Gina and Lou in China

(See Shangri La part 1, posted on September 24th, for the first part of this adventure.)

When we got back to the road, Dai Ou made a phone call (the cell phone service here is remarkably good) and arranged for the next bus to pick us up and take us on to Wang Yu. The place where we had been dropped off was only about a ten minute drive from Wang Yu, so we were there in no time. At first it seemed like every other little non-descript two-street town in the valley, with dreary cement buildings with stores, warehouses, and noodle shops on the street and apartments above. Then Dai Ou pointed out a long stone staircase leading up the side of the valley behind a building. We climbed the stairs and at the top we came out into another century.

The old town of Wang Yu has one street, and most of it is so narrow that three people holding hands could touch the buildings on either side. The street is paved with sandstone slabs on two levels. The center of the street is between four inches and a foot lower than the sides, and the roofs of the buildings on either side nearly meet overhead. This keeps the rain water from running into the houses, carrying with it the refuse and animal waste that drop in the street. The place was full of activity. There were children all over the place, old people sitting smoking their pipes, and men playing Chinese chess. A couple of men had set up a huge circular saw in the street and were cutting logs into planks. (When we went into the street a little while later, men, saw, planks, and sawdust had disappeared without a trace.)

We walked down the street, passing what looked like many doors into two continuous buildings on either side of the street, but what in fact were peoples’ individual houses and shops. There was one house better than the rest, the old head man’s house, which was now empty but still looked after. The street was about 200 yards long and gave out into gardens and corn fields perched on the mountain side. In fact, almost all of the open ground that wasn’t rock face was planted in something. Land is at such a premium that people were growing pumpkins on their roofs.

About half way down the street on the down hill side was the guest house where we stayed. It was built half of wood and half of bamboo, with very low ceilings and ill fitting doors and windows. All of the rooms except the central sitting room seemed to have been added on, without much attention paid to level floors or a regular floor plan. It had a very narrow and steep stair case to the second floor, hardly more than a ladder, followed by another to the third floor so steep that it was nearly impossible to go down forward. All of the light bulbs were bare and the wiring was exposed. It turned out to have a basement of sorts, dug into the rocky mountain side on which the town was perched. The basement was where all of the plumbing was. There was the usual squat toilet in one stall, a shower in the next, and the kitchen next to that with a sink where all other functions requiring water happened, such as washing hands, brushing teeth, washing dishes, and doing laundry.

It was quite charming. In spite of its rustic nature, it had two computers with broadband access to the internet. The strangest thing about it was that the walls were practically covered with Communist revolutionary propaganda posters. Dai Ou pointed out one extolling the virtues of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a rabble rouser during the Cultural Revolution who was arrested and charged with serious crimes after Mao’s death. Dai Ou was surprised that the owners of the guest house hadn’t gotten in trouble for displaying a poster praising such a politically incorrect and universally despised person.

The back of the guest house overlooked the bamboo forested slope down to the river. There was an open air balcony off of the main floor, and one end of the basement foundation was supported by a large rock. The name Wang Yu means “watching fish”. The town was named after the rock under the guest house, which is called “Watching Fish Rock”. Our host told us that before the river was dammed the river was so full of fish that one could sit on the rock, at least fifty feet above the water, and watch the fish.

There were three bedrooms, two each with three single beds and a third with a double bed. We decided to sleep three and three, boys in the third floor triple and girls in the second floor triple. By the time we had settled on a price for the night and settled in to our rooms it was getting dark, so we sat in the parlor and sipped tea until dinner. Dinner was the usual array of meat and vegetable dishes served with a huge bucket of white rice, and soup to finish. After dinner, Deng Juan went to bed and the rest of us went back to the parlor where we played mahjong until about 10:00.

The next morning I got up early in order to avoid the line at the one set of plumbing. I then went out to have a look at the town. I walked down to the far end and out into the cultivated hillside, careful not to fall off the mountain. Then I walked back into town. Just past the guest house was a small alley on the uphill side leading to the school. The alley had been full of children the day before when we arrived, but it was deserted now. I walked between two houses and came out in front of a pair of large pictures painted on tiles, one showing the Great Wall, and the other showing some of the various wonderful technological advances made about thirty years previously.

When I walked into the school yard, I met Pierre and Dai Ou. School had not yet started up for the semester, and the school building was locked. All of the rooms opened on to a sort of narrow cement cloister overlooking the school yard. Neither the rooms nor the school yard had been cleaned up for the coming year yet. The paved yard had weeds growing up through the cracks. The rooms were all dusty and dirty, with all the furniture piled up at one end.

Dai Ou told us about lining up by class in rows in the school yard when she was a child while some pair of students who had earned the privilege by some feat of academic excellence hoisted the flag and the national anthem was sung. It was easy to envision the same scene taking place in this school yard.

