The King Donut

So, the next day, Jing and I got up bright and early to get a bus to Yongding Village, or Yongding County, depending on how you want to translate it. I guess county works a bit better, its not just one small village.

There’s one distinctive thing about Yongding county, and that’s the legacy left behind by the Hakka ethnic peoples who live in the area. The Hakkas were a pretty mobile people, and live over a vast swathe of East Asia, going as far south as Singapore and as far east as Taiwan, and their language is variously referred to as Hakka, Minnan (literally means “People of the South”) or Taiwanese, although only Taiwanese people (who are mostly not Hakka) call it Taiwanese.

The culture is interesting enough to be appreciated on its own, but it has a special legacy in this portion of Fujian. They built a lot of massive buildings called “tulou”, which means “earth building”, although the “building” suggested by the word “lou” suggests a tall building in particular, usually with many levels. I’m not going to show a picture yet, but basically the deal is they’re these great donut-shaped buildings, which were combination forts and apartment buildings, and they more or less dot the landscape here. I thought it sounded interesting, so, on the itinerary it went.

It took several hours to get there from Xiamen, and there may or may not have been a transfer. At this point I hardly care. All of a sudden, though, we were dropped off in the middle of pretty much nowhere. That’s not entirely fair to say. Actually, just a little earlier, our bas had driven by a big ol’ tulou, and I got pretty excited, but it turned out that was not where we were going.

So, one false alarm later, they drop us off at a stop directly across from another big tulou and a healthy kick to the ass to figure out what was going on on our own.

Immediately, hawkers came up asking if we wanted a night in a tulou. Although I was interested, I was a bit worried that it would be a bit expensive due to the holiday period. The price was indeed raised, from 35RMB to 50RMB. This meant that it cost about 7 USD a night. That, I was okay with. So immediately, Jing and I signed up for a room. I mean, come on, look at the thing. It IS pretty cool.

A Dutch guy named Eric had been on our bus as well, and he didn’t speak a single word of Chinese, and ended up tagging along with us to make use of my translation services. He was also interested in grabbing a room in the donut, and when we were chosen the assorted possible rooms, he deferred to the smallest room and granted us the largest, not that the size mattered much, its not like we’re talking about the Hilton here. Here’s a couple pictures of the room Jing and I shared to illustrate, as well as some pictures of the interior and exterior of the tulou in general:

With that taken care of, keys were handed out, and then we were referred to a restaurant across the street, where we could make arrangements to go sightseeing.

Now, usually I’m not a big fan of referred services. They tend to be friends, relatives, whatever, and have inflated prices. However, this town was immediately obviously so small that we weren’t going to really have much of a choice. In truth, the three of us (Erik was a permanent member of our group at this point) walked around a bit to look at other places, before deciding the first one was probably the best one anyway.

After a bit of discussion and trying to figure out what our options were, we settled upon hiring a minivan and driver to take us to a few locations. They didn’t ask for TOO much money for it, and split between the three of us, I felt basically okay with it. Next, we just had to wait for the driver to show up. So in the meantime, the restaurant/travel committee supplied us with some basic food, on the house, and man was it basic. Also got some steamed dumplings that were probably steamed the day before, and filled with peanuts, which was something I hadn’t expected. It was actually not bad, and at least managed to fill my stomach, so no complaints there.

Finally the driver showed up, and after a bit of a tease where we thought maybe two other people would hop in and split the costs even more, we headed off for some tulou hunting. Our first destination was the biggest tulou complex; due to the way the roads were laid out, basically, our driver was going to go straight there, and as we worked our way back we’d stop by some other places that we had passed by on the way.

We reached one small commercial street where there was actually a traffic jam, which made us worry about how the rest of this drive was going to be (the traffic jam was pretty thick, given the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere), but it turned out there was no need. The rest of the drive was smooth sailing, and we were treated to nice views from afar of the primary tulou complex that we were coming up to, as the road wove around the edge of the mountains in a circular path towards it.

