Lying fallow in Anhui

The morning after hiking Huang Shan my legs and knees ached so much that I could barely descend from my third-floor hostel room, so I decided to take a quiet trip to a village. The villages around Tunxi are known as Huizhou style. Absent any kind of economy beyond subsistence farming, the locals traditionally sent their sons away at the age of 13 to work as merchants. Many did well, and sent money back to their villages, where their families built mansions. Today the village lanes ramble among crumbling Ming and Qing era black and white tile-roofed structures, while farmers continue to harvest rice in the same way they have done for centuries.

I chose to visit Chengkan, dating from the Han Dynasty, because farmers rather than tourists continue to walk along its narrow winding alleys. The fact that it takes a series of four buses to get from Tunxi to Chenkan may be what keeps the tourists away. On the fourth bus, a man deposited a huge bag of Purina feed, paying the driver to deliver it somewhere, and another man boarded with some kind of motor that he and his friend were barely able to heave up the bus steps.

The sign at the entrance of Chengkan said “Welcome to Chengkan for tourism, visit, research, making holiday, lie fallow and sketching.” My aching legs told me that my plan in Chengkan was to lie fallow as much as possible.

Outside the city gates I paused to watch the rice farmers tending their paddies. In several inches of water one man in waders uprooted the densely planted seedlings and stacked them in a basket. Another man, barefoot, re-planted the seedlings, one by one, in the next water-filled paddy while a third man, also barefoot, used a hoe to shore up the clay wall of the paddy. In another paddy, an ox chewed its cud while waiting, hitched to a wooden plow.

In the distance, other farmers performed the same tasks, and one man stood on his wooden plow while a water buffalo pulled it around and around in the paddy.

The farmer who had been pulling the seedlings finished this task and stopped to take a drink. I greeted him with ni hao and offered him a package of Oreos. He refused it but said something to me in Chinese which sounded friendly enough.

The man who had been hoeing put a board over his shoulder and, balancing two huge baskets of wet seedlings, staggered to carry them to the next paddy.
All of the tools, including the plow, hoe, ox yoke, baskets and trays to hold the baskets appeared to be hand made, of wood and reed.

I paid 80 RMB (US $11) to enter the city gate of Chengkan. Villages in China charge a steep entrance fee, double the price of a night in a hostel. Chengkan is a quiet village consisting of a maze of narrow winding lanes between high walls concealing I don’t know what. I spent a morning wandering among the picturesque lanes and avoiding dogs as best I could, since China has a big rabies problem, and a traveler from Ireland told me that he had nearly been bitten in a village.
When I saw a woman washing her clothes in the river, beating them with a stick, I felt silly for having been disappointed that the spin cycle on my hostel’s washing machine hadn’t worked the day before, and I had had to wring my clothes dry by hand before hanging them to dry on the bamboo pole.
I had lunch at the village’s only restaurant. The waitress spoke a little English, and asked me if I wanted rice, noodles or dumplings. After I chose rice, she asked me to step into the kitchen and choose a vegetable. Since vegetables are not cooked together, I could only choose one. So I got a huge bowl of plain rice and a plate of cabbage fried with garlic and bother. Together with a beer for the hot day, it was a pretty good lunch. On the way back to Tunxi, two of the four bus drivers remembered me and gleefully helped me get on the right series of buses.

The next day I took a bus to Hongcun, a more touristed but still beautiful village, famous for its Moon Pond. In Hongcun, I rented a bicycle to ride out of town to the Mukeng Bamboo Forest, where parts of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon were filmed.

I rented the bike solely using gestures and drawings, and amazingly the shopkeeper and I correctly communicated the price, rental period and deposit which would be returned to me.

Anhui is a peaceful respite in bustling China.

Anhui: The New Mexico of China

I took the maglev train travelling 301 km/hr (187 mph) from the airport to downtown Shanghai. Maglev is short for magnetic levitation, because the train doesn’t actually touch the tracks. Magnets provide lift and propulsion, so the train hovers just above the tracks, eliminating all but air friction and electro-magnetic drag. Maglev trains are quieter, faster and smoother than wheeled mass transit systems. China’s is the world’s most well-known commercial high-speed maglev. Its top speed is 381 km/hr (268 mph). By bus the trip would take 45 minutes, but we made it in 7 minutes 20 seconds, just slightly slower than an airplane could, and I found myself wondering why we don’t have a better public transportation system in the U.S.

At a youth hostel on East Nanjing Road I dined on take-out pizza and beer. For some reason the multitude of Pizza Huts in Shanghai had caught my eye, and I didn’t yet know that a meal of pizza cost about six times the price of a much tastier Chinese meal.

In the hostel I met backpackers from South Korea, Canada, China and the U.S. A man from Tennessee who had lived in Japan gave me his three-day pass to the Shanghai World Expo, with two days unused. He said that it was disappointing, and one day was enough for him.
In the morning I had spicy sour ramen noodles (8 RMB) while reading the China Daily. Drawn by the sound of drumming, I headed to a little park sandwiched between high rises and glittering shopping malls. A group of women was busily drumming and marching in formations. Further down, the tree-lined pedestrian lane was crowded with small groups of senior citizens doing tai chi and other exercises. One group of particularly energetic middle aged women was performing an aerobic dance to Chinese pop music using pink rubber balls as props.

