Fuddland

Holidays and trips [originating in the UK].

This category also has the following subcategories [number of entries in brackets]:

• Argentina [4]

One of the most fascinating things about the Terracotta Army is that, in their Chinese name Bing Ma Yong, according to my dictionary the last character 俑 translates as “earthen figures buried with the dead in ancient times”—isn’t it lucky they came up with that one, just in case they should ever need it?

Getting to the site, about an hour’s drive from Xi’an, is very simple even if you don’t want to go on an organised tour [which I didn’t, both to save money and to have no time constraints]—you catch the green 306 bus from the car park on the east side of the train station and get off at the very last stop. The ten-minute walk up to the main site is disconcerting; it feels as though you’re walking through a modern housing development [and not a very populated one, most of the buildings appear to be empty], with pointless Chinese rock music blaring out of speakers [disguised as fake rocks] and hordes of peddlers repeatedly offering you miniature warriors until you punch them on the nose to make them go away. [Believe me, saying, “No thank you!” has no effect whatsoever.]

Once you’re through the museum gates life is a little more peaceful, although for some reason those souvenir sellers are also allowed in to harass the visitors as they wander around. I think most people head straight for Pit 1, the main hangar housing the largest restored collection of figures, but we veered off to the right and went for Pits 2 and 3 first, saving the “best” ‘til last. These two smaller pits contain many broken, partially-uncovered figures, horses and chariots, and work is still going on to unearth the remaining artifacts, the majority of which are still completely buried. It was nice to be able to see the statues without obstructive glass or netting, but how long this will be the case I’m not sure, seeing as there was a half-drunk bottle of Pepsi and a tourist map accidentally [I hope!] dropped into Pit 3.

The main pit is enormous, and it was a relief to actually be impressed by the scale of things—even moreso when you consider that, having recovered around 1,000 statues, there are supposed to be another 7,000 or so to go. Towards the back of the hangar—we entered through the exit, continuing our maverick, shoot-from-the-hip approach—is a reconstruction area, where you can see dozens of partially-restored figures and a big pile of broken pottery, together with a couple of computers and other gadgets which help with the jigsaw puzzle. The remaining two-thirds of the building is dedicated to the main show, and after the relatively dim previous pits, it was a surprise to see so much sunlight allowed to flood the room. The more you look, the more you come to realise that it really was quite an achievement for the people of the time. It’s hard to imagine even today people working with such patience and dedication to produce this volume of individually-crafted figures [and let’s emphasise this: each and every figure has a different face!].

Not everyone was so in awe of the millennia-old sight before their eyes: as I stood overlooking the main site, I turned and realised that the Chinese man next to me was not, in fact, taking photos of his cultural heritage, but decided that it was much more important to snap pictures of the foreigner. I quickly ducked out of view and gave him a look that said, “Oi, ninny, no!”, although this might not have translated very well as he immediately tried to take a photo of my Australian friend instead.

[Aside: back in Suzhou, I was walking down the street the other day, a few feet behind a Western man with his two young children when suddenly two Chinese men pulled up on their bicycles. One produced a camera and motioned [repeatedly saying, “Very cute, very cute!”] for the dad to pick up his sons and pose with them for a photo. Somewhat dazed by the speed at which it was all happening, the dad complied. I have no idea what they wanted these photos for. It was all a little creepy.]

Those of us of a certain age and nationality will fondly remember the classic Japanese kung-fu television treat that was Monkey Magic—the story of a Buddhist monk, Tripitaka, and his three mystical protectors, Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy, on a quest from China to India and back, seeking sacred Buddhist texts and battling all manner of demons in a variety of camp costumes.

The story is based on an ancient Chinese legend, Journey to the West, in which the monk is called Xuan Zang, which begins and ends in what is modern-day Xi’an. On his return to the temple of Daci’en Si, Xuan Zang requested the construction of the stone pagoda Dayan Ta within its walls to house and protect the precious scripts as he translated them into 1,355 volumes [as well as negotiating the rights to the television series, sticker albums, action figures and so on].

