On a sweltering morning in mid-August, we left Xiangtan to stay for a few days with a student-friend in the countryside. Peter is a student at the Engineering College, and his parents live in a small village on the shore of Dong Ting Lake, one of the largest natural lakes in China.
We bought five bus tickets, enough so that each of us would have their own seat. Anne and Tariqa took some motion-sickness pills before leaving. We had a long bus ride ahead on a winding road, and I didn't want to sit with a sick child on my lap all day. Anne and I joked because we had never yet managed to keep all of our seats on a bus. I laid out a firm criterion -- the woman had to be at least 90 years old before we would give up a seat for her.
As the bus left, it was not quite full. The full seat across the back was stacked with bags, and one or two other seats were empty. On our way out of town, the bus picked up a few more people. Just as we passed into the open countryside, the bus stopped again. An old lady got on, accompanied by at least 10 children of various ages. By this time, there were no seats left, of course. The bags in the back seat were handed out a window and stacked on top of the bus. Kids literally piled into the back. Anne looked at me. "Well, she's only about 60 years old," she said, "but she has 10 children with her. We should give up a seat." As I grumbled my non-radiant acquiescence, Anne smiled and beckoned the lady to sit down.
One of the men who had gotten on late opened a can of soda. Apparently it had been shaken, because spray erupted onto everyone around him. Passengers laughed as drops of soda dripped from the ceiling. Buses are quite informal in China; class distinctions break down and people share the humors of the ride. A minute later the man surprised everyone again. He had pulled a coupon tab from the side of the can, and the tab said he had won 5,000 yuan. He passed the coupon around the bus. An elderly, distinguished man pulled out his glasses, inspected the coupon carefully, and announced to all that it was genuine.
Two men who were traveling together were quite excited about the other man's luck. They asked him if he was willing to sell his coupon. He said he couldn't go back to Xiangtan to collect his prize and thus would be willing to sell. The elderly man made a bid. He held up six or seven hundred yuan. The other two men pooled their money and came up with 2,000 yuan. As this situation was developing, I was nervous. To me, it had all the earmarks of a confidence scam. I asked Peter to warn the people, in Chinese, to be cautious, but he wouldn't do it. By Chinese standards, he was wise not to become involved.
The two men bought the coupon and quickly got off the bus. I felt uneasy, but perhaps it wouldn't work out badly. The men did not seem poor; they had the money and were willing to spend it. Besides, I remarked as they turned back toward Xiangtan, maybe they had paid with counterfeit money.
Actually, Peter told us the amounts were 50,000 and 20,000 yuan, instead of 5,000 and 2,000 as I have reported above. The Chinese people use a comma after the number ten-thousand, instead of after one-thousand as we do. Thus, there is often confusion regarding large numbers. I thought it unlikely that the two men were carrying 20,000 yuan and were willing to part with it that easily. At any rate, as we jolted along, I kept wondering who had conned whom, and for how much.
Within an hour, several of the 10 children had gotten motion sickness and had vomited on the floor. We were already crowded, and now we couldn't even stretch our legs into the aisle. Anne handed over a bag for the children to use, but they preferred to make a mess on the floor. It could be worse, we thought; it could be our children who were sick.
After a few hours we arrived in YiYang, a medium-sized town near the south shore of Dong Ting Lake. Peter picked up his daypack; it was covered in you-know- what. I suggested that he could wash it off with a hose. He went off and came back in a few minutes with a new bag; he said his other one was old, anyway. We congratulated him on a wise decision. We changed buses. The new bus driver was a friend of Peter's; they lived in the same village. Again, there was no chance of keeping all our seats. The bus headed north, into lake country. We crossed a stretch of water on a ferry, a steel rampway large enough to hold about three buses or trucks. We drove on; the road grew narrower. We bought some fresh lotus pods, and the children learned how to pop out the seeds and remove the thin bitter shootlets. We crossed several more ferries, about four in all. Finally we pulled into Peter's village. It was one of several small towns on a large peninsula that cut into the middle of the lake. His uncle had a minivan and drove us to Peter's house.
We met Peter's parents and his dog, a frisky border-Collie kind of dog, which Tariqa played with constantly. Peter's house was about 10 years old, one storey, brick, with a cement floor, electricity, and a hand pump near the front door. There are thousands, or perhaps millions, like it in China. There is a central room used for meals, lounging, and storage, with sleeping rooms on each side. On the far right side is a room with a separate entrance, used for cooking in front and as a pig sty in back. Attached to the left side, around the corner, was a small, pit outhouse. Like other country houses we have visited, their electrical appliances were a few naked light bulbs, a black-and-white TV, and a small fan. A narrow, open porch ran the length of the house, with a large concrete patio in front. Chickens roamed the yard. Peter told us that, 20 years ago, all the houses in the area were made of mud bricks and straw- thatch roofs. China is changing rapidly.
