A Few More Trips

I’m sitting now as I type this in the port of Mawei, a special district in the Chinese city of Fuzhou, located just across the straits of Taiwan. In approximately one and a half hours from the time I’ve started writing this, I’ll be aboard that boat, heading to Taiwan, and leaving China behind, for who knows how long.

This means a couple of things. First, it means that over the next couple days I’m going to crank out a couple of blog posts about previous travels that I haven’t yet covered, and maybe another couple of shorts about Shanghai.

Second, it means that once this blogging is done, I have no more to say about China. My next destinations, luck and fortune abiding, are going to be Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and if all goes the way things usually go, I should have plenty to say about those trips. However, they will come to an end, and around mid-September I will no longer be traveling for the forseeable future. I’m sure at that point that I’ll still be backlogged in stories to tell, but its not certain when I’ll have another opportunity to detail my journeys. Perhaps I’ll blog about a bit of traveling around America to fill the gap, its hard to say.

In any event, a new chapter in my travels. Back to China! The next few entries are going to be about a small trip I took during the month of April, when I went to the towns of Guilin and Yangshuo, in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi.

Guilin is a very famous city and scenic location in China; everyone in China knows it, and if they haven’t been there, they want to go there. Its most famous for its mountains and rivers, especially the Lijiang River (redudant in name here, since jiang actually means river), which are the source of inspiration for Chinese watercolor landscapes that perhaps some of you have seen. The unusual undulating mountain lines of this area are incredibly distinct, and shared by Yangshuo, a small town only an hour away that is a world away in terms of feel.

The break was right after our midterms; our school actually offered organized trips to I think about eight different locations, including the famous locations of Beijing, Xi’an (home to the terracotta warriors), and a variety of other locations. I wanted to go to Guilin, but I didn’t want to be chaperoned by the school, so I organized my own trip, and left just a couple days earlier than everyone else. We had the whole week off, so why wait for Tuesday when you can leave Sunday? I actually would have left Friday, but I had some matters to attend to Saturday first.

So Sunday I got onboard a plane, which would carry me first to Shenzhen, so I could hang out with Jing a little once again. I know I took some pictures of this day, but I can’t find any of them, so I can’t really say much about what we did. The main thing we did was hang out at this one park in Shenzhen, which is nice enough, but nothing too spectacular, and contains a variety of points of interests ranging from a paleontological museum to a desert plants exhibit which just looked like San Diego. We walked a ton, and I’m sure Jing was exhausted; we took a tram back to the front of the park to make up for it, and on the walk down from there, I got some sugar cane juice, which I thought really sucked. I’d never drink it again, probably.

The day other than that was really mellow, and we wandered around some parts of the town, back to where we got Indian food in the past (this time we got some pretty decent Thai food), and down to the waterside as well. It felt like a pretty typical day out in my hometown, to be honest, and though there wasn’t much action in it (aside from one beggar boy who latched himself onto my leg for a block), it was a nice way to start off the trip.

The next day, though, I was onboard a 12 hour train to Guilin, and the fun would really begin there.

The train ride was pleasant; I made the acquaintance of all five other Chinese people within my hard sleeper compartment, and we all chatted until about 11pm, when the lights got shut off. From there, I pretended to sleep, until we got dropped off at around 7am in Guilin’s central area.

I already had a hostel booking for Guilin, but I had forgotten to write down any pertinent information for it at all, so there was basically no way for me to find my way when I got off the train. I chose a direction on the main street (left) and walked, hoping I would at least find something of interest.

Fittingly enough, given the end of my last blog entry, the first point of interest was a McDonald’s, where I had an amazing fast food breakfast, and asked for directions to the nearest internet bar, most of which tend to be 24 hour deals. There happened to be one just around the corner, and when I went in, they let me use it free of charge, since I just needed to check this place’s address and phone number.

I had to wander back another 40 minutes to get to the train station and beyond a little bit, until I was able to make it onto the street where the hostel lay. A few more minutes, and I was there.

It was too early to actually check in to my room, but I could at least pay, and drop my stuff off. I hung out and got online for a little while, and recharged my camera, until I thought I was ready to go out and face the town. I rented a bike, left everything other than my camera and keys, and got rolling.

I had also purchased a bike, and I had roughly sketched out an idea of what I wanted to see in the city. First I wanted to head northwest, where it seemed the city would give way to decent views of more or less undisturbed nature. There were also some marked out points of interest along the way, so I circled those, and set for it.

