Fuddland

This category is a subcategory of Travelling in China.

Summer has hit Sūzhōu (苏州) with its full force, which means several days of sweltering heat [pushing 40°C] followed by torrential rainstorms which, although a welcome break from the sun, turn the streets into dirty rivers and bring sticky humidity when the temperatures rise again the following day. It’s a far cry from the refreshing change of the final week of my holiday a few months back, which I spent on the southernmost shores of the southernmost part of China, the provincial island of Hǎinán (海南).

I admit I was fairly dubious about visiting a beach resort out here, and while it wasn’t quite up to the standards I’ve seen while visiting Nantucket or Cancun, the water was clean enough, and the beaches were kept rubbish-free despite the generally carefree Chinese attitude to littering. [Some days it’s all I can do to pick up the sweet wrapper that the kids in front of me have just thrown on the ground and thrust it back into their hands, but then a street-cleaner usually sweeps it away before I have a chance to move. This obviously works for them, but for someone with a deep-ingrained aversion to dropping litter, the lack of convenient bins every few hundred metres means I sometimes walk for miles with a sticky ice-cream wrapper flapping about in my hand.]

All along the south-east shores of the town of Sānyà (三亚) are lavish hotels and resorts with private beaches, but being a man on a budget I stayed in the Dàdōnghǎi (大东海) area, home to two youth hostels, the better of which I found to be the Blue Sky International Youth Hostel. It was right around the corner from a very nice stretch of beach, with plenty of restaurants overlooking the sea and lots of street vendors peddling deliciously fresh fruit — I’ve never tasted better mangos.

The area is apparently astoundingly popular with Russian holidaymakers — so much so that most of the shops and roadsigns are displayed in both Chinese and Russian, although a Ukrainian woman that I met at the hostel told me that the Russian was mostly as amusingly wrong as much of the Chinglish that can be seen all over the country.

Walk a few hundred yards away from this vibrant, luxurious district and you find several huge hotels that have gone out of business. It was quite eerie walking around these deserted places, which looked as though everyone had simply walked out one day and never come back: through the padlocked glass doors, I could see plants that had wilted and died in the lobby, newspapers on the coffee tables; the adjacent restaurants still had their tables and chairs set out. [I half-expected the Chinese name of the hotel to translate as Mary Celeste.] A large smelly skip was thankfully downwind from the currently-populated areas.

Between these two areas were small groups of local fisherman, whole families catching crabs and molluscs, and — to be expected — more than a few wedding photo sessions taking advantage of the scenic backdrops. Despite not being much of a beach person, I did enjoy my week or so walking with the soft sand between my toes, my breakfasts of coconut jam on toast, and the surreal experience of Chinese taxi drivers and waiters trying to speak to me in Russian.

One of the must-dos in the province of Guǎngxī (广西) is a leisurely cruise down the Lí River (漓江) from Guìlín (桂林) to Yángshuò (阳朔), taking in 83 kilometres worth of the renowned karst scenery. The weather was not totally on our side, presenting us with a rather overcast day, but it was still a lovely way to spend five-or-so hours.

A coach picked us up from our hostel and stopped off at a couple of other nearby hotels to collect the other members of this particular scheduled cruise. Once we were all aboard and on our way to the pier, we were given a brief history of the region by the tour guide, but the most entertaining thing he said was when, since lunch on the boat was part of package, he enquired if there were any vegetarians on board. Several people raised there hands, only to be told:

Okay, can you tell me who you are again when it’s time for lunch? All foreigners look the same to me.

[Aside: this appears to be genuinely true and not an intentionally ironic twist on the racist stereotypes displayed in many a terrible British sitcom from the 1970s; several other Chinese people have told me they have a hard time distinguishing many Western people from each other. Mary explained to me that this is because although people of East Asian descent generally all have straight, black hair and brown eyes, they have a much wider variation in their facial features — the width and positioning of their eyes, the length of their noses, and so on — than Caucasians. So whilst people of European descent are conditioned to use the visual clues of hair and eye colours when recognising others, if those aspects are subconsciously disregarded, there’s a lot less to distinguish one Caucasian from another.]

The journey took us past some imaginatively- and not-so-imaginatively-named rock formations such as Yearning for Husband Rock, the Painted Hill of Nine Horses, and Writing Brush Peak, and there was a sublime moment of comic timing when, just as we were tucking into our lunch below deck, our guide informed us that we were about to glide past the most famous of all the Lí River vistas — the one that appears on the back of the ¥20 note.

The cruise ends at the town of Yángshuò, which these days is entirely given over to tourism: literally every place of business is either a travel agent, restaurant, cafe, bar, hotel, souvenir shop or some such establishment. There were more eating places specialising in Western food than Chinese cuisine, and at night the main streets are garishly lit with ill-thought-out neon, waging war on your eyes while your ears are similarly assaulted by the clash of dance music pumping out of every bar. That’s not to say these places are all dreadful — the Karst Cafe and Drifters Cafe both had good food and wine, and we sampled the Rosewood Cafe’s ice cream menu a couple too many times. My two-years-in-China anniversary on February the 17th was celebrated with Shepherd’s Pie, apple crumble, and a nice bottle of French red — not a particularly Chinese meal but delicious nonetheless. But the real reason to spend any time at all in Yángshuò is to visit the surrounding countryside.

