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!

China Trip - Luoyang

This is part 3 of our Western China trip.

After a 2-hour high-speed train followed by a very roundabout taxi ride to our hole-in-the-wall hostel, we went exploring for lunch. Our experience in back-alley markets from Chengdu came in handy, and we ended up eating dumplings for lunch in a wee shop. We were staying off the tourist path, and eating even further off the main strip (as much as Luoyang can be said to have a "main strip"). Our presence seemed to have disturbed a delicate ecosystem of noodle shops and regular customers, in that we basically had to wait for the owner/cook/server to whip up noodle soups for all of the locals taking their lunch breaks before he could take our order for dumplings.  Middle Child and Michael went exploring the fruit market and making friends with the feral kittens while we waited.

After lunch we crossed our fingers, dodged traffic across a busy street, and hopped on a city bus we hoped would take us the 7 KM down the main drag to the primary tourist attraction of Luoyang, the Longmen Grottoes. And it did! Score!

Luoyang was the imperial capital when Buddhism (and Kung Fu!) entered China from India, so Luoyang is where they started carving giant Buddhas into the cliff faces. Ranging in size between one centimeter to 10 meters tall, this was an impressive site that had been worked by hand for hundreds of years.  At the beginning of the site we met a friendly Chinese couple who asked if they could walk with us, and spent the entire afternoon strolling around and chatting.

So many Buddhas. 

Not quite enlightened yet.

Our children are masters at making friends.

Across the river, we stumbled upon Chiang Kai-Shek’s villa where he held the meeting (under the pretense of a birthday party) that would launch the offensive that triggered the Long March and solidified Mao’s leadership of the Chinese communists. It was all well preserved 1930’s decor, in stark contrast to the rest of the temple complex it was housed in.



 

We stayed until the grottoes closed, and wandered for a bit trying to figure out how to get fed and back to our hostel, when we spied the correct bus coming down the street. We flagged it and hopped on. Since we knew food was scarce near our hostel, we took a gamble and disembarked at a likely-looking street corner. There we wandered into a friendly-looking restaurant and pointed at pictures to order too much food. So good! (the highlight was tofu pillows in mysterious yellow garlic sauce) So cheap! So many cartoons and free lollipops for the kids!

The next day we visited the Shaolin Monastery. About an hour from Luoyang (the closest town was Dengfeng, which at a mere 0.6 million population was described by our tour guide as “tiny”), and passed by a number of “Ghost Cities” - enormous housing projects build speculatively that currently sit empty (remember that construction we mentioned last time? It turns out that if the skyscrapers are too far from public transit, nobody can afford to live in them).

The Shaolin temple (The name literally means “Temple in the bamboo forest (Lin) on the Shao mountain) is the birthplace of Kung Fu and Wushu, but also the first Zen Buddhist temple in China, but also an important imperial temple that played a part in choosing the emperor’s successor. The abbott of the Shaolin Temple is akin to the ArchBishop of a large area… about as much power and influence as a provincial governor. Families used to give their sons to the temple to be raised as monks and learn Kung Fu, but since modern families have fewer boys to spare for a life of poverty and dedication the temple has taken to adopting young boys from orphanages (there are between 200 and 300 monks residing at the temple now).

Families do still want their sons to learn kung fu, so the temple grounds are also home to a number of martial arts academies that teaching many hundreds of students (mostly boys). Students typically live at the academy for 4-7 years training in kung fu and wushu for 6 hours each day, and can also choose to specialize in police combat, western boxing, tae kwon do, or movie stunt fighting.

The tree in the back is filled with finger-sized holes from martial arts practice

SHAOLIN MAGIC!!

There are probably worse lives than being a ward of the Shaolin Temple.

The oldest remaining structure in the Shaolin temple.  Buildings in China seem to have a tradition of being alternately burned down and rebuilt by successive generations of warlords.

All that's missing is a super-villain's fortress.

Pagoda forest - resting place of Shaolin luminaries.

After strolling through the temple complex itself we took a cable car up to the peak of the Shao mountain, and were treated to stunning views of forested mountains and limestone cliffs.

We cannot resist a good cable car.

This trinket stand on the top of a mountain has a CNC milling robot.

This platform was used for performing Shaolin magic, faithfully re-enacted by Elizabeth ;^)

Hiking up mountains in China invariably means climbing many, many stairs. Which is more fun when you're chasing an older sibling!

Did I mention there were so many stairs?

Queen of the mountain! Not pictured - the guy offering to remove the cloth from that "Shao Mountain" sign for 20 yuan.

The full temple complex from above

The yellow gondola has an "A" instead of a 4.  In China the number 4 sounds like the word for "Death".  Strangely, no one ever wanted to take the death car so they had to re-label it.

Afterwards our very attentive guide brought us off at the smallest train station in Luoyang and reluctantly dropped us off - sure we were in way over our heads (we were fine. Okay, maybe we were in a little over our heads, but that's what travel is about!).

Most of the waiting area was outside.  The nearby public toilet was truly horrifying.

We hung out at the station waiting for our next train - the overnight slow train to Zhangjiajie. A very different experience than the bullet trains we had been riding thus far, and our last train of the trip, sadly. More like a summer-camp bunk room on rails.  A number of Michael's co-workers asked if there were chickens running around on the train, which leads us to believe there are yet lower classes of train service. 

The kids find this arrangement ridiculous. And awesome.

Eldest adding a new WeChat friend on Elizabeth's phone.

We eventually got to sleep and woke up just outside ZhangJiaJie, a national park that is home to stunning limestone and sandstone cliff formations.  More on that next post!