China Trip - Chengdu (Again!)

Our final stay in Chengdu, this time hitting up some of the lower-tier tourist sites and getting ready to say goodbye to China (for now).  We awoke to a rainy morning, and after camping out in the hostel for as long as possible eventually went out with umbrellas and ponchos to explore a nearby monastery.  Afterwards we had an adventure in the noodle shop that we were introduced to by our food tour on our first visit, and eventually managed to order the "right" noodles after accumulating a pile of pretty-tasty-but-not-as-amazing bowls of noodles.  After a trip back to the hostel to dry off and rest, we headed down to the Culture Park to explore a little before taking in a Sichuan opera.  Sichuan opera is famous for fire-breathing and "face-changing", in which characters change their masks seemingly instantaneously while on stage.  It's a little hard to describe, so here's a video that shows it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fWVAN0Er_4

Going to the Sichuan opera is a little bit like going to a ballgame.  The theater we went to was actually outdoors with just a canvas roof, and we spent the entire show munching on sunflower seeds.  The show was a combination of story, singing, comedy, dance, and musical elements highlighting the cultural traditions of Chengdu.

The next day we were picked up by a driver and we went out to visit Quingcheng Mountain, the birth place of Taoism.  But first: A Ghost City!  China has been adding commercial and residential high-rises at an astounding clip for the last decade.  Enormous projects like the one below would be entirely sold before ground was even broken in Shanghai and Beijing, but out in Western China they either sit completely un-sold, or with units purchased as investments but left vacant.  As a result, there were city-sized development projects with only a handful of cars and businesses, waiting for demographics and migration to catch up with the infrastructure.

Quingcheng Mountain was home to a mix of Buddhist and Taoist temples and monasteries, and figures prominently in early Chinese mythology.  It was where Zhang Ling synthesized the various indigenous belief systems into the formalized doctrine of Chinese Taoism, and thanks to a real estate dispute in the 17th century is now regarded as the "official" home of Taoism.  We could have spent a full week exploring the small temples and caves and side paths, but instead we had three hours to hike to the top of the mountain and get back to the car.  Still enough time to splash in the stream, though.  The mountain itself was almost impossibly beautiful and idyllic.

Taoist temples look like Buddhist temples.  Maybe they both just look like Chinese temples?

Another misty day in the mountains

A rare moment: Danger Monkey with zero danger.

After getting of the mountain and getting a "quick" lunch in a completely empty dining room of a fancy local hotel (sometimes our guides had strange ideas about what we would like and didn't always consult with us first), we drove a short ways to visit the Dujiangyan Irrigation System, a water works project that was constructed roughly 2300 years ago.  Michael was highly skeptical based on the description, and was expecting to wander around some rice paddies.  It turns out that this was the site where the first Qin emperor BLEW UP A MOUNTAIN AND DIVERTED A RIVER so that it could be used to irrigate the Sichuan basin to feed his army and provide transportation to allow him to invade a now-downstream province, kicking off his conquest of China in earnest.  One thing our time in China hammered home was the fractal nature of human history and geography, that the closer you look anywhere and anywhen the more amazing detail you find.

The main administrative offices had been  converted into a tourist attraction, which included the imperial governors gardens which housed a world-class collection of pensai trees, from which the Japanese got the word "bonsai".  There were, in fact, two trees that dated back to the 13th century, when the practice was beginning to really catch on in Japan.

"The Buddha Palm".  About half as old as the actual Buddha.

This garden is slightly off the main track, and so has zero other tourists

The "new" branch of the river

The structures on the hillside are old customs houses for the Horse Road that led to Mongolia.

The little gap on the right is where they used steam to break the rock apart and create a new channel

Finally it was time to head back to the airport, scarf our last fast-food dinner, and catch our red-eye flight home.

Taking the shortcut.

And that's it for this trip!  Thanks for following along!

China Trip - FengHuang

It was a 4 hour drive to our next stop: the old city of FengHuang. On the way we stopped off briefly at a Miao village. "Miao" is a Chinese term for an officially recognized ethnic minority that has bounced all over China since the Qin dynasty, and are actually made up of a variety of independent ethnic groups including the Hmong. In China they are currently concentrated in a number of smaller towns in relatively remote river valleys in the southern part of the country.