We settled in and looked at the flat countryside around us. We had followed a canal on the way out from town. We had started on a standard dirt road, but by the time we got to Peter's house, we were straddling a narrow footpath. We saw scattered farmhouses and ponds, sized from about half an acre up to five acres. About a hundred yards to the west was a large levee, about 60 feet high -- the edge of the lake.
Peter's family grew fish. About five years ago, the government came through and persuaded most of the rice farmers to become fish farmers. Many of the rice fields were dredged into ponds. Contracts were signed with companies in Guangzhou, far to the south, to buy the fish once a year. In an average year, the family cleared about 10,000 yuan on the fishing operation. This earned more money than rice farming, and with much less effort.
We helped Peter feed the fish. They had two ponds of about an acre, with several much-smaller ones for specialty fish and eels. We got into a concrete boat -- the Chinese will make almost anything out of concrete -- and poled to the center of the pond. We slowly tossed out handfuls of fish food. At this time of year, the fish were about half grown and weighed about two pounds. During winter, when the tank trucks came up from Guangzhou, the ponds would be partially drained and all the fish would be caught with nets. The pond held 1000 grass carp; each would weigh about 4 pounds when harvested.
Peter's parents were very friendly and relaxed with us. They had only to glance at Tariqa and the dog (named "Dog") to break into smiles. We had a good, simple dinner of vegetables -- no ducks, fish, or eels were sacrificed in our honor, thank God. Afterwards we walked up on the levee to watch the sun set. The water level was extremely low due to a continued drought. Peter pointed out signs along the top of the levee that commemorated the heroic efforts of various groups of people in saving the levee from failure during the great floods of 1998. After dark we sat around the patio and ate watermelon as neighbors and friends came by to meet the foreigners. Peter took us out on the pond in the pitch darkness. There was no moon, and we could see the reflection of stars on the water.
The next morning we helped to catch fish. Several species were grown in the pond: grass carp for sale to Guangzhou, and another type that was caught to feed to the carnivorous fish/eels in the other ponds. Using the boat, Peter and his father stretched a net across the center of the pond. Then they walked the net along the shore. As the net closed on itself, fish began jumping out. Peter's father waded into the water and scooped fish into the bottom of the boat, and then into a basket. In one casual sweep, we had caught 30 to 40 fish, which would be cut up and fed to fish in the other ponds. In addition to bags of fish pellets, they fed grass to the carp. A coarse, vigorous grass (similar to Johnson grass, but without the seed heads or rhizomes) was grown around the edge of the pond. It was a simple, if time- consuming matter, to clip the grass and dump it into the pond.
Peter's uncle arrived and we rode away to see some of the local sights. First we visited a pearl farm. Many large ponds had been converted for growing cultured pearls. A worker poled us in a concrete boat over to the pearl beds. Shallow baskets had been built from something like chicken wire. Each basket held four large, flat oysters, which were kept near the surface by four plastic pop bottles used as floats. The man grabbed an oyster, brought it to shore, and wedged it open. Inside were 30 pearls. They were fairly small and irregularly shaped, but they had a beautiful rosy luster. We were told that the oysters were grown for about four years before the pearls were ready for harvest. Our oyster was only two years old, and we were assured that the pearls would be much larger and smoother when they finally were harvested. The farm is new, and is just now ready to bring in the first harvest. They expect to have about 2,000 pounds of pearls this year. Next year they will be the first full harvest, and the yield will be 2 tons. They have markets in China, but they would like to find wholesale markets overseas, so if you know someone who can market them, please let us know. We were given the thirty pearls as a token of friendship.
Later we drove along another levee on the south side of the peninsula. Dozens of large wooden boats were beached along the dry channel. We came to a small town and walked around. We saw two men fixing their wooden fishing boats. These were maybe 20 feet long and 4 feet wide, at the most. The inside was partitioned into sections. Some of the sections had holes through the hull; this allowed water into those sections to keep alive the fish that were caught. The boats were sitting upside down on blocks. The men had scraped them, treated them with tung oil, and were applying some kind of very thick varnish with a stick.