After breakfast at the guest house, we left our hosts and walked back down the stairs with townspeople going to work and farmers going to catch the bus to take their produce into town. We bought a few snacks and headed out of town, walking along the road in the same direction we had taken the day before, away from Ya’an. After about a quarter of a mile, we came to a place where we could climb up the embankment into a farmyard. From the farmyard, we started our second hike of the trip, over Haizi Mountain.

We walked for a while on narrow paths through rice paddies and corn fields passing a few farm houses, barns, and drying yards with corn and rice drying on reed mats spread out on the ground. At times we climbed steeply. The farm fields alternated with dense bamboo and cedar forest, and soon we were climbing next to a small creek.

The path was paved with sandstone slabs, arranged as flat paving where the terrain allowed, stairs where it was steep. Many of the stones had been worn down smooth with a slight depression in the middle. We were perplexed by this until we met a man, the first of four, dragging a bundle of bamboo down the path. He had cut about a dozen stalks of bamboo and lashed them together. They were about two inches in diameter at the wide end and about twenty feet long. He was holding the bundle by the heavy end. They were still green and apparently quite heavy. As he dragged them, the end on the ground mostly slid down the path in the trough that had been formed by the years of steady erosion caused by the dragged bamboo bundles.

Through farm fields and yards, in and out of the forest, we climbed steadily for about an hour. After climbing through unbroken forest for about a quarter of a mile, we turned away from the creek and started climbing in earnest, up a muddy switch back trail. Up to this point, the trail had been well paved, but after a few stair steps up the mountain, the paving stopped and we were climbing through mud. We had a steep and treacherous climb of about a quarter of a mile before we reached the high point of the trail on the shoulder of Haizi Mountain. The trail leveled off and a short mild descent through a bamboo grove, we came out into a broad grassy valley where there was a small farm next to a pond.

We walked down to the farm house, where we were met by a man, the single occupant of the farm. There was a tiny two room house with bamboo walls, a dirt floor, and a tin roof, and small barn with three rooms, one of which had a wood floor and served as a tiny one room “guest house”. Despite being so primitive, the farmer’s house had a tiled stove and a water trough coming into the “kitchen” through the wall. The man claimed that the water was exceptionally pure, which seemed likely, given the surroundings. Apparently the electric lines had not yet been brought over the mountain. It was the only building I’ve seen so far in China without electricity. The man said that it was lonely without a television.

We were invited to have our lunch in the farmer’s guest house. We sat on little stools he had carved from logs and ate our cookies and peanuts and drank our bottled water. Behind the guest house was a small corral with about twenty goats. At one point, a boy came and took the goats out to the field. We weren’t sure where the boy was from, since the farmer said he lived alone. We could hear their bells as the goats went along the path. After we finished eating, we said good bye and went back up towards the mountain.

We took a different path for most of the way back. Instead of going halfway across the mountain’s shoulder and down the side, we stayed high up on the mountain until we were all the way around it and facing out over the farm land we had crossed to get to the base of the mountain. This time we were treated to a series of views out over the little farms and fields we had walked through earlier.

Eventually, we descended to the lower slopes and then to the fields that ran down to the river. After a second walk through paddies and corn fields, we came out on the road. Dai Ou had called ahead on her cell phone, and the bus was waiting for us to take us back to Ya’an. It was hard to believe that after two days in paradise, we were back home in our apartment after only an hour.

In the 1930’s the American James Rock wrote a series of articles for National Geographic comparing the Chinese town of Zhongdian and the area around it with the legendary Shangri-la. The articles inspired the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton, which was later made into an Academy Award winning movie by Frank Capra. What impressed James Rock about Zhongdian was its isolation, not just geographically, but culturally and, as a result, its isolation from the violence and corruption of the rest of the world. Its inhabitants, although poor, lived in a state of harmony and contentment.

Just before the beginning of the semester, we took a two day trip that felt similar to some of what James Rock must have experienced in Zhongdian, but which began only 45 minutes by bus from Ya’an. Our friends Dai Ou and Pierre invited us to go with them, Lawrence, and a friend of Dai Ou’s named Deng Juan for two days of hiking and a night at a guest house in the town of Wang Yu. Wang Yu is called an “ancient town” because unlike almost everywhere else in China, the old parts haven’t been torn down and replaced. We got up early on a Saturday morning and walked a few blocks to a little place for breakfast. Then we walked around the corner to get a minibus. Dai Ou talked to a couple of drivers and a dispatcher, evidently negotiating our ride, and we got in an old minibus with lumpy seats and stained upholstery. There were a couple of other passengers.