I had some pleasant meandering through the city first, trying to get my bearings in relation to the map, and wound up with these pictures:

But not long after I was able to find my way to the main road that would take me to the Reed Spring Cave or something like that. This road was not nearly as crowded with buildings and such, and it took a while until I reached any signs (other than the road signs) that confirmed I was heading in the right direction. I rode up through a parking lot and parked my bike where a few other bikes were parked, locked it, and walked up to the ticket office.

The lot wasn’t empty by any means, but there weren’t many people around. The faint sounds of children’s voices in the near distance loomed, but I paid it no heed. Two Chinese girls were at the ticket office before me, and kind of looked at me as though they thought maybe I was in the wrong place.

After they got their tickets, I walked up, and asked (as I always do) if they had student discount tickets. The lady in the ticket booth threw a gargle of words at me I couldn’t fully make out, but her hand gestures led me to believe I was supposed to go somewhere to my left.

So I started walking to my left, and directly in front of me were those same two Chinese girls, plus a middle-aged Chinese man, who was beckoning for me to join them.

Turned out he was a tour guide, and I was joining a free tour given to explain the culture of the . . . Zhuang people of the area, if I recall correctly. Of course the tour was conducted entirely in Chinese, and for the first thirty minutes, at least, I was completely silent. The guide showed us around to some important tree where they hung their lucky charms or what have you:

And then took us into a building upstairs to have our fortunes read, by official Zhuang fortune tellers who also offered to sell us magic turtles. I politely declined.

We had our names written on those lucky charms, though, and hung them on that same tree ourselves, after which we were told to walk around it three times in one direction in a circle, and then three times again in the other direction. The girls found this about as funny as I did, and this is really what broke the ice between us, and we chatted regularly throughout the rest of the day.

At this point, our tour of the Zhuang people’s culture and history was pretty much over. The next stop at this area was the caves, and so our guide walked us towards them . . . and towards our doom. Or at least mine.

Those children’s voices I had heard when I first arrived to the park? I don’t know exactly what the deal was, but it seems as though all the primary school children of the province were on a school fieldtrip to this location today; literally, there were probably at least five hundred young children, if not more. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if there was up to a thousand over the course of the day.

I was the only foreigner. Do you have any idea what that means? It shouldn’t be too hard to guess.

The legions of children yelled and screamed and waved and smiled and pointed and gesticulated wildly, not in unison, but in anarchy. They were far more interested in me than in the caves. I don’t know how many times I said hello, but it was definitely at least a couple of hundred times. The girls I was (at this point) with thought it was quite amusing, and I’m sure if I was in their shoes I’d feel the same. Instead, though, I felt the need for some battlements and forts.

I tried to play nice though, and I even chatted with a couple of children for more than a minute or two, but it was exhausting, I’m not going to lie.

Here’s a picture of the hordes:

Then we got into the cave, finally, after a bit of confusion as to where we were supposed to wait in line.

The caves were sort of a waste of time. What I saw in Jiuxiang back in Yunnan some months ago was just as good, if not better, and it all had the same silly Chinese lighting that is commonplace these days. Going through it made me resolve to not go to any caves again unless its pretty natural.

I experimented with my camera in the light settings a bit, though, to try to get at least a picture or two that I thought were interesting, this is what I was able to come up with:

The girls and I wandered through slowly, obliging whenever children wanted to talk to me a little, and even the occasional photo session.

The girls seemed to enjoy it, though, so there’s that I guess. Finally we got through the caverns, and we just chatted aimlessly for a while afterwards, before going our separate ways. I went to find my bike, and then started riding along the road that would take me even further northwest and away from the town. While I started to set off, I saw the girls again, so I decided to pull over and ask for their numbers, as they were going to Yangshuo in two days, when I’d still be there, and I figured it’d be nice to meet up again if possible. They agreed, and I took a couple pictures of some sad bamboo rafts next to us, then took off again.

From this point, I took a northwesterly route around the area of Guilin to get away from the city and into its foothills, to try and imagine what the scenery would be like without all the modern urban settings intruding. I found quite a few graveyards on the sides of mountains, and not for the first time wondered where people go when they die in Shanghai. The population is exponentially larger in Shanghai, yet I’ve never seen a space for the dead. I suspect many are cremated, but I have nothing to back this up.

Over the next hour or two, I found myself bicycling through some pretty rickety places, and some of it was quite charming, such as it was, even if absolutely desolate, and impossible to imagine someone living in. A couple of dilapidated factories also lit up the sides of the road, here and there, and interestingly enough they were actually marked on the tourist maps of Guilin, but I suspect no one really thought of them as tourist attractions.

I kept heading north from there, but didn’t really intend to. It took me a while to precisely place myself on the map, and I had to ask some locals for a bit of help as well. Their reaction basically boiled down to “Whoa man, you’re wayyyyyyy off the map right now” but they were still able to point me in the right cardinal direction to get back to town.