The path terminated at a spot above the tulou complex, actually, to give people the chance to take photos just like these:

From there, we walked through a simple path that took us directly into this tulou complex, wandered around the various wings (although they wouldn’t let you go upstairs), read placards, etc. There were also many people selling souvenirs and knick-knacks, especially lots of little things that were tulou themed. You wouldn’t believe the variety in regards to this. There were also lots of tacky paintings for sale and the like. Here’s some pictures of us wandering:

From there, we took another simple trail over to another part of the road we had originally come from to meet back up with our driver, who then took us to yet another scenic spot viewing the same thing we had just spent a half hour with.

From there we drove to another tulou complex, one that was quite a bit older. According to this sign:

It was built in roughly 1300AD (don’t pay attention to the English translation, the Chinese writing says 1300.) It was a bit more authentic feeling, whatever that means. Here’s some more pictures:

There wasn’t really a lot more to say about that location. From there, we drove back to the site of the traffic jam earlier on. Our drive pulled over and told us to get out, but didn’t really tell us much of anything else. So I took a picture from our parked spot. Eventually we figured out that we were supposed to head up in a certain direction, and that we’d come to yet another point of interest. So we walked through some random buildings that exuded a musky aroma, and past some shacks of tea leaves in various states of roasted-ness.

After that, and some stair crawling, I came across a temple that looked like something out of a video game. It had a small, simple complex, but a semi-circle pool in front of it filled with opaque green water, surrounded by what looked like twenty or thirty feet spires. I swear I’ve seen a place in a video game where you fight the devil or something that looks just like it.

It wasn’t easy to get a picture of the whole thing, an aerial photograph would really be necessary to do so, but I did the best I could by scaling a hill behind it. Here’s a few that together should give a good idea:

Next to this, sure enough, was another tulou. This one was kind of interesting though because it wasn’t really set up to be a tourist attraction, it was actually just a regular tulou that people live in, if you can imagine such a thing. I wandered around it and found a tea leaf roasting chamber, and spied some kids watching some form of music television, where they had a music video of a huge Korean pop group called the Wonder Girls playing. The world is never quite as big as you’d think it is, apparently.

After that, it took a while to find Erik and Jing again, but maybe ten or fifteen minutes later we rounded up and headed back towards our driver, having been satisfied with our exploration of the area. Before we got into the van again, though, we all decided to have a ice cream break, that absolutely critical recharge of all recharges while traveling. The three of us each bought different kinds of ice cream, as you can see here:

The one I got was horrible. I mean, it was some of the worst ice cream I’d ever had. Essentially it was compacted shaved ice with a hint of flavoring, bad chocolate on the outside, and sunflower seeds. Who puts sunflower seeds on ice cream? Apparently China does. Oh, China.

So we hopped back into the van and headed back towards our home. Night was starting to fall, and we didn’t have much time left. Before we went home, though, there was one last tulou to check out, the king of all tulous. Its Chinese name is actually something like King Tulou, to be honest. Its certainly the largest, but when we arrived, we had decided we’d already seen enough of them for one day, that we’d be content to just see it from the outside. Our driver had told us that there was a chance that, since it was nighttime, that they might wave the admission fee or perhaps they might not even be around to collect it; that being the case, we weren’t opposed to going in, just to paying to enter.

Well, the admission collectors were still there and still quite keen on collecting, so we shined it, and just took in the sight of this thing’s exterior. I don’t know if you can appraise it from this picture, but it certainly was pretty big:

That being said, there wasn’t much to do in the area, so after just five minutes or so, and one vague consideration of trying to break in (followed by Erik and I’s mutual agreement that the people in the area would probably notice two big white guys that they didn’t recall paying entrance fees) later, we got back in the van and headed back home.

