothered in the midday sun. Eventually she peeled off and turned back towards her bus.
Some very large restaurants loomed up on the shore just next to the ferry terminal, and the lure of air-conditioning and nourishment pulled us into the first one, which was beautifully empty of customers. Upstairs and at the back was a cool breeze, under some shade, looking out over the lake. We ordered a fish dish [caught locally, naturally] and sat back to enjoy what we came to realise was probably the most peaceful place either of us had been to since we’d come to China. The food wasn’t up to much to be honest: I’ve always found the fish-dishes in (苏州) to taste distinctly of mud; the vegetable dish was uninspired, and the rice was on the dry side. But there wasn’t a soul about, save for the waitress [hovering at a respectful distance for a change] and a couple of fishermen on row-boats out on the lake, and this rare treat more than made up for the culinary disappointment.
A short time later we saw the ferry leaving, and after a moment of frowning, we understood why the minibus woman was so concerned that we should hurry, I had a quick look in my guidebook and realised that, in my head, I had managed to transform the half-hour length of the ferry ride into the notion that ferries left every half-hour, whereas in fact there were only two a day, and we’d just missed the last one. But we were so relaxed by then that we simply shrugged, finished our food, ordered a couple of beers and sat reading and admiring the view for a while longer, happy to be in each other’s company in such a peaceful place.