It was still pretty early in the day, maybe around 3pm or so, so my next destination in mind was an old fortress/palace/whatever in the middle of town with big city walls, you know, the whole nine yards of typical ancient Chinese stuff. It was really not that interesting. I’ll throw a couple of pictures at you real quick just for the fun of it, but the most exciting part about it was being able to go take pictures in the same place Sun Yat Sen and his wife did (/sarcasm). I posted a picture about that a while back, but I’ll re-post it for your convenience and since its been long enough anyway. After is a picture of the view from the top where they would have taken photos.

There was one slightly interesting thing about the fortress on top of the small mountain here, that was totally random, and its in this picture:

That red paper lantern you see in this picture is probably at least fifteen feet away from the stairs’ edge, and several feet below as well. There’s no discernible overhang or ledge that one could hang from or stand upon to get to it, and yet the lantern is tied onto it. As far as I can imagine, the only possibility would be for someone to have let themselves down slowly to it on a rope from the top. In my opinion, this lantern’s existence is either insanity, or a testament to mankind’s will to conquer nature, or both. You be the judge.

After this, the plan was to go to a place that translates to something like Nine Star Sightseeing Locations or something along those lines, and see whatever that park had to offer. Once again, I hopped on my bike and trudged on over.

Outside of the park, a man requested a couple of yuan to look after my bike in the bike parking lot. There were quite a few other bikes and motorbikes parked in an orderly fashion there, so I figured it was probably legitimate, gave him a couple of yuan, and locked my bike up anyway, then went inside.

Again, let’s get this over with quick. The park was boring. It ranged from the illustrious Bactrian camel scene (wherein a lump of rock is supposed to look like a camel. I guess it kind of does, in this case):

To the chained peacocks forced to sit there for people to take photos with:

To a modest grotto, which I thought was actually the most interesting part of the place, if still essentially mysterious given the fact that my Chinese is not nearly advanced enough to make much out of these writings:

I took my time walking around as much of the park as possible; early on, I ran into the same two girls I had seen and walked with in the Zhuang village area and the caves, and we chatted briefly while diverging again. Eventually I found my way into some back paths that were clearly not really intended for tourist purposes, though still fully accessible, and found some nice little shrines:

This area was littered with goldleaf shrines, yet totally unmarked from any tourist information I had thus far seen. Afterwards, I found myself wandering back through some peacocks, and then through the back entrance of the saddest zoo I’ve seen in my life.

The exhibits were few, with the first one I could see being these masses of deer or gazelles or whatever they are, all saddled up to the side of their enclosure, giving great attention to anyone that came by (in this case just me, there was no one else around), probably in hopes of gaining freedom again.

Just past the Bambis was this sad girl:

Notice her sagging humps. I am no expert on camel health, but Im guessing that this animal was in severe malnutrition. Just behind her was another curious beast, and albino ox, featured together in this picture:

The animals moved with a solemn acceptance of their fate, and I couldn’t help but be moved. As I stood there frozen in empathy, a couple of Chinese handlers came in and knocked them around a bit to get them out of the way while placing their food supplies in proper order and such. It was pretty miserable.

I made my way out of the zoo, and found myself back at the peacocks yet again. By chance, I found those two girls again. Their names, for reference sake, are Chu Yang and Le Le. At this point, we joined together to go to the last parts of the park that none of us had visited yet. They were also mostly unimpressed with the area, but in good company such things are minor.

The last place we had not yet visited was a temple to the west of the park, so we wandered over there, talking about any old thing. It was really nice practice for my Chinese, actually; Chu Yang in particular had a way about her that suggested she’d be a good teacher, especially for children. She seemed to have infinite patience, and willingly explained things multiple times in different ways until I understood.

The temple was a nice clean structure, but also relatively unimpressive, so after taking a few photos, we headed back to the entrance of the park, said our goodbyes yet again, and went our separate ways.

When I went back to my bike, though, it was gone.

Not only that, the guy who had been ostensibly paid to watch it was nowhere in sight. Another lady was sitting on the steps, so I asked her where my bike was. She didn’t know, of course, and so she went and found that guy I had paid. As soon as he saw me and realized the situation, he started to run, but somehow, the way the situation occurred, I knew it wasn’t because he was running away from me, but that he was for some reason trying to run after the bike. Which seems really quite silly because the bike was obviously gone, and that’s all there was to it.

I waited a short time for him to come back and produce results; he didn’t, of course, so I called my hostel. The manager called the police, and said she would come to my location and assist as well.

