Fuddland

Getting out of the city for the day.

This category is a subcategory of Travelling in China.

Last month I was treated by my nursery school to join them on a daytrip to Shànghǎi Wild Animal Park. Having had a pretty bad experience with the zoo back in Běnxī, I was a little apprehensive, but thought that a modern, wealthy, progressive city such as Shànghǎi might be a little more clued-in animal-welfare-wise.

Can you guess what’s coming?

To be fair, the animal enclosures were of a decent quality: good sizes, and the animals [for the most part] looked to be in fairly good condition, which is surprising once you witness the general public’s complete disregard for any and all prominent notices [of which there were many] imploring them to not feed the animals.

It was simply amazing: children and adults alike, gleefully throwing bread to the red pandas and offering cake and biscuits to the ostriches, or trying to pet birds doing the best they could to avoid the out-stretched hands whilst tied to a perch by a six-inch chain.

One mother couldn’t seem to accept the fact that alligators generally don’t do very much apart from sit on rocks for most of the day, especially when the weather is on the chilly side, so she decided to lob a plastic bottle at them so they’d get up and do an elaborate five-minute song-and-dance routine for her precious son. Sadly for her, the bottle just bounced off their tough hide and they barely even raised a scaly eyebrow. [One of the teachers decided that they were not, in fact, real alligators, but statues, although if she could have been bothered to stand still and simply look at them for a few minutes, she would have seem them blink and move everso slightly.]

But all that was left in the dust by the grand finale: a 45-minute long animal show, featuring, amongst other things:

• an elephant performing acrobatics with two girls, being encouraged to stand on its hind legs through the use of a metal spike on a stick

• three monkeys on chains scurrying up and down poles

• a chimpanzee dressed as a shoe-shiner engaging in slapstick routine with his handler [who, for some reason, was dressed as a Frenchman]

• a bear riding a bicycle, and later being made to walk upright with cymbals strapped to its front paws, whilst two other bears [also upright] took part in a wedding ceremony, attended by the elephant, monkeys, a llama, and a zebra.

Still, at least: the kids were pretty cute; I got to see white tigers for the first time; and, most importantly, there were many fine examples of Chinglish on display, my favourite of which was in the stay-in-your-vehicle stage, and said,

In case of breakdown, please dial 61180113. In case of no communication equipment, please whistle for a while, our working staff will tow out your troubled car.

Lóngtóu Shān (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 yángméi (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 Dōng Shān (东山). From there our plan was to catch the ferry to Xī Shān (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 Xī Shān, 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 Jǐuhuá Shān (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 Sūzhōu (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.

Just twenty miles or so west of Sūzhōu (苏州) lies Tài Hú (太湖), the third largest lake in China, easily reached from Sūzhōu on the number 502 public bus from opposite the train station [well, it’s opposite the train station at the time of writing. There’s so much construction going on around there at the moment, the bus stops are continually being moved around]. You can also take a minibus from the bus station down the road, but why pay a lot more just for a bit more comfort? It’s only four yuan for the hour-long journey if you take the 502, and you get to see a bit more of the surrounding towns as it winds its way through them, rather than taking the express route.

Read the rest of “Getting to Dong Shan”…

An hour’s bus ride out of Sūzhōu (苏州) is the small historic water town of Lùzhí (甪直). Just over a square kilometre in size, and dating back 1,400 years, it’s famed for its surviving small bridges and a Buddhist temple containing treasured sculptures of arhats — the term for those who have attained enlightenment.

A single ¥60 ticket gains you entry to eight local sites of interest — as well as the temple there are a few museums displaying farming tools and detailing the lives of some of the town’s famous inhabitants, as well as some historic houses — all within walking distance of each other, and it makes for a nice little daytrip. Lùzhí is rather less touristy than Tóng Lǐ (同里), but then it is also less well maintained — although that didn’t seem to bother the good few local artists from setting up their easels along the canalsides.

One of the more interesting sights was housed within the Buddhist temple: three thousand-year-old ginkgo trees, which I have since learnt is a species of tree with no close living relatives — an example of a living fossil [think crocodiles, horseshoe crabs and coelacanths]. But I was most intrigued by this sign off to one side in the arhat room:

Anyone got any theories as to the meaning of “119”?

Just outside Dīng Shān (丁山) is a series of caves open to the public, the largest of which is Zhānggōng Dòng (张公洞), set in a small park with the usual offerings of ponds, rocks and winding pathways.

The caves would be a lovely place to spend some time exploring, admiring the stalactites and listening to the drip-drip-drip of water echoing around the chambers as you ascend — you actually climb a hill, but from the inside — except they’ve been ruined [in my opinion] by obtrusive, unsubtle lighting, bathing everything in either yellow strip lighting running along the celing, or the same bright green spotlights that they’ve lit the trees with in every city I’ve visited here. [The fact that everything was well-lit made a mockery of the torch I’d hired at the cave entrance.] Fake cement columns have been dotted here and there for no good reason, and stairs have either been added or simply carved out of the existing rock.

I might still have been able to enjoy the caves despite these things, if not for the fact that I continually felt the urge to keep moving due to the other visitors deciding it was more fun to ignore the natural sights and instead yell, “Hello!” at me at every given opportunity. Now I’m all for being friendly, but when the same group of people follow me around, shouting and asking to take my photo, I tend to get a bit annoyed, so I chose to sod foreign relations and curtly refuse their requests. My apologies if this has set the Anglo-Sino relationship back at all.

Walking back some of the way to Dīng Shān, I saw a lot of independent pottery works: each house seemed to have its own small-scale clay-pit in the back garden, where they’re been digging out the clay for years, bringing it back to their personal kiln and working and firing it into the various types of pots that lined the front of the house. Most of them also had hundreds of bonsai trees in the garden — I couldn’t tell if they were for sale or simply decorative — as well as small watermelon plantations [as in, small plantations, I’m sure the watermelons were on their way to being watermelon-sized], or whatever the correct term for an area growing grapes is [a grapery?].