I think most people hire bicycles, but we opted for what we thought would be the easier option of an electric scooter. [For the benefit of any parents who might be reading, let’s all pretend that, yes, of course helmets were provided.] We asked what the best direction to head was, jumped on, and away we went.

Now excuse me while I gush: whizzing along the roads through the undulating countryside — karst after karst towering over small plots of farmland; passing through small villages and townships — with Mary riding pillion, her hands tucked into my coat pockets for warmth, her face pressed against my back as she too admired the scenery, is simply one of my happiest memories of the past thirty-one years. Even though the battery ran out of juice earlier than we estimated because we kept going further and further out and, despite stopping for a late lunch at a roadside noodle place and borrowing their electricity to charge it up for an hour, we ended up having to push the scooter for about 10 kilometres back to Yángshuò, in the dark and the rain, and I was a cranky old so-and-so for most of this time, thinking about that day gives me a goofy little smile that I have no intention of hiding.

Tearing ourselves away from the beauty and tranquility of Duōyīshù (多依树) and the surrounding countryside of Yuányáng (元阳) was hard, but we also wanted to go and see the famous scenery of the Lí River (漓江) in Guǎngxī (广西), which meant we had to first get back to Kūnmíng (昆明) in order to catch a train to Guìlín (桂林).

The bus that we had originally caught heading south from Kūnmíng to Xīnjiēzhèn (新街镇) in Yuányáng left in the mid-morning and took about eight hours. So, when boarding the return bus at half past four in the afternoon, we were figuring on being back in Kūnmíng somewhere between midnight and one o’clock in the morning — not ideal, but not too bad.

But when the bus turned out to be of the sleeper variety — comprising no seats but two rows of bunk-beds along either side of the aisle — we started to suspect that we were in for a longer ride than we were banking on. Neither of us had been on a sleeper bus before, and the experience was a lot less comfortable than the comparatively-luxurious sleeper train carriages. The duvet covers provided were a hotch-potch of children’s designs [we had Pokemon], all of dubious levels of cleanliness. Smoking was allowed throughout, and the driver’s reckless confidence at handling the mountain bends had Mary cutting off the blood-flow to my hand for most of the evening.

In order to warrant the use of a sleeper bus, it seems that the driver had been instructed to stretch out the journey as much as possible, so we found ourselves making many more stops than on the way down, and of course given that any and all activities in China must stop dead at mealtimes, there was an extended break beside an outdoor restaurant a few hours after we first set off. [Having spent so much time getting comfortable in our twin top bunk, we opted to stay aboard and chow down on the snacks we had brought with us.]

It was now well past sunset and there were so many more stops for toilet breaks and the like that eventually we just stopped trying to ascertain where we were and, after some reassuring of Mary that I would do my level best to prevent the driver from careening off the mountainside, we drifted off to a restless sleep.

At some point I half-woke up, enough to notice that we had yet again stopped for some reason, and caught a glimpse of another bus parked immediately in front of us. I almost wondered what was going on, but it was still pitch dark and I instead immediately fell back to sleep.

Some time later, Mary and I both woke up to find it was daylight, but we still weren’t moving and, moreover, I saw that the same bus was still parked in front of us. We then noticed that there were yet more buses parked all around us. We were, we had to deduce, in a bus station. Kūnmíng Station, to be precise, and had been there since before whenever it was that I had woken up.

It was gone nine o’clock on the morning. Sitting at the front of the bus, chatting around a charcoal fire in a metal bucket, were the driver and the bus attendant. The rest of the bus was completely empty, and all the beds had been made up. We had arrived in Kūnmíng in the middle of the night, but rather than wake up the dozing foreigners, they just let the rest of the passengers disembark around us and then allowed us sleep for about five more hours, which meant that we had missed the possibility of catching a morning train on to Guìlín. I still can’t decide if their hearts were in the right place or they simply didn’t care whether we were still fast asleep when the bus started making its way all the way back to Yuányáng.

One of the villages in county of Yuányáng (元阳) was either selected or has the savvy [and I suspect it was the former] to charge tourists to wander its streets. Beside a particularly beautiful expanse of terraced rice paddies about halfway between Xīnjiēzhèn (新街镇) and Duōyīshù (多依树) lies a small market where you can haggle over silver trinkets and hand-finished throws, and a large entrance gate to the village of Qìngkǒu (箐口).

In a masterful sales move, this entrance gate leads to a path that winds fairly steeply for fifteen minutes or so down into the valley below, and it is at the end of this path that you pay for your entrance ticket to the village: anyone who didn’t know about the tariff would surely take one look at the way they’ve just come and decide they might as well pay to explore the village before they huffed-and-puffed their way back up to the main road.