By the time we got home, it was actually dark, and we were hungry, so we went looking for a place to eat dinner. Nothing looked particularly promising, and I’m not fond of getting food from the first place closest to one’s lodgings, but ultimately we decided that all of the restaurants actually looked almost identical, so we sat down in one fairly close to where we lived, and settled in.

Erik and I ended up chatting for quite a while about all the usual things; he was surprised to find I was aware of the current developments in Dutch politics (not due to me being particularly keen on Dutch politics, mind you, only because I have a couple of other Dutch friends), and so we talked about that and related topics at length. It was a pretty pleasant conversation, actually, even if it isn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea.

As I was starting to see with a rather large frequency, Erik was a man who had quit his job back at home due to some sort of dissatisfaction, be it with that particular job itself or with a certain restlessness that I think most of us can empathize with. I can’t remember the exact length of time Erik was planning on traveling for, but the standards that people tended to say over and over were either six months or a full year, though the truth is probably not as precise as that.

My traveling was pretty different from theirs, in general, I think, as it was never for so long a period of time (although my time away from America was certainly more than that), and I was never giving everything up and going. My traveling, thus far, has all fit between different sensible transition periods anyway, and so has actually been fairly convenient. So it is that I have a hard time understanding exactly how daunting it must be to be someone in their shoes, whether they’re 17 or 47. Erik seemed to be quite well adjusted for it, though, and I hope to hear that the world finds him well even today, 4 months later.

At some point, we all settled into our own little worlds, while waiting for a certain time to strike. At this point in time, the New York Times was arranging a worldwide photo project called “A Moment in Time” in which they asked for anyone and everyone around the world to take a photo a set global time, then submit them online for a large collage. I thought this idea was pretty neat, so I got my fellow travelers for the day onboard and we waited.

When the proper time struck, I took a picture, and here it was:

It wasn’t particularly exciting, but it was an honest representation of what our lives consisted of at the time. Erik still had several months of traveling ahead of him, and so is quite likely to have his nose buried in various travel resources late at night most nights for the forseeable future, whereas Jing as not so far from home, and just as likely to keep using her Chinese cell phone to check out the latest gossip or text her friends, while all of us were gathered around a bunch of sub par food and sub par beer.

A little after that, it was late enough (around 11pm), so we decided to head back home to our wooden plank beds in the tulou nearby, only to find that our tulou was all locked up! We spent some time trying to force it open, but to no avail. We all decided it’d be funny to stage an exaggerated attempt to get in for the purposes of an alternate photo shoot for the Moment in Time project, and so my friends posed thusly:

After a little while, we despaired a bit of what to do. No one was coming to the door, and it didn’t seem they were going to any time soon. A quick scan of the building suggested that there were only a few lights on, a couple of which might’ve been ours that we left on early in the day, and at least one of which we were hoping belonged to people who could actually do something about our plight.

There was actually a police station just across from the building, so we went over there and explained our situation. A police officer joined us to go back down to the tulou to inspect the situation, and when he was convinced that yes, we weren’t idiots and knew how to open unlocked doors, of which this was not one, then he used his gadgetry to eventually get ahold of the people who ran the place. It took longer than it should have, but then again we were sleeping in a hundreds of years old clay donut. What can you really expect, you know?

Eventually they did come down, with barely an apology in hand for us. Apparently they close those buildings up at about 8pm, which seems just over the edge of ridiculous in my book. A 10 pm closure I could understand, but what’s the point of closing it at 8? They’re not going to get much more than eight hours of sleep, they’re definitely not getting up at 4am, and there’s nothing to do INSIDE of the tulou. Whatever.

Anyway, we silently headed back up to our rooms and got as much sleep as we could, which wasn’t all that much, given what we had to work with. The temperature was alright, but the beds were really literally wooden boxes with blankets thrown on top.

The next morning, we all got up at roughly the same time, and got ready to leave. I decided with Jing that we would just go back to Xiamen instead of going to Wutaishan, as I had originally planned, because it just didn’t seem like Jing was very interested in going there anyway, and it would’ve been pretty hard to fit in our admittedly short schedule.