Shortly after this, a police van pulled up. They somehow knew who the guy was pretty quickly, and started berating him immediately. The lady I had first found on the steps when coming back to the bike area ran towards the police van, as you can see in this photo:

Apparently the hostel manager had already explained the situation in quite some detail to the police, including what the price of the bike was (about 60-70USD) and that the people who I had paid to watch over the bike would be held accountable.

These people, though, were destitute. “These people” also consisted of more than just the two already mentioned; in fact there was a small community of them, and they were all in one way or another disabled. The guy I had originally paid didn’t have all his fingers, and his left ear appeared to have been lost in a fire. The woman seemed to be actually mentally unstable, not quite all there. The chances of them being able to pay this much for the bike was nil; I knew that from the get go. I kind of hoped from the beginning that the hostel manager would be willing to try to get maybe half of the price out of them and then let it go, maybe at most asking me to chip in a token amount, since it hadn’t been my fault to begin with.

The hostel manager was nowhere to be found, at first, though. I called again to see what was up, it seemed she was on her way, but that’s about all I could know for sure. The cops wanted me to get in the van with them, though; they had already taken my statement and checked my identification, and wanted me to go with them and the guy who for all intents and purposes at the moment was the perpetrator. I wasn’t exactly keen on this situation, but it seemed pretty safe. No one seemed to try to be putting me to any blame at all, so I went along with it.

At this point, that guy had already given three different accounts about what happened. The first one was tbat the bike had simply disappeared. The next time, a group of eight bike thieves had come by with lock cutters, obviously there’s no way he could have stopped them, he’s just a poor weak guy. The third time was basically the same as the second, but different numbers.

I knew it was going to be a long night.

So we went to the police station; awkwardly, I was asked to sit next to the guy in the van. He was pissed, but passive aggressive, and didn’t yell at me or anything of the sort. I phoned my manager again and let her know where I was going, it seems we left the scene of the crime at the same time as she had arrived, so I’d have to wait a bit longer for her to show up at the police station as well.

She showed up pretty soon, though. This was actually the first time I had met her, I think... but maybe not. Its possible I had met her the morning I had arrived, I don’t quite remember. For the next four or five hours, though, we were stuck at the police station trying to get this situation resolved. Early on, the police told us that it was basically our problem to figure out, and that even though the guy was totally technically in the wrong, he was not prosecutable owing to his disability. Essentially, this park allows this guy and the other disabled people to sit outside asking for money to watch over the bikes because they have nowhere else to go, no other job they could possibly acquire, but doesn’t actually give them any wages or anything of the sort, therefore not having any official relationship with the disabled people. It wasn’t the first time a bike had been stolen in this way, and in fact, it wasn’t even the first time my hostel had had to put up with such a situation.

The guy knew he was in the wrong, the main problem to him at this point was the amount of money to be paid. He insisted he only had 50 yuan, and that he could not possibly pay the full 450. We were actually asking for 300, or at least my hostel manager was, and he wouldn’t agree to this, nor, after hours of negotiating, would he agree to much of anything else. Finally, hours later, my manager was able to get him to sign a confession of sorts and a claim of responsibility for paying up. The plan was for him to go around to some people he knew the next day to borrow some money; actually, in the middle of all this, he went on a short trip with the police to someone he knew for the same reason, but they weren’t home.

What could I do? My hands were tied, and I knew this meant that I’d have to pay for the bike. In these hours, my hostel manager and I talked quite a bit and got to know each other fairly well; at one point, she started weeping over the proceedings, because she felt the way this disabled man was acting was shameful, and it made her reflect on the horrors of disability that her own close relatives (grandfather? I can’t remember) had gone through, but with greater integrity.

At that point, I knew that we had talked enough and gotten to be friendly enough that she would have felt awkward in persisting to ask me for the price to replace the bike; if I had wanted to, I probably could have ignored it and just gone on traveling without worrying about it. Sometimes, though, I have a conscience, and so I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that this time. I didn’t give her the money right then, and instead waited until the next morning, but I did give her the money nevertheless.

Here’s a picture in the police station of the guy signing that statement:

Finally, at around 9:30pm or maybe even later, we left the police station, and got on a bus back to the hostel. It had been a pretty long day, so I sat inside and relaxed for the rest of the night after getting some quick noodles. There, I met a couple of Chinese girls and an American girl and discussed Taiwan and politics for a while, always a good way to have fun in China. Although the Chinese girls got angry, one of them was also planning on going to Yangshuo the next morning, so we decided we’d get a bus together in the morning. Shortly after this, I got some dearly needed sleep, buzzing with excitement nevertheless; Yangshuo is the primary rock climbing destination of all of China, and I’ve been wanting to got here for quite some time because of it.