On their part, the citizens of Qìngkǒu have installed a small museum of local culture, and restored and maintained their homes and buildings in their traditional designs with thatched roofs, although there are one too many brazenly-displayed gift-shops, and they couldn’t quite conceal their use of modern technologies such as satellite dishes by using them to dry their traditional clothing. But it was nice to spend a couple of hours exploring the designated attractions such as the old mill house, as well as going off the beaten path. At one point Mary acquired a new potential suitor in the form of a little boy who followed us for a while crying, “Miss! Miss! You’re beautiful, I love you,” until he got to his house, at which point he stuck out his tongue and ran inside.

Back up at the main road, waiting for the minibus to ferry us back to Duōyīshù, we watched a steady stream of elderly women walk past us carrying large baskets of damp sand on their backs, depositing them further up the road for a group of men to use in the building of a new wall, occasionally stopping for a rest and a chat on the way back.

While we waited for the minibus [which actually took almost two hours to turn up], Mary was subjected a couple of instances of drive-by photography from Chinese tourists deciding that she was part of the scenery, and we were both entertained by a tiny young girl — she couldn’t have been more than four- or five-years-old — who was in charge of collecting the fee for using the public toilets. While I was busy looking the other way for an alternative means to get us back to our guesthouse, Mary saw this little girl, dressed in beautifully woven clothes and a wearing a hat decorated with silver, allow a tourist to pose with his arms around her, before she marched up to the photographer and demanded a payment of one yuan for her troubles. Qìngkǒu: village on the take.

Having got delayed for longer than we wanted to be in Kūnmíng (昆明) due to the whole of China shutting down to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Mary and I were itching to get away from all aspects of city life and enjoy a bit of peace and quiet. Nine hours by bus later, we arrived in the mountainous county of Yuányáng (元阳), famed for its sprawling hillsides of terraced rice paddies.

The first township we settled in was Xīnjiēzhèn (新街镇), our bus winding its way up some precarious mountain hairpins and getting there in the late afternoon to find it all a bit foggy. The hotel we checked into was supposed to overlook a spectacular expanse of countryside, but all we could see from the balcony was the blanket of cold, grey cloud that pervaded the interiors of the buildings as well as the town streets.

After a cold and damp night’s sleep, we woke the next morning to find the weather exactly the same as yesterday’s, so rather than hang about in the hope that the cloud would soon burn off or blow away, we elected to try and move on to one of the smaller villages further up the mountain. I’d read about one called Duōyīshù (多依树) that had a well-recommended place to stay called the Sunlight Guesthouse, run by an elderly local couple. This turned out to be one of the best decisions we made on the entire trip, and possibly of all time.

We had escaped from the miserable weather below and from the rooftop of the guesthouse could look down the valley at the paddies stepping down the hillsides. For three idyllic days we slept late — “We’ll definitely get up for the sunrise tomorrow!” We sat in the courtyard in rocking chairs, read, drank tea and looked at the view. We walked to and through some of the other surrounding villages, past busloads of Chinese tourists armed with foot-long camera lenses and, for some reason, dressed from head to foot in all-weather gear like they were going on an Arctic expedition instead of being ferried up and down the mountain on a heated coach; down through tea plantations to teeter along the edges of the paddies and back up to the road; past oxen coming down from the fields and enormously fat boars suckling their boarlets; children playing in the stream running though their village; women in traditional dress buying live chickens from the market; men in their standard modern-day clothing of loose-fitting slacks and a dark-coloured suit jacket chewing on and spitting out chunks of sugar cane. We caught the minibus back to Duōyīshù when we got tired of walking, and wondered why so many of the women were getting physically travel sick. In the evenings we ate good, home-cooked meals together with the other guests around the kitchen table. Our decision to leave was based entirely on time-constraints and having other places we wanted to visit. If we had had more time or nothing else we wanted to do, I think we could have happily spent the entire trip staying at the Sunlight Guesthouse.

For the record, here are the places I visited during my recent trip to the west of China:

• Yǜnnán (云南)
  • The city of Kūnmíng (昆明)
  • The county of Yuányáng (元阳)
    • The town of Xīnjiēzhèn (新街镇)
    • The village of Duōyīshù (多依树)
    • The village of Qìngkǒu (箐口)
  • Shílín ( 石林) — the Stone Forest National Park
  • Xī Shān (西山) — the Western Hills
• Guǎngxī (广西)
  • The city of Guìlín (桂林)
  • The Lí River (漓江)
  • The town of Yángshuò (阳朔)
• Hǎinán (海南)
  • Hǎinán Island (海南岛)
    • The city of Hǎikǒu (海口)
    • The Dàdōnghǎi (大东海) area of the city of Sānyà (三亚)

I also dipped my toe into the province of Guǎngdōng (广东) in order to catch a bus to the ferry port on my way to Hǎinán Island. And, okay, yes, I misled you in the title of this entry because one of the above isn’t really a province — Guǎngxī is technically one of the five so-called autonomous regions of China, like Tibet and Inner Mongolia, which means it has more legislative rights than a province, I think mostly due to having a higher population of a particular minority ethnic group.

I’ll be sharing photos and stories with you all over the next few weeks, but right now I’m hitting the books in swot-like preparation for the beginning of my Mandarin Chinese course which starts at 8.30 tomorrow morning at the local university. I’m actually looking forward to being back in the classroom after an extended break from learning!