Allow me to quote from The Rough Guide to China:

This obscure town has been producing pottery since the beginning of recorded history. Primitive unglazed pots have been found here which date back … some three thousand years.

Ceramic lampposts line the road into town, pottery shards crunch under your feet on the main street and the walls of buildings are embedded with broken tiles.

Now I may have an overly-romantic imagination, but I was expecting some kind of quaint traditional little town, much like Tóng Lǐ (同里), with family-run kilns and stalls politely offering their wares. Upon arriving, I was disappointed to find quite the opposite.

The main streets of Dīng Shān (丁山) are grotty, rundown and bustling with modern restaurants and clothes shops — the pottery shops there were not prominant by any means. Walking around for half an hour or so, I was drawing stares from all angles — I even got a classic mid-chew-pause-and-boggle-eyed-gawk — which made me feel like I was the first foreigner to ever set foot in this town. I certainly didn’t see any other lǎowài (老外), a slightly derogatory term for a foreigner the entire day I was in the area.

Despite my initial bad impressions — already subdued due to a hazy day preventing me from seeing any vistas on the two-hour journey to Dīng Shān — after having a rest on a bench in a central park area, I decided to try and find a hotel so I would be free to explore the surrounding area safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t need to rush to get the last bus home. It was at this moment that a middle-aged Chinese woman came up to me and said with a smile, “Hello young man!”

Her English was quite poor — about on par with my Chinese — but we managed a short chat and I explained I was about to find some cheap accommodation. She immediately offered to help, which I warily accepted, having heard a couple of stories from friends about overly-friendly locals attempting to rip off foreigners by taking them for vastly over-priced meals and expecting them to pay for everything. The woman called to her husband who was sitting on another bench nearby, and we started to walk back towards town. Soon the husband marched off on his own to enquire about prices in one of the larger hotels while I continued to chat with the woman. Her son is studying computing in a larger city nearby, and was delighted by my answer when she asked me what I had studied. She, if I understood correctly, is originally from Běijīng, but now works in a local factory — her husband is her boss’s personal driver.

The husband came back and placated some of my earlier suspicions when he approached shaking his head and telling me it was too expensive; there were cheaper options in town, and after a couple more minutes we had arrived at a significantly less salubrious-looking establishment — exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately we soon hit a snag. Despite the efforts of my new friends to convince the owners otherwise, it seemed I wasn’t allowed to check in to this small hotel. I couldn’t quite follow the conversation, but eventually a young boy [the owners’ son, I assumed] was summoned and explained in no uncertain terms [and in English] what the problem was: “The government forbids us from allowing foreigners to stay here. You must stay in the big hotel.”

I was a little surprised but tried to tell the owners that I understood it wasn’t their fault, and we went on our way. A second big hotel was found but this was even more expensive than the first, and I wasn’t going to fork out a chunk of money to stay in a place I wasn’t all that keen on, especially when I could catch a bus for a fraction of the price and be home in just a couple of hours. I thanked the couple for their efforts and explained my new plan: to just explore Dīng Shān for the day then go home, so I was about to head off to begin my trek, but they insisted I came back to their flat for some lunch. Since I hadn’t eaten yet that day, it was a hard offer to refuse, and I soon found myself sitting in their very basic home, being treated to some really quite delicious home cooking, washed down with some local green tea and a sherry-like drink from a dusty bottle the husband pulled out from under the bed — I was mildly embarrassed by the efforts they were obviously going to, but they were a very modest, hospitable couple and I didn’t feel like they were doing it for any reason other than kindness.

After eating my fill [as with all Chinese meals, the plates still looked as though they hadn’t been touched, such was the quantity of food on each one] I got some information about things to see in Dīng Shān and said my goodbyes — but not before a couple of citrus fruits were thrust into my hand for snacking later, and I thanked them once again, not least for making the first few hours of my trip to Dīng Shān much more enjoyable than they had initial looked like they were going to be.

[I’ll need to do a little more digging into this “no foreigners in cheap hotels” stuff — I’m hoping it’s only in certain areas, or at certain times of the year, because otherwise it’ll put a bit of a dent in my finances when I come to do my main stint travelling around the country next year.]

A day-trip to the mountain of Fèng Huáng Shān [(鳳凰山) — Phoenix Mountain] proved one of my most enjoyable experiences since I came out here. It’s a two-hour train ride from Běnxī and, at this time of year, is relatively tourist-free but also lush and green enough to make the climb well worthwhile.

Although it’s not particularly high [about 900 metres], it’s pretty steep going most of the way up, and in some places it’s quite a knee-trembling scramble to get to the next stage of the climb — and that’s with the aid of the rough-and-ready staircase that has been carved directly into the rockface.

Once one peak is reached, the other four or five can be reached relatively easily without descending and re-ascending too much, making for a quite lovely view of the surrounding countryside as you wander from peak to peak. I was really quite envious of the traders who get to sit around all day, selling bottles of water and snacks to thirsty visitors [although I’m sure getting to work every day with fresh supplies isn’t exactly easy].

One word of warning to the more rotund potential visitors wanting to reach the summit: start dieting today! In a shocking case of discrimination, there are parts of the climb that are simply not possible to progress past unless you occupy the leaner end of the scale. At one point, after squeezing though one particularly narrow passage way, I was half-expecting some sort of slim-person’s Utopia, full of frozen yoghurt, enormous aerobics classes and delicious Scarlett Johansson-shaped fruit hanging from every tree. Sadly, I was disappointed. Still, I got some nice photos along the way.