Green China: Guilin and Yangshou

Looks like I saved the best trip for last! Guilin has been on my radar since 2009 when I first came to China as a study abroad student. I can still recall a mid October trip, where we had to choose between Gansu and Guilin. Thinking I would never have a chance to see Gansu again, I attended that trip instead (not knowing I would end up spending two years in Gansu for Peace Corps!)

So now, 9 years after my 2009 semester abroad trip, I FINALLY made it to Guilin (Yangshuo specifically) and was not disappointed. It was worth the decade long wait… Yangshuo in the summer is the most beautiful place I’ve visited in China these two years.

Endless rice fields, karst mountains jutting out of the earth in all sorts of shapes and sizes, small villages squeezed between hills and streams, all lined with easy bike trails for the avid explorer.

Yangshuo is well developed from the tourism front- a hotel for foreigners in China (foreigners are sometimes required to stay in separate hotels, especially the further west you go) costs over $70 USD in areas like Qinghai (where three police banged on my door in the middle of the night to check my passport). Here, decent hotels were under $30 USD a night, no pesky police in site.

Full day bike rentals were also inexpensive- I paid just 15 RMB ($2 USD) to rent a bike at a shop across the street from where I stayed. The dozens of bike rental storefronts here have helped drive down prices (whereas in Menyuan Qinghai, I paid 100 RMB per day at a monopoly of a bike rental shop)

Anyway, the four day trip was refreshing and fulfilling, a break from the brownness and yellowness of my desert life in Gansu. The weather was sweltering and humid, but I didn’t mind – I spent entire days biking around shirtless to keep cool and perfect my tan.

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I was hesitant to take part in an hour long touristy raft experience, but was glad I did it. I locked my bike at the south end of the river, jumped on the back of a middle-aged woman’s moped (she hooked me up with tickets) and rode north for several kilometers before arriving at a wharf to board a bamboo raft, life vest and all.

It was great to take in the view on the slow moving river, to leisurely and lazily soak in all the sights and sounds of nature. As much as I love biking, it’s never a bad thing to sit, relax and not pull out my phone to check google maps for an entire hour. 

I let my feet dabble in the water for a while, and asked the guy who was paddling my raft if he would ever swim these waters. He said absolutely not – the river was full of raw sewage from all the homes lining the nearby streams. Immediately, I plucked my feet out of the E.coli infested waters…

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The nearby villages provided a peek at what life here was like before urbanization, globalization and digitization hit China hard. times were quieter, earthier, and more enjoyable to say the least.

Hens and roosters prodded at the dirt roads, cats and dogs fought over shreds of leftover fish that their owner had just discarded from preparing dinner, and elderly women were hunched over on the ground, laying out piles of chili peppers to dry.

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Moon Hill was also impressive, a sweaty half hour hike up hundreds of steps to see (not surprisingly) a moon-shaped hill, with a pleasant view of the countryside from above.

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In Yangshuo it was common to see girlscouts selling ice pops for a couple kuai. (the boxes read: mung bean ice pops, flavor of childhood!) and the girls would wear their hair in adorable braids and put on a Mao era hat, tie, and shirt.

I didn’t think much of it, but after posting a photo on weChat, an elderly couple I met months ago left a comment that sent chills down my spine:  服装让我想到那个年代的历史不堪回首，而这些天真无知的孩子却全然不知只是作秀吸眼球

“their uniforms remind me of that time period in history… the memories that I cannot bear to recall… these days the kids have no knowledge of any of that, they just wear it to attract attention”

Cycling Trips: MenYuan, XiaHe

From June – August, most parts of China during the summer become unbearably hot and humid. Historically there were three furnaces (三大火炉) – Chongqing, Nanjing, and Wuhan- cities that were notorious for their deathly summer heat. Then there were four furnaces (Changsha being the forth), then seven… and now thanks to global warming there are like 20+ furnace cities in China.

Luckily for us in the northwest, we have wonderfully tolerable summer days, due to high altitude and low humidity. This makes for great exploration of the vast fields/ plains/ grasslands that make up most of Qinghai and some parts of Gansu. I spent some time in MenYuan and XiaHe to enjoy the scenery and good climate- and was smart enough to bring a jacket, as temperatures plummeted at night.