The particular village that we visited had made the mistake of getting listed in a Lonely Planet guidebook a few years back, and now the bamboo slat + mud and cow pie houses had all converted to wood, and some of the wood houses had converted to concrete. They were constructing an enormous theater for traditional drum-and-dance performances for tourists, along with giant parking lots, souvenir stands, and over-priced food and drink stalls. The Miao worshipped the water buffalo (and believe they were descended from them), but there were none to be found anymore. Like all of rural China, the village was suffering a “youth drain” where everyone under age 40 had emigrated to a large coastal city, leaving a village of nothing but senior citizen basket weavers to try to extract tourist dollars. On the drive out of the valley Michael asked the guide about the small shrines on the hills and confirmed that they were graves, which started a conversation about Tomb Sweeping Day, “cultural” buddhism and how a belief system predicated on reincarnation related to ancestor worship, and the various belief systems in China.

There was a much easier path just off to the right, but that would be cheating.

This counts as a handicap accessible walkway in China.

On the remainder of the drive our guide told us about the history of the FengHuang (Notably it is the location of the “Southern Great Wall”, intended to defend Han-dominated Chinese territory from the Miao and Tujia peoples in the region) and the famous people that had resided in it. He also recounted the entire plot of Hibiscus Story, a movie released in 1986 that he thought accurately conveyed modern China’s relationship with the Cultural Revolution (summarized as "Mistakes were made, but that's all behind us now"), and also a famous novel written by a Shen Congwen, a Chinese author from FengHuang who has been called "China's Faulkner".

Once we arrived we explored the riverfront, ate some ice cream, and went to bed early. By this point in the trip we were all varying levels of sick, and now that we finally had a few relaxing days in front of us wanted to catch up on our rest.

A helluva bridge.

Barely visible: Middle Child exploring off in the distance.

Ice-cream-and-coffee-shop-with-walls-covered-in-post-it-notes was an entire class of business.

The next day we “slept in” as much as one can with small children, had a traditional breakfast of bau (steamed buns) and youtiau (fried bread), and went out to see the sights. We wandered into some sites that had basically no interpretive signage in English, took a boat ride down the river, bought some souvenirs, and hiked up through the town and out of the tourist zone.

Now they just need some servants.

This was not the only elevated room with tables and chairs exposed on three sides that we found.  The cultural significance is, sadly, a mystery to us.

Also a helluva bridge, but in a different way.

FengHuang was very pretty!

Danger Monkey's other nickname is "Asian Baby'.  Here she is demonstrating proper photo etiquette.

The oldest parts of FengHuang "only" date back to the Ming dynasty, making it a little older than Boston.  The median age of buildings is probably a lot older than Boston, though.

We saw kind of a lot of people washing clothes in springs and creeks.

Middle Child frolicking in front of the Wànmíng pagoda.

On our way back we got lunch at a little restaurant near the river. Like all restaurants in FengHuang it appeared to be deserted (or have a single cook snoozing in a corner), but they were more than happy to cook us delicious food. We never figured out if we were eating at the wrong times, if it was just low season for tourists, or what; but we were always the first people to sit down in a restaurant, and it was rare that anyone else sat down by the time we left.

Thank goodness for pictures of food on the walls.  Sometimes pointing and grunting is best.

Trying out the good camera.

The entire town seemed to come alive from about 8 PM until 10 PM, but still no one ate food. Just more people crowding the walkways and the nightclubs went from zero occupants to about a half-dozen, sitting around individually staring at their phones and nursing beers while house bands played Chinese language covers of Top 40 hits from the 2000’s.

The kids were disappointed by the rule "We will not eat dinner in any restaurant with strobe lights."

Our hostel was similar, in that there were people who nominally worked there, and supposedly a “bar” in the first floor, but it really seemed like the first floor was a hippie flop-house for Chinese millennials. The manager gave Michael a free Budweiser every night, but then crashed out on a couch.

Fenghuang was also full of Miao people and handicrafts, and we were offered many opportunities to dress up in traditional local finery and have our picture taken on one of the rickety bridges… for a fee. Middle Child and Danger Monkey both got in the spirit of shouting “Bùyào!” (“Do Not Want!”) at the touts, which made them giggle and chase our children mimicking their undoubtedly terrible accents.