The Temple is currently undergoing a face-lift and, sadly, looks as though is was all constructed in the last twenty minutes instead of portraying its 1,500-year-long history, although the pagoda itself has largely been left alone and looks sufficiently weather-beaten for you to believe the legends surrounding it, and even today, still emits enough mystical energy for a few moments of levitation…

The Muslim Quarter, in the north-west of downtown Xi’an, is the place to go if you want to buy some nice-looking souvenirs, antiques and trinkets—from local crafts such as intricately-cut patterns in paper and jewellery, to novelty items such as Mao Zedong watches and playing cards. All the haggling can make you hungry—luckily there are plenty of restaurants and street vendors selling cheap and delicious food on the supposedly-pedestrianised road perpendicular to the shopping street. New dishes for me included yangrou paomo and hu la tang, as well as the Xi’an speciality, candied dried fruit [beware the mixed bags: they also contain thick slices of ginger, which may be mistaken for pineapple at first glance and lead to nasty taste-bud-related surprises when you bite a chunk out of it].

Tucked away Tardis-like off the narrow winding market street is Daqingzhen Si—the Great Mosque—the largest mosque in China, dating back to 742. I was slightly confused by its backwards [I thought] layout until it was pointed out that China is east of Mecca, so they pray to the west in this part of the world. Still in use today, it’s surprisingly peaceful considering its proximity to the bustle of the eateries and stalls, and resolutely Chinese in its design: I really was expecting to see a golden-domed building like the London Central Mosque that I’ve seen many times [and I’m quite sure once visited on a school trip, although that was possibly a different mosque], and was a little disappointed to be presented with a traditionally-Chinese structure instead.

The two large museums in Xi’an that I visited—Beilin Bowuguan and Shanxi Lishi Bowuguan—both contained an impressive display of the region’s renowned history. I found the former more interesting simply because I saw stone tablets detailing conversations with Confucius, the first record of Christianity in China, and the first Chinese dictionary [so it claimed], all displayed with uncharacteristic subduedity. [I think I’ve just made up the word for the quality of being subdued.]

The History Museum houses a nicely-chronological collection of locally-found pottery and metalwork, and it was nice to really see the skills of the craftspeople becoming more and more refined over the hundreds-of-years, although perhaps the most striking thing for me was realising that we, us human type people, seem to have an innate sense of beauty such that the designs on pottery dating back thousands of years are still pleasing to the modern-day eye; we all still like a nice, simple geometric pattern on our breakfast bowls don’t we?

Xi’an and the surrounding area is positively brimming over with sites of historical importance, and it’s well worth spending a good few days visiting the city of you want to be sure to make the most of the places of interest on offer.

The downtown area is enclosed by the imposingly-tall city walls, first built in 1370 then rebuilt to last in 1568; eighteen metres thick at the base and not much narrower at the top, you can certainly imagine they formed a bit of a barrier to anyone contemplating a city invasion. You can walk along the wall by ascending at any of the four city gates, and it’s a great way to get a feel for the city below, as well as admire the architecture of the gatehouses and [very recently restored] watchtowers. I started at the South Gate and was intending to walk only as far as the East Gate, but I found the views so interesting, and the stroll so peaceful with hardly anyone else around, that I ended up circumnavigating the whole downtown area along the wall—a 12 kilometre walk that took me about three hours, with plenty of stopping for photos and gazing down at the people and buildings below. [For a high-speed version of the same route, you can hire bikes and tandems for an unusual limit of 100 or 200 minutes (an attempt to decimalise time?)].

The east end of the city was particularly interesting, being noticeably more rundown than the rest of the downtown area and consisting mostly of tightly-packed low blocks of flats along narrow streets, each one with small, almost spontaneous-looking fruit and vegetable markets. Dust and grime pervades Xi’an, an omnipresent cloud that varies in intensity day-by-day and coats the buildings and streets throughout the city in a layer of filth despite efforts to keep the dust down by spraying the roads with water each morning, but the east end of town seemed to be losing the battle faster than elsewhere.

One of the lesser-known gems in Chengdu is Wang’s Tiny Museum of Mao Memorabilia. The name says it all: down a side street that I had to ask three people how to find despite having the address and a map, it’s a small, dark, cluttered room, brimming over with posters and photographs, badges and plaques, statues and busts, books and hats, and all manner of other representations of Mao Zedong, amassed over the last fifty-six years by one man: the eponymous Mr Wang.

Read the rest of “Wang’s Tiny Museum of Mao Memorabilia”…

Right next door to the hostel I was staying at in Chengdu was the Buddhist temple of Wenshu Yuan; it is a Chan temple, Chan being the Chinese for what is more popularly known as Zen Buddhism. Although initial visual impressions resemble any of the numerous restored dynastic palaces you might find in China, one key difference here [aside from being a temple not a palace of course] is that the temple is still in use, so mingling with tourists like myself are Buddhists monks and Buddhist Buddhists, paying their respects to the many statues housed within the temple walls, lighting incense, or chanting in procession.