I had read that because only two percent of Chinese smile at strangers, the government hired professional smilers to encourage smiling among the population before the Expo, so that visitors would feel more welcomed. Either it worked, or the original statistic was wrong, because in the bustling city of Shanghai, strangers greeted me with “ni hao,” smiled at me, waved, and generally tried to communicate with me in a friendly way. Shanghai felt vibrant and warm, brimming with talking and laughing and cheerful activity.

I spent a day at the expo which involved lots of waiting in lines to finally walk through mediocre exhibits consisting mostly of videos and a few products from each country while throngs of Chinese people rushed to get their Expo passports stamped but didn’t seem to look much at the exhibits. I realized that I’m pretty fortunate to be able to collect stamps in my real passport. Below is Britain's Seed Pavilion.

The two highlights of the day were the stuffed grape leaves I ate at a Bulgarian restaurant, and the African Pavilion in which countries which could not afford their own pavilion created smaller exhibits in a shared building. Their lower tech exhibits were actually more interesting, and had fewer lines. But overall I tend to agree with the man from Tennessee who gave me the three-day pass. The Expo is a huge waste of money and resources, and since all the buildings but two are built with temporary building materials and will be torn down in six months, it is an environmental outrage.

When Expos began in the mid 1800s, they were a place to showcase new technology and inventions like the ice cream cone which made its debut at an expo in the early 1900s. But today the expo seems to be a reluctant exercise in foreign relations. The U.S. nearly didn’t participate this year due to a lack of funds, but not participating would have been such an affront to foreign relations with China that the U.S. eventually raised the funds and built a large pavilion.

After a night in the hostel dorm room with four Chinese women who came to Shanghai to see the expo, I got up early to take a morning bus to Tunxi, a small town in the beautiful but impoverished Anhui province.

So far I had not seen the famed Chinese ni hao toilets “hello toilets” where everyone reportedly squats together with no privacy walls. The expo and other places I had been in Shanghai had great toilets, often even with paper. I hoped to see a ni hao toilet at the long distance bus station, but instead I found individual stalls with a shared trough running through. No need to flush, as water automatically flushes through the trough regularly. It’s a pretty good system, but the only strange part is that one can see other people’s business floating by in the trough.

Before the bus took off, the driver handed each passenger a plastic bag. “Bag” he said to me in English, passing me mine. I wondered if it was for vomiting in, as I had done years ago on a mountainous bus ride in Mexico. But I decided hopefully that it must be for garbage. Later I saw a man spitting in his, employing that less than endearing Chinese practice of loudly hacking and spitting, usually done on the street. Apparently people are not able to refrain from doing it during a bus ride.

Chinese people seem to readily talk to strangers on buses and in public places. The man sitting next to me on the bus to Tunxi tried valiantly to have a conversation with me. Unable to understand anything he said, I handed him my phrasebook which gave him and his friends some good chuckles but didn’t help us communicate much.

At my hostel in Tunxi I met a young Russian couple at the beginning of a two-year world traipse. They thought it was funny that I am from Minnesota, since earlier in China they had bought T-shirts that said “Minnesota” and “Iowa,” and people from those places kept approaching them.

To me, Anhui is the New Mexico of China. Frequent floods and mountains keep its agricultural ability marginal, and it has no other industry, but the atmosphere is laid back and the mountains and ancient villages are absolutely stunning. Anhui’s top draw is Huang Shan, a mountain comprised of a collection of granite cliffs laced with trails on the side of sheer cliffs flanked by odd and beautifully shaped trees and shrouded in misty clouds. Huang Shan’s beauty inspired a whole school of ink painting during past centuries, which even extended to Japan, and more recently it inspired the set of the movie Avatar.

I spent a day in Tunxi, absorbing the beauty of the Ming Dynasty (1600s-1800s) architecture that surrounded Ancient Town Youth Hostel, getting a foot reflexology treatment and stocking up on supplies for the two-day trek on Huang Shan. Seeking trail food among the aisles of unfamiliar food at Tunxi’s supermarket left me with a couple of duds (black hard boiled eggs – eeew – and dried fruit meant for cooking, not eating raw) but mostly hits (jerkey of unknown meat, canned tuna, cookies, chocolate) and I found an especially good bonanza at a local bakery (cheese and herb bread - yum!).
On the bus to Huang Shan a collection of solo backpackers from Holland, England, China and Ireland befriended me. Together we took the cable car part way and then hiked up the east slope, through packs of package tourists in matching hats swarming around megaphone-wielding guides. Still we managed to take some pictures of the beautiful Huang Shan pine trees for which Huang Shan is famous.
After 2 ½ hours we left the hordes behind and entered the loop, which consists of cement paths precariously built hanging from the sides of sheer cliffs. I can’t imagine how many people must have died building them. The loop hike took about six hours up and down cement steps, and is not for those afraid of heights or without sturdy knees.
We staggered to our hostel, the Baiyun, located near one of Huang Shan’s summits, where we watched the sunset from a peak and then limped to our beds in an 11-person dorm for 140 RMB per night.

I shared my room with nine Chinese tourists and one Columbian doctor who practices medicine in Miami but is working in Beijing for four months.

After the first day’s strenuous and knee-killing hike, Floor from Holland and I just managed to limp down to the eastern cable car. Back in Tunxi, our new Chinese backpacker friend, a pilot who had studied aviation in Phoenix, guided us to an excellent restaurant where I broadened my regular menu beyond the boiled dumplings on which I had been subsisting.