MenYuan

MenYuan is two hours northwest of Lanzhou by high speed rail. Had I arrived in mid-July, i would have been greeted with endless fields of bright yellow canola flowers. I went a week late (around the end of July) and missed out on peak-canola season, but the vista was still astounding. 

I couldn’t find anything online about how to rent a bicycle, but that wasnt an issue in the end- the plaza outside the MenYuan rail station hosted a bike rental shop for the adventurous traveler. A full day rental costs 100 RMB, and i dropped off my US Passport as a deposit (the guys at the shop had never seen one, and gleefully passed it around for a short while) 

i swerved off the main highway into the small villages to check out the scene. the lifestyle there was still very traditional- people had collected cow dung to burn for fuel, and piled the dried dung into large mounds. (village not pictured, but see cows below)

there were also many beekeepers who come through Qinghai in the summer to let their bees do the work of pollinating the flowers, and collect fresh honey in return.

the downside is that I must have rode through areas of heavy bee traffic, and a bee got caught in my hair and stung my scalp! (a bee trapped in human hair will recognize the situation to be a bear attack, and sting when it cannot get out of what it thinks is bear fur. i know this from my Redhook community farm beekeeping days! see below for evidence from 2014)

The sting caused lingering pain for a good 15 – 20 minutes. i decided to protect myself by wrapping my hair in my t-shirt for the rest of the day…

Xiahe

I had come here last summer to see Labrang Monastery, and returned again to check out the local grasslands. I rented a bike for 50 RMB and rode south of the monastery.

the views were not as splendid as the plains in Qinghai (mostly because the grasslands here have been fenced off, and no matter how far away from the touristy areas i biked, everything was still enclosed). however, i did see a lot of bored-looking horses; born with the ability to run endlessly through the wilderness, but fated to spend a lifetime sequestered in a few acres of land to pose with tourists for a small sum of money. 

i sent the horse photo to my parents (“oh no! the baby horse is dead!”) but i think foals sleep on the ground… i think…

the street signs were interesting where everything was written three times- in simplified Chinese, tibetan script, and English (or a phonetic translation of tibetan script, more accurately. the tibetan script pronunciation sounds nothing like mandarin chinese)

at some point, the distant dark clouds caught up with me, and on my return journey home i was forced to ride under a patch of cloud that was relentlessly pounding the ground below with rain… i didnt want to miss the bus back to Lanzhou so i had no choice but to speed through the 1km span of angry cloud, and was utterly drenched… but a few minutes later i emerged into the sunshine yet again!

Huashan 华山

Huashan (Mount Hua) is one of many historically significant peaks in China. It is grouped as part of the Five Great Mountains (representing four directions/ seasons plus a central anchoring point) – not to be confused with the Four Sacred Mountains of Buddhism, which is different from the Four Sacred Mountains of Taoism!  (China is huge and its history stretches for 5,000+ years; there’s something for everyone, as far as mountain ranges and ancient capitals are concerned)

Tim, Denver and I set out on a weekend trip to Xi’An to take the HSK Mandarin Exam, and decided to throw in a trip to Huashan as a sweet bonus for all our hard studying 🙂 Huashan is one of those places that’s probably best done in an overnight trip- the logistics of getting in and out can be time consuming, despite the superfast bullet trains.

In Xi’An we woke up before 5 AM to get a cab to the train station for a 6:30 train- and once arriving near Huashan, it was another cab ride, a detour to purchase tickets, getting through the main ticketing area, and then another 40 minute bus ride from the main entrance to the cable car access point. By the time we actually stepped onto the mountain it was close to 9 AM!

Initially I was bummed at what seemed to be poor weather – the morning was cloudy and slightly drizzly, and I feared we spent all that money for nothing. But halfway into our costly cable car ride, we rose above the clouds and were rewarded with a stunning view of the mountains peeking through the mist:

The moment called for a sleep-deprived, but excited, selfie

I don’t think I’ve ever been on a more dramatic or beautiful cable car ride up a mountain – the landscape was ever-changing, and as the clouds drifted to and fro, hidden peaks emerged just as visible peaks disappeared into dense fog. It’s easy to see why ancient Daoists believed the gods lived under the mountains, and elixirs of immortality could be produced in this realm

Due to poor planning on my part, I only had maybe 4 hours total on the mountain (I realized it took an hour longer than anticipated to get onto the mountain, so I needed an extra hour getting back down). But I was still able to visit the West and South peaks, climbing thousands of slippery, wet steps up and down steep hills, clinging to rusty iron chain fences for support.