Read the rest of “Wenshu Yuan”…

Foolishly, I’d mentioned earlier to one of the other passengers on the bus how good the driver was: up in the mountains of Jiuzhaigou park the winding roads were still covered in snow, yet he managed to keep a steady pace without skidding at all. I was feeling quite safe as we headed back down the [clear] mountain highway, despite it having a large number of hairpin bends and the driver deciding that his tea was almost ready and he needed to step on the gas—until he chose to overtake a wide lorry on one of the bendier bends. Overtaking means pulling out into the cliff-side lane. Wide lorry. Cliff-side lane. Bend in the road. Brown-trousers time, to say the least.

The lorry was as far over to the right as it could manage without veering into the drainage ditch, but it wasn’t quite far enough, and—luckily—our driver didn’t fancy careering over the edge of the cliff, so instead the side of our bus scraped along the lorry, ripping off its wing mirror and front bumper.

When vehicles collide in China—and they everso-frequently do—even with relatively minor damage, they simply stop dead in their tracks. None of this polite pulling over to the side of the road to allow other vehicles to pass by [with an obligatory rubber-necking, of course]—the vehicles involved won’t budge until the shouty-shouty is over with and all the blame has been assigned [and, especially if somebody is a driver by trade and doesn’t want to lose his job, an appropriate wad of cash has been handed over to keep schtum].

Thus, we sat waiting in the bus, blocking oncoming traffic, whilst our driver, the lorry driver and several thousand other drivers from the other vehicles, inspected the damage to the lorry [blocking the other lane]. Whilst the lorry driver was ranting and, seemingly, saying the same things over and over [“I couldn’t pull over any further! Look at my mirror! Look at my bumper! I was as far over as I could go! My mirror! My bumper!” etc.], our own driver had adopted the other stance that seems to be popular amongst Chinese drivers: the impassive-faced, silent, I-know-it-was-my-fault-but-I’m-saying-nothing look.

[I’ve seen a moped crash into the back of another stopped at traffic lights, and the driver at fault simply stared at his victim without even a single word of apology, as if to say, “Look, it was bound to happen sooner or later.” Likewise, the crashee looked back and intimated, “Actually this happens all the time, I’m used to it. Still quite annoying though.”]

Eventually some rope was found, the bumper was secured, our driver doled out a couple of hundred yuan, and we were on our way, but not before the coolest man I have even seen crept through the gap between our bus and the lorry on his motorbike-cum-trailer, clearly not caring one jot about the drama he was passing by—or perhaps he knew his companion would fill him in later.

Those enormous gloves attached to the handlebars are fantastic. I want some, even if I don’t have actually a bike to put them on.

Aside from the dominant Han Chinese nationality, there are 55 other officially-recognised minorities in modern China; the province of Sichuan is home to four of them, and the village of Taoping has been occupied by the Qiangzu people for around two thousand years.

The houses are all hand-built from rock, wood and mud, with running water provided by diverted streams coming down from the mountains. At least one of the still-habitable homes is claimed to have been built a thousand years ago, and they all display a large lump of quartz on their flat roofs—if I understood correctly, this is to ward of evil spirits, although I could be wrong and pehaps it’s because everyone used the same architect with a penchant for lump-of-quartz-topped roofs.

Still a largely agricultural region, the townspeople—or, thinking about, probably the local government—are slowly wising-up to the fact that this historic town could be a hot tourist attraction, but when I visited it was still relatively unspoilt, leaving me free to wander the streets and get a good feel for life in this small, peaceful, unpolluted village, where I didn’t feel harrassed or hurried despite being the one and only remotely foreign face there at the time.

[More photos tagged with Taoping form part of my Chengdu and Sichuan photoset.]

In typical in-at-the-deep-end style, I’ve been rather busy for my first couple of weeks with my new language centre, teaching children every morning and afternoon, and adults a couple of evenings a week—but thankfully it all comes to a dead stop on Thursday, when I get a lovely two-week holiday over Chinese New Year.

