Rough Rural Sunday

Sunday began at 4AM, rising to the soft ringing of my computer. It was then a flurry out the door to find a rather incompetent cab driver and a sleepy Sarah, and we were off to the bus stop. There, we picked up some pork buns and sesame-red-bean buns. Those would come back to haunt us later.

We shuffled onto the bus. The seats were too small for our wider American rear ends, particularly mine. On the outside seat of the three of us, I took constant elbows to the face, bloated bellies pressing up against me. The bus driver was an anger-bent maniac who drove on the wrong side of the road and honked at cars, on their side of the road, for daring be in his way. He honked at cars thinking about considering looking both ways at an intersection such that they might then ponder whether or not they might decide that they would soon decide whether or not they were going to try to enter the road. He honked long. And we were near the front, sitting on top of the damn wheel, which made our legs scrunch up into ourselves. Every time we considered sleep, the honk of the driver jolted us back into consciousness. For three hours. Luckily, I had reading material.

When we arrived in Zhang Fang, the town nearest to our lonely mountain village, we jumped out and stretched our legs. We were the first white people in that town since Marco Polo. People stared at us. Not only that, but they all started accosting us for rides--in Chinese, of course, nobody presumed we would venture that far out and not know it. Of all these old men trying to drive us in their sketchy cars, I believe their frustration with our inability to understand them, along with the "do not make a mistake around me" frightened them off. But our poor planning meant we had little idea of how to get to our village.

We found a very nice lady with yellow, broken teeth and an accent heavy enough to crush a mule, who sprang to life when we mentioned the name of the village. She talked slowly enough for us, which was nice, and flashed brochures in our face to give her credibility--she claimed she worked at the very village we wanted to go to. ("Brochures?" I thought)

She led us to an old, broken, smelly van, stuffed with people, teeming to split. We hesitated, and entered under the notion that it was full of women with their children, and therefore was unlikely to be driving us to a parking lot full of muggers. I gave our odds at 80/20.

So the van careened through the valley of ever-rising mountains, for about an hour. Standing was not so bad. Peopls just looked at me, and the nice lady talked to Kim about the village. The following two photos were taken from the van:




Despite my worries, we arrived, no worse for the wear. We hopped out and looked at the alleged village... on our side of a river, there were horses, four-wheeling off-roaders, speedboats. Terrible multi-colored triangle flags, like those hung at used car lots, adorned the entrance. It seems we were far from the first to discover the village. It was packed with tourists, all of them Chinese city-slickers.

The nice lady helped us buy tickets (at an outrageous Y60, but we knew this beforehand), and we went along our way. We had to cross a 200-foot suspension bridge to get to the other side, and kids about or age kept rocking the damn thing. Luckily, I had my sea legs. On the other side was a pagoda with a man-made waterfall. But it looked nice:





We then started off towards the deeper reaches of the (as we learned) national park. Tourists crowded the way, but the further we went, the fewer there were. Horses and mules carried people up or down, for extra money. We refrained. The view was pretty great:




We saw a staircase emerge from our path, leading to the "Crack in the Sky." We took it. The staircase stretched up like a fissure itself, wavering, uneven:



But we conquered it, panting at the most exercise we had had in many weeks. We met a bunch of kids with our age and much more than our energy peering into the great crack:



Here we are inside it. The rock was split as if by a thin wedge. I could not do much with my camera to look up, but a tiny sliver of light poured in from the opening at the top. The walls were slick with their own cold sweat:



We got through, looked about more mountains (there were many), and walked back down, whence Sarah grew quite sick, and I queasy, probably at the terrible terrible, greasy, dirty sesame-red-bean-buns we had eaten at a quick picnic. Sarah napped off the sickness, but awoke with a headache. I read. Kim drew. We all roasted quite a bit in the sun, but got to relax. We decided, when Sarah was back on her two feet, to take off home. We're lucky we left as early as we did.

Exiting was difficult. We went back to the "bus" stop, to get another one of those rickety vans. But every time they came, they were too full of people to even open the door. We realized we needed another way to get to Zhang Fang.

Despite my aversions, Kim led the charge in looking for someone to give us a ride. Another man-with-a-van was picking up some other kids to take them to ShiDu, a nearby town, and we haggled his more outrageous prices down to Y20 for the group. He was sure ShiDu had a 917 bus able to take us back.

We arrived at ShiDu's bus station, said thanks, and met a nice middle-aged man that chatted with us, including telling us that the 917 did indeed come to ShiDu, just very rarely. A very large group was waiting to return to Beijing. We waited for an hour, and nothing came. We grew worried at the time... we were too far from Beijing to mess around.

So we determined to get back to Zhang Fang, and stop playing games with fate. But Kim found us one more game to play: the fates brought us a small blue tractor, and a friendly driver willing to take us to Zhang Fang (the opposite direction from the park/village as ShiDu, of course) for Y24. I eagerly tossed him the money and leapt into the back compartment of the tractor. We had benches, nothing more. When he started the darn thing up, he jumped out and cranked it until it started up, belched a soup of black smoke, and shook violently. My very bones started to soften. Kim loved it:



I had the pleasure of looking at my black-and-yellow death every time I turned around:



But looking forward was just as interesting:



We went past the park, picked up a few more kids that I had the pleasure of helping into the back compartment, and got stuck in a traffic jam. We arrived in Zhang Fang four hours after we left the park. We found a 917, and went home, under conditions similar to our journey outward. We were dropped off in a station farther out from city center than when we had started--apparently the bus just did not go to the last few stations at that hour of night. How frustrating. Sarah sucked up the cost of a cab, feeling so sick, and Kim and I ran around looking for the subway. Turns out, Beijing keeps being much bigger than we keep thinking, and the "few major roads" between us and the subway stop spanned a space as big as many Massachusetts counties. We asked directions, and people told us jibberish and pointed in directions that were just incorrect. In my utter contempt for wasting time, I grew frustrated, visibly so. Kim kept me calm. I thank her.

We found a bus, and took it to the station, where we transferred, and I rode to the closest subway stop (a 20-minute walk from the apartment until Line 10 opens later this month), and walked home. It had been a long day, and I went to bed.