These chains are burdened with locks and red ribbons that were sold everywhere on the mountain- for 20 or 30 RMB you could have your name engraved on a lock and fastened anywhere on the mountain, as proof of your adventure. cute, but now instead of gripping onto a solid chain of iron, I’m gingerly grasping at flimsy locks and shreds of red fabric… dangerous…

The South Peak in particular had astonishing views of several thin, Stegosaurus plate-like mountains that were bathed in a dreamy, white cloud bath.

My elementary school teachers would be proud that I connected land formations to dinosaur fossils, but I do think that’s the most fitting description for these jagged, pressed cliffs:

After enjoying the view I bid farewell to Denver and Tim, and head back on my very early train back to Xi’An. I’m sure they had time to visit the remaining East and North Peaks… but I’ll pretend they saw nothing but fog from those vantage points, to keep myself from being too jealous 🙂 

Side note: Huashan was also shockingly expensive, close to Disney World prices. Between the park entrance ticket, roundtrip park bus tickets, roundtrip cable car tickets, etc I spent almost $100 USD. It’s hard to fathom how middle class Chinese families could casually do a trip to Huashan; nature, it seems, is a luxury in the Middle Kingdom.

Dujiangyan Irrigation System (都江堰)

In early April I set out to visit DuJiangYan, a large-scale irrigation system built some 2,200 years ago, to prevent flooding in the Sichuan plain during the rainy season. It’s the oldest surviving “non-dam irrigation system” in the world, and the levees and artificial channels are still in use today (albeit with some modern modifications), which is a testament to the ingenuity of the project and its brilliant engineer, Li Bing.

Legend has it that once Dujiangyan was able to tame the Min River and prevent major floods, while simultaneously moving water around when needed during droughts, the people in Sichuan become wealthier and their lives more convenient. No longer plagued by catastrophic hardships, their culture became the most relaxed in China. This is evident today in Chengdu, with its countless teashops and clattering mahjong tiles heard on every street corner, with the blissfully enjoyable pace of life that the city has adapted.

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Dujiangyan is just 20+ minutes outside of Chengdu by high speed rail, and I went for a quick overnight trip. I looked through the tourist map a few times, and also studied some scale models they had at the site, but had a lot of trouble figuring out which parts of the structure were natural vs artificial, which parts were used for de-silting the river water, and which channels were used to prevent flooding. I’m not a hydraulic engineer, and sometimes it’s better to just admit defeat, smile and take selfies.

The site requires a lot of walking, and upon entering I was greeted with a series of fantastic gardens with several koi ponds. The nice thing about Sichuan province is it rains a lot, and the ponds were teeming with life and movement, brimming with moving water, fish, and energy.

In Lanzhou, most fish ponds are only half full, muddy, and covered in algae or dead leaves. Here, the walkways and bridges that connect the pavilions were almost submerged into the lake. A most welcome and refreshing problem to have.

One garden had the most picturesque window carved out of a wall, to grant the visitor a perfect view of the waterfall and foliage contained within.

A perfect expression of fengshui 风水!

After relaxing in the gardens I headed north to see the irrigation project. I walked past “the bottle neck”, the “flying sand weir” “Golden levee” and Inner River. Again, they each served a purpose but it was beyond my comprehension.

Eventually, I reached the Fish Mouth, which splits the incoming Min River in two. April is considered dry season, so the water level wasn’t at its peak, but from what I understood, excess water was diverted left to irrigate the Sichuan Plain, and prevented the Inner River from ever flooding.

The hills to the east provide scenic views of the entire irrigation system. To get to them, you need to walk across Anlan suspension bridge. For centuries, this bridge was held together by only bamboo and rope. Thankfully, steel chains now bind the entire structure together.

I suppose if the bamboo and rope bridge ever snapped, ancient visitors would be swept into the Flying Sand Weir and spat into the Outer River. But now, we’ll never know.

At last, I climbed up the hilltop pagoda and was rewarded with an impressive and calming view of the entire irrigation system and valley. Mist was billowing out of lush, green mountains, and the blue waters rushed below… and the birds were singing and delighting in the afternoon drizzle… sitting there, I could not think up a more peaceful or enjoyable way to spend a weekend.