Fuddland

This category is a subcategory of Travelling in China.

Subtitle: The Evil Scary Monkeys of Lu Shan

Look at this pathetic little fella:

Feel sorry for him, don’t you? You’d like to coddle and cuddle and love him for ever and ever, wouldn’t you? He’s just hungry and wants a little bit of food, that’s all, right?

Wrong. He wants all of your food, he wants it now, and he isn’t going to take no for an answer.

One part of the forests of Lu Shan is home to a group of some kind of monkey that have, over the years and generations, come to expect—nay, demand—tasty snacks from the visitors that dare to wander through their domain. So it would be quite unwise to, say, take out a half-eaten packet of biscuits from your coat pocket right in front of two of these agile little chaps and attempt to stow it away in your bag, because [as the woman who did this found] they’ll come bounding towards you with their bony fingers and bared teeth, with every intention of relieving you of your biscuity treats. Of course this was not all the woman’s fault; the blame mostly lies with the countless people who have come before and [directly, or indirectly through thoughtless littering] given these monkeys an insatiable sweet-tooth.

Foolishly, we thought we were safe sitting some way from where we first encountered the monkeys, and sat down on a bench at the Dragon Head Precipice to snack on some bread rolls, but before we knew what was happening, a lone and larger-than-the-others scavenger crept up on us. Reverting to our base states, Mary yelped and threw her roll over the precipice while I grabbed my camera tripod and gave the ground a thump in an effort to scare the mangy monkey away. But he was not deterred and made off with our bag of rolls—then sat brazenly nearby and got to work ripping open the plastic and chowing down.

Filthy fish to fry

Walking back up to the town, we came across a formerly-large and now very muddy lake that seemed to have had the plug taken out, with a fair number of fishermen dotted around its banks.

On the pavement above were people selling their freshly-caught fish, which were laid out on the ground—no tables, no plastic sheets, not even a newspaper betwixt fin and filth. As I took a quick photo, the gentleman asked me to buy one, to which I replied that I didn’t want to buy, I just wanted to take a picture; in Chinese, this forms a pleasant little rhyming couplet which caused some snickering from the people standing nearby:

Man

买买买！

Mǎi mǎi mǎi!

Me

我不要买，我只要拍！

Wǒ bù yào mǎi, wǒ zhǐ yào pāi!

There are historic sites aplenty to be seen in Lu Shan and, unlike many of China’s mountainous holiday destinations, they do not all comprise seemingly identical Buddhist temples with a huge bucket of incense burning outside. They do, however, have typically grandiose names such as Dragon Head Precipice, Lion Mouth Rock, and the Grand [and Small] Heavenly Lake, all within easy walking distance of each other.

Immortal Cave

And of course, if you love nothing better than visiting Buddhist temples with a huge bucket of incense burning outside, fear not for Lu Shan caters for you too. The Immortal Cave offers an interesting twist on this, being set in a small cave where the leader of the Eight Immortals of Chinese mythology is said to have hung out, probably being all mystical and stuff.

Nuona Pagoda

Nowhere of interest is complete without a pagoda or seventeen, but at least this one is of a quite different style from the usual square, tiered variety—a sign said it was based on “Indian style” but it is apparently in honour of the tulku [current incarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist lama] of the now-defunct region of Tibet known as Xikang.

Lu Shan cinema

One of the less-historic claims-to-fame of the area is the cinema that has shown the same one film [the tautologically-translated “Romance on Lu Shan Mountain”] every day since it premiered here in 1980, making it the Guinness World Record holder for “Longest First-Run of a Film in One Cinema”. We hung around outside for a while just on the off-chance that one of the staff would come tearing out of the building screaming, “I can’t take it anymore! Every … day, the same … film, over … and over! Raaarrrggghghhhghggghhhhhhhgggurgle…” but we must have missed them.

For a different sort of Christmas we headed out of town for a few days of peace and quiet in the pine forest-covered rocky mountains of Lu Shan. This area was created for and by the wealthy foreigners who mostly lived in Shanghai from the 1800s until the establishment of the PRC, as a holiday-villa settlement in which to escape the cloying humidity of the city. There are still many fairly-well-maintained villas remaining, the most significant of which belonged to Chiang Kai-Shek.

Glories of the past

It subsequently became a regular meeting-place of the CCCPC, and Mao’s former residence has been converted into a combination of a museum of local geology [a few rooms with some rather uninspiring collections of rocks and dirt, together with poorly-translated signs and comically-naff paintings of scenes from the bygone millennia] and a shrine to its previous occupant, complete the preserved bedroom in which everything on display was, it proudly claimed, “personally used” by the man himself.

This claim was not so proudly advertised—although one can’t help but infer it—at the villa of Chiang Kai-Shek, at which Mao was a guest once or twice and, for some reason, includes the bathroom as one of the rooms on display. Perhaps it was to highlight the multi-cultural aspects of its past, containing as it did both a squat- and Western-style toilet as well as a bidet.

There was also an intricately-carved ivory tusk that must have been a metre in length—and however much we may tut-tut over its origins, it was fascinating to see the level of detail they could carve out without destroying it.

Off-peak peaks

Despite it being close to zero Celcius at this time of year, we deliberately chose an off-peak season simply so that we didn’t have to contend with hoards and hoards of tourists [like ourselves, for example]—make no mistake, Lu Shan is one of the most popular destinations in this part of the country and on national holidays is teeming with visitors, foreign and [overwhelmingly] domestic. Our plan worked and we wandered through the peaks in relative solitude, apart from the odd tour group and one particularly boisterous group of male students.

There are well-defined pathways and staircases all over the mountains themselves, which lead you quite naturally to each and every one of the designated vantage-points and places of interest—or rather, to those that weren’t frustratingly closed for the winter. [The frustration lay in the fact that we had to reach the entrance to the place before we found out it was closed. This included one occasion when we purchased one-way tickets for the cable car in the belief that at the other end was a pathway through the mountains that eventually lead back to the town. It was only at the other end that the staff told us it was closed. What did the ones at the top think we were going to do, tightrope-walk back? In fairness, once we protested that they should have really been told at the top, they gave us a discount on the return ticket.]

As if it wasn’t quite clear enough that there is something worth stopping and having a look at, we found most places had been set up with a now-badly-weathered wooden platform from which one can recreate a photo of Mao at the same spot. Previous visitors’ photos were proudly displayed, which somehow all managed to include one balding Chinese man with a paunch doing his best to adopt the pose of his past leader. These fellas must be a hoot at every fancy-dress party. “Oh, I see you’ve come as Chairman Mao … again…”