I’ll resume my Tales from Sichuan series once I’m on my break, but I have found time to upload three of my favourite photos from the trip, all taken at various stops en route from Jiuzhaigou back to Chengdu. I especially like them because I almost never take photos of people—I feel incredibly self-conscious and, also, not owning a super-duper telephoto lens, it’s hard for me to take candid snaps of people acting naturally, which is what I’m really after most of the time. Having said that, I do love the cabbie’s cheeky eyes and standard Chinese pose as he leans out of his Songzhou bicycle taxi.

The woman attending the toilet at a mountain-road rest-stop was momentarily distracted by something out of shot and only turned her head in my direction at the very moment my finger pressed the shutter. I’m not sure what animals have been skinned and stretched out on the frame behind her—they looked like some sort of hyena, but I forget what someone told me the Chinese name was, so I can’t look it up for a translation. The little girl was simply oblivious to anything that wasn’t her notepad, and lay there singing to herself as she doodled in the sun.

In the mountains of northern Sichuan is the 720 square kilometre reserve of Jiuzhaigou. The name means “Valley of the Nine Villages”, after the nine high-fenced Tibetan settlements that originally populated the area. The 1000-or-so permanent residents of the villages within the park’s perimeter are forbidden from agricultural activities, and must rely on subsidies and tourism to survive.

Designated a national park in 1982—after ten years of heavy logging the government realised the value of the area’s natural beauty and banned further destruction of the environment—several of the villages are maintained to “tourist-friendly” levels of attractiveness and traditionally-dressed employees [not all of Tibetan nationality] occupy them during the park’s opening hours, showing people around the various rooms, all of which seem to magically lead to the gift shop.

Political and sociological ramifications of the region’s government-controlled status notwithstanding, the park houses some undeniably beautiful natural sights—even in the sub-freezing temperatures and baren foliage of mid-January, the landscape was impressive, and I was treated to frozen waterfalls and crystal-clear lakes of stunning cyan colours, refusing to freeze due to their mineral content.

A collection of my photos can be viewed via those of my Flickr images tagged with Jiuzhaigou [the slideshow option displays them at their best, against a black background], or alternatively as part of the still-growing Chengdu and Sichuan photoset.

[Before anyone asks: yes, there’s been a certain—small—degree of photo-editing, but I promise that the water really was that colour. Anyone who doubts me can ask to see the originals!]

I made a few videos at the Panda Breeding Research Centre in Chengdu, the first of which shows two three-year-old giant pandas play-fighting in the cold morning air.

Read the rest of “Panda-ing”…

After spending a few days there at either end of my trip, I really warmed to Chengdu. The guidebooks and information I had read about the city all mentioned the laid-back approach that its citizens have to life, and it was a joy to see.

Wandering the streets and central park of the city, no matter what time of day—morning, afternoon, evening—everywhere I saw people, of all ages, hanging out at teahouses or on benches [in some cases, they had brought their own seats], chatting, playing cards or dominoes, dancing, singing, to such an extent that I have to wonder: does anyone in Chengdu actually have a job?

Read the rest of “Chengdu”…

My flight home this morning was cancelled due to poor visibility. This is a regular problem at Knock Airport (or Connaught Airport as I think it’s officially known?). Now I’m no expert, but surely building the airport on one of the highest hills in the region was a bit of a mistake? Is it as numbingly-simple as: the higher one is, the closer to the clouds, and thus you might expect them to roll over the airport a lot more often than if it was on lower-lying ground?

So I’m now awaiting an afternoon flight to Stansted rather than the more convenient Luton destination of this morning’s flight, and crossing everything that the fog lifts in time.

The train manager on my journey up to Leicester yesterday raised a few smiles with his greeting as we set off from St. Pancras:

Good morning, I’d like to welcome you all onto the 10:55 fast service to Nottingham, calling at Leicester and Nottingham only. Coach A has been designated a Quiet Coach: use of mobile phones in this carriage will automatically trigger the ejector seats. Also please note this is a non-smoking train; all toilets have been fitted with smoke alarms and high-pressure water jets.

One of the [many] highlights of my holiday was the afternoon we spent visiting a series of stunning rock formations just outside Cafayate.

Los Castillos—The Castles.

[View the entire collection of rock formation photos in the Flickr set.]

Day four

As had become expected by now, leaving Roberto’s home was not a simple matter of waking up shortly before our scheduled leaving time, packing up and jumping on the horses—for one thing, our guide Horatio discovered that the horses had wandered rather farther than he’d anticipated during their rest day, so Jo and I sat around for three hours with absolutely nothing to do whilst Horatio enlisted his friends from down the mountain to get the horse back. This was particularly frustrating as he had been up and about for at least two hours before we emerged from our tent, and didn’t use his time effectively; his lack of experience was beginning to grate, especially given the quite considerable [for Argentina] amount of money that we were paying him.