Overall, FengHuang was very pretty and rustic, and insanely touristy. It was relatively relaxing after the strenuous days in ZhangJiaJie and fun to stretch ourselves in a location with basically zero English affordances, but maybe not a place we would need to go back to.

This shop had a machine that made piping hot fried walnut confections automatically.  The State Fair needs this.

Travel Day - Our final morning in Feng Huang we explored a few more of the sites that our two-day ticket got us access to (or at least, tried to. We visited some temples, but no one asked to see our tickets), and then packed up and took a 2-hour taxi ride to the nearest airport large enough to have daily flights back to Chengdu; where we waited for approximately 6 hours for a delayed flight. The airport was a little larger than the regional train station in Luo Yang, but still pretty tiny.

The airport could only handle one plane at a time.

China Trip - ZhangJiaJie

After our overnight train ride we were picked up at the train station by our guide “David”.  We were whisked off to hike the nearby Tianzi mountain in the rain before making the hour-long drive to the ZhangJiaJie national park.  "Tianzi" translates to "Heaven's Gate", and the most prominent feature of the mountain is an enormous archway hundreds of feet high.  We took the cable car up to the top and hiked around (including on a glass-bottomed walkway cantilevered out over a cliff) and then took escalators down to the gate itself, where we were treated to a dense fog with about 20 feet of visibility.  Mike hiked down 1000 steep wet steps, and the rest of the family took the final escalators.  Tianzi Mountain joins the Great Wall on our list of “amazing Chinese heritage sights that we visited but didn't see."

The next day we visited the stone forest, the reason this remote location was on our itinerary at all.  This region served as the inspiration and visual reference for the floating islands in Avatar (which we were reminded of by every souvenir stall).  It was a sandstone ocean floor raised up by plate tectonics approximately 380 million years ago, and subsequently carved by rivers into a forest of enormous rock spires.  It looked like the Needles in South Dakota, but at the scale of Monument Valley.  We took the glass elevator up to the top and hiked around the rim of the most impressive region.  Many great views, many monkeys. 

A popular destination for domestic tourism.

Such scenery.

Much spire.

We occasionally snuck off the main tourist routes.

The postcard shot.  Though it does not capture the way the wispy low clouds flowed around and through the rock formations.

There were more people taking pictures of monkeys fighting over stolen bags of food than of the scenery.

Fambly!

The height was hard to capture.

Eventually the sun came out!

There is a McDonalds at the top of a mountain.  Not gonna lie, we totally ate lunch here and I have no regrets.

The national park was create in the 1980's as Wulingyuan Scenic Area, and the entire area was renamed to ZhangJiaJie in 1992 after a small town located within the park boundaries, which was itself named after Zhang Liang, a hero of the founding of the Western Han dynasty who settled there later in his life.  There has been a little unrest as they’ve evicted farmers from within the national park which occasionally escalated to the military being called in.  On one winding drive we had a conversation with our tour guide about relative national approaches to the idea of “eminent domain”.  

On day 3 we drove to another part of the park to walk across a "Glass Bridge" that spans a large valley in the park.  At 300 meters high the ground below was so far away as to not necessarily be recognizable as riverbed and forest.  On the far side we hiked down many hundreds of stairs, through caves (including a bandit cave that had been populated by “noble” bandits ala Robin Hood and his merry men) and followed the river bottom to a dock where we took a boat back to the trailhead. 

A big valley needs a big bridge

AAAAH!  These cloth booties are the best!

Safety Last!

China is made of staircases.

This picture was taken as an excuse to rest Michael's wobbly legs.

An actual "living wall" that every office building in Singapore tries to emulate.

"How to freak out your tour guide in one easy step!"

Maxwell rides again!

Surprise Boat Ride.  This one even had life jackets.

We wrapped up with a hike through the canyons at the foot of the stone forest, and saw the area from a different perspective.  We also saw baby monkeys, and stumbled across the tomb of Zhang Liang where a bunch of kids were playing in the river.

Finally far enough upstream that the water is clear and refreshing!

Elizabeth WINS!

This picture needs a pterodactyl to be complete.

Baby monkeys are super bad at being monkeys.

Another postcard shot.

The next day was a travel day, off to the old city of FengHuang!