With our time quickly winding down in China we headed out on our last domestic adventure in late October 2009. Based on strong recommendations from several of the Chinese Peace Corps staff members, we traveled East and South to two amazing sites – an ancient riverside town in western Hunan province (Fenghuang) and a minority village in central Guizhou province (Xijiang). The trip was wonderful and provided us with several images and impressions of China that we will not soon forget – one funny one that we wouldn't mind forgetting, but most that we hope to remember for many, many years to come.
We took an overnight train from Chengdu to the eastern edge of Guizhou province to a town called Tongren. Neither of us had traveled by “soft-sleeper” before (a cabin with four beds and a door), so we splurged to experience the more private four person compartment vs. the less private and more open 6-person hard sleeper arrangement. Our compartment-mates were nice people, very open and friendly, and willing to talk to a few foreigners – one was an older man from Shandong province who was in the midst of vacation in central China and the other was a young guy from Chengdu, who was headed to Shanghai and was very animated during our talks, especially when we were discussing the NBA. I was fighting a cold, and I took the top bunk and was asleep soon after the train started to move around 10pm. Charles was awake a bit longer. The younger kid in our compartment was quite agile in getting from the floor to his top bunk – picture a Chinese gymnast on the parallel bars swinging himself up to the bunk in one graceful and quick movement. This was in stark contrast to me, trying to not fall on my butt as I climbed up or down from the bunk. As everyone else was preparing for bed, which for our Chinese friends included removing all of their clothes but their underwear, Charles was “lucky” to witness the old man’s curiosity in how the kid was able to get in the bunk so quickly. This is the image referenced earlier that we’d like to forget. You can imagine that an old man in his tight briefs trying to jump up to a top bunk with his body a few inches from your face is not all that pleasant. The same scene, minus the acrobatics, was repeated early the next morning when Charles awoke to the man standing between the beds while he was putting his pants back on. “Good morning” and it’s time to get off this train!
In Tongren we met a few Peace Corps Volunteers for an early lunch before taking a bus to the town of Fenghuang in Hunan – about 1 ½ hours away. Fenghuang is a beautiful riverside town with an ancient city wall, gate towers and houses on stilts that are built into the cliffs along the riverside, all of which date from the 1600s. We enjoyed walking along both sides of the river and exploring the various shops in the narrow alleys of Fenghuang, which looked to us like an elaborate movie set rather than a vibrant authentic village. In Fenghuang we had our first stay in a Chinese guesthouse (or kezhan in Chinese). Kezhans are much simpler than hotels and are more akin to hostels. We discovered that kezhans only have squat toilets and they don’t provide towels. In shopping for towels in the old town, we found that only Chinese-style bath towels were available. “What is a Chinese style towel?” you might ask? Picture a dishtowel and you would be pretty close. While we were fine using our new Chinese towels for a few days, we missed our big American-sized bath towels and didn’t feel like we
ever got completely dry. The kezhan we stayed in was right alongside the river with a balcony that overlooked a pagoda and several old style pavilions. At night the lights on these structures provided a nice backdrop for the people that released floating candles along the river. The other amazing aspect of this kezhan was how quiet and peaceful it was at night which was a significant contrast to our Chengdu apartment (and most other places in China for that matter). Once the sun rose though, people were out living their lives in the much the same ways that they did hundreds of years ago probably; washing their clothes and vegetables in the river (note to self: “make sure vegetables consumed are well-cooked and absolutely NO salads!”)
After a couple of days we traveled from Fenghuang, Hunan to Xijiang in Guizhou by renting a car and driver from one of the Peace Corps counterpart universities in Tongren. We weren’t expecting the trip to include a couple of people from the foreign affairs office of that university, however. They were headed to a town near our destination and decided to combine the two trips. One of them was a heavy smoker who, in broken English, repeated the phrase “I need smoking” more than a few times on the trip. It turned out that these folks were incredibly warm and friendly people though and we enjoyed our conversation with them during the five-hour ride through the interesting countryside.
The beautiful mountain village of Xijiang is thought to be one of the largest traditional villages of the Miao minority. Miao (H’mong) people are spread across Southern China from northern Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. While part of Xijiang has been restored and fixed up for tourists, the majority of the village feels like it has hardly changed for centuries. The two storey houses are built of wood and stone with the lowest level devoted to livestock and the buildings all have large central windows on the upper floors where corn and peppers are hung to dry.
The majority of the inhabitants of Xijiang are farmers. Starting at the town edge and extending far into the surrounding hills were beautiful rice paddy terraces. Although the rice crop had already been harvested, we enjoyed exploring around the paddies with their odd-shaped stacks of dried rice stalks and farmers busily headed to and fro. We noticed several farmers using large woven bottomless baskets in the paddies and at first I thought they were doing something to prepare for next year’s rice crop, but when we talked to one woman who was agilely moving her basket around she told us that she was trying to catch a type of fish that thrives in the flooded paddies. These folks are nothing if not resourceful. We stopped to watch for a while and though she didn’t catch a fish while we were watching, she did pull out a few fist-sized clams. We walked for a few hours in the terraces along the river and away from the village, enjoying the clean air, the beautiful scenery and exchanging friendly greetings with the many farmers that we encountered along the way.
Back in the village, we found a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that served one of the local specialties: hot and sour fish soup. While we enjoyed the soup, during our meal we were alarmed by the many bursts of small firecrackers that were being set-off by kids. Since we arrived (the day before) the firecrackers had been going off throughout the town, at times startling us and making us jump. At first we were annoyed and thought it was a plot to frighten tourists, but after lunch, a shop vendor explained to us that the Miao New Year was being celebrated that evening. As the night began, the fireworks and firecrackers increased in intensity, and at midnight we were awakened to a booming onslaught of firecrackers that lit up and shook the entire village. Charles tells me that it was quite a sight. He watched for several minutes as the ground-level sparks and rumbling reminded him of a scene in Apocalypse Now, but I was too lazy to get out of bed!
The next morning we took a bus to the nearby larger city of Kaili. On our walk to the bus station, we saw a restaurant sign that just cracked us up. Guizhou is famous for its culinary specialty “dog hotpot”, which is dog meat served in a spicy soup. The sign had a picture of the dog on it that looked absolutely (and rightly so) petrified. We thought it was a riot, and don’t worry, we didn’t show the photo to Marley when we got back to Chengdu!
The bus ride to Kaili through the mountain passes of Guizhou was winding and beautiful and it gave us an appreciation for how separated and hidden the various Miao villages we passed were from each other- and from the rest of China. After a brief stop in Kaili, we took another bus, although this one was not as scenic, to the capital of Guizhou, Guiyang, and from there we flew back to Chengdu.
This trip was a wonderful trip of planes, trains, automobiles and buses, which allowed us to explore western China for one final time. For that reason alone, this trip was especially memorable because we don’t know if we’ll ever make it back to China again. But it was also memorable because we saw some of the most beautiful sights that we had ever seen here in China during this last trip. Over the last 2+ years, we’ve had some amazing trips within this large and diverse country. We’ve seen the beautiful ice sculptures in Haerbin, the famous Great Wall in Beijing, impressive and serene karst mountains in Guangxi, the colonial Bund of Shanghai, and the natural beauty of Jiuzhaigou in northern Sichuan to name just a few of the places we’ve seen. This last trip really drove home that fact that this has been a fascinating and beautiful country to have explored during the time when we called Chengdu our home.
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