Read the rest of “Out of the Yungas—days four and five”…

Meet Roberto, our gracious and very friendly host for days two and three of our trek. He lives deep in the forests of the Yungas, in a very muddy and quite steeply-inclined clearing. All of his accommodation is constructed from the trees that grow all around, and consists of four huts: one for sleeping, one for cooking, and two for storage. He was tremendously excited to have visitors from another country staying with him, and made a real effort to show us how he lived. Within minutes of us arriving I had been given a hot drink made from boiling the blossoms of a nearby tree—a traditional pick-me-up, I was told. Unfortunately I can’t report on its effectiveness since he laced it with so much sugar that I can’t be sure it wasn’t just that which got my blood flowing again.

Read the rest of “Into the Yungas—days two and three”…

For five days my friend Jo and I trekked up and down the mountains from the east of Ticara, heading southwards towards Jujuy [pronounced choo-chooey, with the ch as in loch], led by our Spanish-speaking guide, Horatio.

We started early on the Tuesday morning—scheduled for a six o’clock start, but our guide was about half an hour late turning up with the four horses. We learnt as the week progressed that this was the norm; whatever time we were told we’d be setting off, the actual hour of departure was no sooner than thirty minutes later than stated. After fifteen or twenty minutes of trotting along on our horses we’d left the town and begun to ascend the west side of the mountains, the landscape being largely rock-strewn, fairly barren, but quite beautiful in its own way, and very warm as the sun rose high in the sky. We stopped for a simple lunch at one of the more level regions, gazing at the stunning views.

A short time after lunch we had reached the summit and started to descend; for whatever reason, the clouds from the east do not generally rise high enough to travel up and over the mountains, and instead sit quite happily on this side, so we were now trekking down into cold and misty—and subsequently much more fertile—valleys. I found that I enjoyed the afternoon more than the morning; not only do I prefer being too cold to being too hot, but at many points we had to dismount and lead our horses along the mountainside pathways, because it was too dangerous to ride them—either it was too steep, or the path too precarious and we risked being thrown if the horses slipped. Great fun!

At the end of a very long day—twelve hours of trekking, all in all—we arrived at our first night’s lodging: the remote home of a family of five [plus their lamb, cat, and some chickens], friends of our guide. It consisted of four or five small buildings, with loosely-fitting stone walls and straw- or corrugated iron roofs. The family were quite quiet—the young children in particular—but this had a lot to do with the language barrier, and Jo managed a bit of small talk here and there. She soon had the oldest boy demanding that she take more photos of him and the surroundings because he loved to see the instant results on her digital camera’s screen.

After a simple but welcome dinner of potatos, goats’ cheese, and a lamb-based soup, we were shown to our sleeping quarters—two sleeping bags on the floor of the storeroom—and soon after dark we settled down to sleep in our cold but dry accommodation.

So here I am, back in Londres, and blimey it’s a bit nippy—this is the first time that I’ve switched seasons after coming back from a holiday, leaving the very warm summer of Argentina for the tail-end of the cold snap that has hit the UK over the last few weeks. I thought I asked you all to do something about this?

Aside from the few days in Buenos Aires that bookended my trip, I spent my time in the north of the country, visiting a couple of cities and several small towns along an essentially north/south-running mountainous line roughly 250 miles in length [so Google Earth tells me]. As you might be able to tell from the map, to the west of this range the landscape is quite arid, whereas to the east, where the clouds can rise no higher and so dump their rain on the mountainside, it is much more fertile. These “clouded mountain forests” are known as the Yungas, the natural habitat of endangered creatures such as numerous species of birds and jaguars, for example. I spent five days trekking through this region on foot and on horseback, probably the highlight of my trip.

I’ll not bore you with the entire transcription of the journal I kept whilst I was away [not least because I’m a bit behind and haven’t yet written up the last week or so], but I’ll provide a few thoughts and photos [via my slowly-growing Argentina Flickr photoset] over the next few days, before I forget everything and just end up writing: ate steak, climbed some rocks, then drank magnums of red wine, Argentina’s ace—which is essentially the entire month in a nutshell [and in haiku form no less!].