We walked across the channel on an old road and came to an endless sea of grass. It was more than 15 feet high. We were told that it covered an area of 50 kilometers by 100 kilometers -- about 2,000 square miles! I don't know what species of grass it is; the stems were about three quarters of an inch thick. It is harvested and used as pulp in paper mills, usually for newspapers. Most of the local people spend several months of the winter harvesting the grass, by hand. This industry provides a steady, if tedious, supplement to their income. For some, it is the only source of cash.
In the evening we visited Peter's other uncle, who makes doufu (tofu) in the village. They grind soybeans to a fine mash and then force steam through the mash to cook it. Then they press the doufu in wooden frames. Some doufu is pressed further to make various firmnesses. Some is smoked and dried over a low fire. We didn't actually see the process, because they begin work at three in the morning.
In the morning we took a small boat onto the lake. We poled over to a grassy area with tree-lined channels and wandered around. Off to the north, we saw great flats spreading into the distance, with fishing nets left high and dry by the drought. When we came back to the boat, we found that someone had made off with the pole. I climbed a tree that hung over the water and broke off a dead branch as a substitute.
We were encouraged by the variety of crops that are grown in the area. In addition to the traditional rice and vegetables, we saw sorghum, cotton, sesame, and hemp. Squash plants sprawl everywhere; at Peter's house we picked squash along the edge of the pond by boat.
We visited several students' homes in the small town. Their parents were very hospitable. They served tea and lunch and watermelon, and offered us a place to lie down for a snooze after lunch. Instead, we walked around in the bright midday sun. Peter's uncle uses his minivan to deliver bags of fish pellets to the fish farmers in the area. We ate lunch one day at his house. The first floor is a combination garage/storage area/dining room. A stairway mounted on the outside of the building leads up to the bedrooms on the second floor. As usual, our children attracted many more children, and they amused themselves by playing tag and jumping off the stacks of fish-feed bags, much as I did 40 years ago in my father's feed store.
We felt the need to move on. We made arrangements to leave at 6:00 in the morning, and bade farewell to Peter and his parents. The bus driver was waiting for us. We crossed on the ferries and arrived at the train station in YiYang around noon. Our plan was to catch an afternoon train west to ZhangJiaJie, an area famous throughout China for its remarkable scenery and rock formations. Sorry, we were told, the train doesn't leave until some time after midnight. We bought tickets and wandered off to get some lunch.
We found a small restaurant, ate, and played spades and hearts for several hours. We told the owners we were waiting for midnight, and they said we could rent a cheap room upstairs for a nap. We did, and were awakened in a few hours by clouds of very large mosquitoes that had targeted our position. We still had a lot of time, so we decided to teach Tariqa how to play pinochle (she's only six). Several hours and several hundred dead mosquitoes later, we went to the station and boarded the train. To be on the safe side, we arrived at 11:30; the train pulled in finally at 2:15 a.m. We were in the hard-seat section, but we all had assigned seats and even managed to sit together. Since we weren't tired, or perhaps too tired to sleep, we talked and played pinochle most of the night, and we arrived at ZhangJiaJie around seven in the morning.
We caught a local bus into downtown and were befriended by a college student. He volunteered to show us around the town, so we accepted. Sometimes this is helpful, sometimes not. Today our student took us to a too-expensive restaurant for breakfast and then to the travel agent's office. There we felt the first hint of the cash- cow-tourist mentality that would mark the remainder of our stay.
We explained that we wanted some information about traveling to ZhangJiaJie. The agent explained their package deal, complete with guide and tickets for two people, three days, two nights, accommodation included. He quoted a price for two people -- 750 yuan per person. We explained that there were four of us, not two. OK, then, they would charge only 650 yuan per person. After further pressure to accept the package deal, we decided that we would rather see the area on our own, thank you. Then we asked a few questions about bus schedules and hotel rates. The agent didn't give us a straight answer. We inquired whether he was indeed a travel agent and whether travel agents normally were able to answer such questions. Finally he gave us the information we asked for.
We left and caught a local bus to the entrance to ZhangJiaJie, an hour or so north of the city. We checked into a cheap hotel and explored the shops that catered to tourists. In the morning we bought tickets, good for two days' entry into the scenic area. Along with a few thousand other people, we went through the gates. The whole area is quite beautiful, with tall, picturesque rock formations. We walked up a trail of many stone steps to a plateau called Huangshi Village. The view was good, but the main observation tower was mobbed with people shoving their way up the stairs. We snacked and took the cable car down; it took only about five minutes to descend.