Erik I think had originally been considering another day in the area, but one day with the tulous had turned out to be more than enough, as we all had discovered. Seen one tulou, seen ‘em all, more or less. So he was going to go back to Xiamen as well. Thus, we banded together yet again for a short time.

We could’ve taken a direct bus to Xiamen, but we would’ve had to wait a few hours for the first bus out to do so. So I made the decision to go a bit more roundabout, and go from Yongding to another transit hub that would have more frequent buses to Xiamen. From the information I had on hand, it seemed as though I would be able to do this and actually arrive in Xiamen than I would have otherwise. Jing didn’t really have a choice but to go along with my plan, and Erik seemed to trust in me, so we all went the way I planned.

The punchline is that things went a couple hours slower than suggested, and we got into Xiamen ultimately at about the same time that we probably would have had we taken a direct bus.

At that transit station, we wandered around as much as we could, as we still had some time to kill until the next bus. We had a decent lunch, and then asked around for directions as to whether there was anything worth doing in the area. This one lady responded to Jing approximately so: “Oh yeah, go to this one place, there’s bags and shoes, they’ve got everything!”

We weren’t exactly convinced, but we had little else to do, so we went over there.

Sure enough, there were bags and shoes, but everything? Not so much. The place looked pretty run down, too, yet also it looked as though its been waiting for some grand event that never happened. Here’s a few pictures:

It only took about five minutes to realize that the area wasn’t worth our time. I felt like a cup of coffee, so I asked Jing if she’d accompany me to a McDonald’s, assuming there was one, and she happily tagged along, while Erik decided he’d just wander a bit before heading back to the bus station, and we would meet again an hour later, or whatever it was.

So Jing and I went over to fetch a moto-taxi, which whisked us away to the Golden Arches. The driver quizzically asked me if I am Singaporean. If anyone can come up with a plausible explanation to this question, I’ll give you five US Dollars. For real. I was so taken aback by it, I didn’t even think to laugh until a couple minutes had passed by.

A few minutes later, we were at McDonald’s sure enough, and I got my coffee (and a McFlurry!). I’m pretty sure that store has almost never seen a non-Chinese person enter it, so I got a LOT of stares, more than I even got on the streets in general, which was just a little bit off-putting. I tried to have fun with it though, made some schoolgirls blush and some children scared. You know, the usual.

We didn’t stay long, though, as we wanted to make sure we got back to the bus station in time to catch our bus. After the three of us hopped onto that, we all pretty much slept through it, as we didn’t have much else to do. At some point during these bus rides, I finished reading Krakatoa, and I think Erik might’ve even taken a look at it, given that the Dutch were featured quite heavily in it (given that they were Indonesia’s colonial masters all the way up through the middle of the 20^th century).

At the terminal bus station in Xiamen, the three of us got together in a taxi as well, as Erik’s hotel was 2/3 of the way along the path to the hostel Jing and I were staying at. We chatted a bit more on the ride, and said our farewells at the door, and rode on.

The rest of the night was pleasant. There wasn’t much to do, so Jing and I spent some time at the beachside of Xiamen, where there were a surprising number of people (in my opinion) milling about. The beach was comfortable there, and the sand wasn’t half bad, basically the same as the sand at the beaches of my hometown. The surf was almost non-existent, though, and so it was a very calm place for people to hang out at. I saw some people play hopskotch, some people playing in the sand, some people being lovers, and Jing being Jing as she wandered around the beach doing whatever it was she was doing. Maybe she went to dip her toes in the water, I don’t remember.

And that was our day. It really took us pretty much all day to get from Yongding to Xiamen, so we were left feeling drained at best anyhow. We still had one more day, the next day, to spend some more time in the area and enjoy ourselves, so for this evening, we decided to toss the towel in and have a quiet night.