Shangri La part 2 - Lou
(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.