We strolled down a quiet valley called Gold Whip Stream. This is China, so every rock, cranny, brook, and hollow has a scenic name. For example, there is Long- Yearned-for Meeting of Couple Rock, Bewitching Terrace, Black Dragon Waterfall, Fairy Presenting Flowers, and Monkey Gate. Pinnacles of rock towered around us, 1200-or-so feet high. Local porters continually implored us to ride on their sedan chairs. A sedan chair is made of bamboo/wicker and is supported on two stout poles. Two people carry the chair, as they would support a heavy load with shoulder poles, one in front and one behind. They carried people up the steep mountain paths on these sedan chairs. I can't imagine a life spent this way, but the local people feel that they don't have much choice for a better life. As we walked along we might hear a shout behind us. It's a signal to make room; in a few seconds a sedan chair would pass us. The porters trotted along with their muscles popping; the chairs lurched and tilted. Other porters made money by carrying luggage up the mountain. A local boy attached himself to Taalan and they talked for more than an hour. He told us that most tourists hire guides through the travel agencies in the city, so the local villagers cannot find much work. With the advent of the cable cars, even the porter jobs are fast disappearing. It was their home first, and still is for that matter, but others are getting rich.
We found that there is no simple way to get to the top rim. A standard tourist loop is to walk up the trail to the rim, stay in a hotel, travel the next day along the rim, stay in another hotel, and come back down on the third morning. The only way to get to the rim by bus was to go back to ZhangJiaJie City and take a five-hour ride that stopped in three cities. Nope, thanks. The eastern route looked promising, but it involved a long detour by taxi. Isn't there a local bus? Mei you (no). Are you sure there's no bus? Mei you. But, there must be a bus! Mei you. We had too much baggage to carry it up to the rim by ourselves, and we were too compassionate, stingy, or proud (choose one adjective) to hire a porter to carry our bags. Also, we were tired of being forced to do what all the other tourists did.
We chartered a minivan taxi to the east entrance and took a truly spectacular cable-car ride to the top rim. We checked into another cheap hotel and wandered around the little tourist village. It was hazy and late in the day, so there was not much to see. A large tour group was sharing the hotel with us. We washed out some clothes and hung them in the atrium, along with about a thousand other clothes hangers. We fell asleep on our small, hard beds. We were tired from the day's hiking and eager for the next day, when we would explore all those places with exotic names.
We woke in the morning to a steady drizzle. Visibility was less than a hundred yards. We began to pack and found that all the clothes had been moved out of the rain. Though finding them was a challenge, at least they were mostly dry. We surrendered. We decided to forego the rim trip, and go instead to a nearby town to see Yellow Dragon Cave. After another spectacular cable-car ride, down the fog- wrapped mountain, we looked for a local bus to the town. Mei you, mei you. We chartered a taxi; it was expensive, but there was no alternative. The driver held up bills in different groupings as we negotiated the price. I kept shaking my head until I felt the price was halfway reasonable.
Yellow Dragon Cave is one of the largest in Asia, and is well-worth the entrance fee. It features a boat trip on a large underground river. A large arching bridge has been built over the river, a hundred feet or more underground. Rather than stay with our group, we wandered back and forth between several. As we left the cave, we were assaulted by the minivan-taxi drivers again. We knew there must be a local bus from the town to ZhangJiaJie City, but everyone we asked -- taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and passersby -- said mei you. We refused to be gouged by another taxi driver. As we stood helplessly, waiting for divine assistance, a young man approached us. He showed us to a bus stop, less than a block away. Within two minutes, for two yuan each, we were on our way back to ZhangJiaJie City.
We made our way to the train station, bought tickets, and headed south to JiShou. We had heard of a good university there, and wanted to take a look. The girl seated next to us spoke some English and went to JiShou University. After disembarking from the train we took a local bus with her and checked into the guest hotel at the university. The room was cheap and quite modern and comfortable. The campus was laid out like a park, with stone bridges and irrigated lawns and flower gardens. We spent a morning walking around, talking with an English teacher, and inspecting the teachers' living quarters. It was also very clean!
We felt the need to move on. We went to the train station, bought tickets, ate a quick dinner, and claimed our hard seats. About ten hours later, after a very tiring ride with little rest, we arrived at 4:00 am back in Xiangtan. We were glad to be home and were cured, at least for awhile, of our wanderlust. Perhaps we were hasty in abandoning ZhangJiaJie; perhaps we were a bit testy with the price gougers. We'll go back another day, wiser, more serene, and ready to hike.
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