The minibus took off after about ten minutes. The bus stop was right at the edge of town; we drove around the corner and found ourselves in a narrow river valley on a winding road with steep cliffs on one side and a hundred foot drop off on the other. This was where the adventure started. The driver seemed to know no fear. He drove at what felt like top speed around blind curves, leaning on the horn, crossing the center line whenever he felt like it. We thought we were used to this sort of thing in China, but this ride was a new experience. We passed through a few smallish hamlets, never slowing down except for the occasional stop to pick up or drop off a passenger.

After about thirty minutes, the bus pulled over at a bend in the road where a narrow mud and rock road headed off up a narrow, steep sided ravine with a rushing stream at its bottom. We got out and the bus took off leaving us looking up the ravine. The cliffs on either side of it were covered with lush vegetation and the stream was clear. We started walking. The scenery was beautiful. The only sounds were the stream, the birds, and our quiet conversation. The road went up but the grade was fairly gentle.

Soon after we started, we met three people with baskets full of produce on their backs heading to town to sell the fruit of their labors. They told Dai Ou that the place we were headed was a few kilometers up the valley. We continued walking. After a while we began to notice a large number of butterflies of many different colors, patterns, and sizes. They were all around us, sometimes even landing on us. There was one particularly large black variety that seemed to have tufted wings. We started to notice other insects, even a few lizards. The place was a hive of interesting little creatures.

For a long time the only evidence of humans was the road. We passed a building right next to the road that Dai Ou said was the local Communist Party “clubhouse”, according to the sign in front of it, although where the local Communist Party members lived was a mystery. At one point there was an abandoned mine across the valley. There was no indication of what the miners had dug out of the earth. We passed an especially dramatic place where the sides of the valley became vertical and there was a bridge over the creek with railings in the shape of dragons.

After climbing for a while, the road became a little less steep and we started to pass farm houses. The houses were right up against the road, with narrow little fields on either side on the few patches of land that weren’t almost vertical. The only inhabitants of the houses at that time of day were old people and chickens.

We kept walking, going through short steep spots alternating with more or less level places that had a farm house or two, altogether about six inhabited spots, until we got to a place where the valley started to widen and level out. All along the stream had been full of huge boulders, and as we saw the valley widening ahead of us, we saw a couple of naked little boys playing on the boulders and in a stream. As soon as they saw us, they disappeared.

We came to an old dam that had been burst to let the stream flow through. We found out later that it had been built to flood the broad level place in the valley with the intention of breaking it and farming the land whose fertility was increased and rockiness covered with the river silt. We passed through the break in the dam and came out into a paradise of fertile farm land with three or four homesteads and a few farmers working in the fields. The valley was surrounded by steep mountains covered with a lush growth of bamboo and cedar. Ahead and to our left we could see a tall waterfall, the destination of that day’s hike.

We came to a farmhouse where we asked a woman hanging laundry how to get to the waterfall. She directed us across her yard and through a cornfield. We came out at a small reservoir where a man directed us to continue. We passed through a bamboo grove and came to a stream. At that point, the boys we had seen earlier, three this time, appeared and offered to guide us up to the waterfall. Like everyone we had seen, starting with the minibus driver, they were awed and excited to be so close to a bunch of foreigners. They spoke with Dai Ou and Deng Juan but said not a word to any of us. A couple of times one of us would say something to them in our fractured Chinese, which they seemed to think was the most hilarious thing they had ever heard, but they didn’t dare to actually reply.

The boys led us up through the forest on the side of the mountain on a steep trail that eventually came out at a huge boulder next to the pool at the base of the waterfall. It was an awesome and beautiful sight. While we stood and gawked, the boys ran out onto a gravelly sand bar and started skipping stones on the pool.

The waterfall was about a hundred feet high. It wasn’t a large volume of water, but in dropping that distance it created a strong breeze that carried a cold wet mist across the pond. It was a hot day, so despite the wet breeze, Pierre and Dai Ou changed into their bathing suits right away. I followed suit after a few minutes. Gina, Lawrence, and Deng Juan stayed on the rock and started lunch. The water was extremely cold, but invigorating. As I swam toward the waterfall, I could feel the spray from the water fall from twenty or thirty feet away, and then the water pounding on my head. Behind the waterfall was calm water and a damp, shallow cave.

After a half hour or so, we were joined by an old man, presumably the boys’ grandfather. He said a few words and then settled down on the rock to smoke his pipe, something that most old people in China, male and female, seem to enjoy doing. By then the boys had stopped skipping stones and had settled down on the sand bar to surreptitiously watch the strange foreigners.

Eventually it was time to head back down the mountain. We packed up the remains of our lunch, giving some treats to our guides, and walked back down the mountain. It was still early afternoon, so as we retraced our steps, we took in the view again from the opposite direction. But as we passed through the broken dam to start down the path to the main road, we stopped and spent a few minutes looking back at the little valley which seemed so isolated from modern life.