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.