Hangzhou

I have the foggy idea that Marco Polo may have described Hangzhou as the loveliest city in Asia, though I can't say for sure if the idea originates with a reputable source. From what I can tell so far, the city is a wet one-- it has been raining since sometime the night before last and the air is hot and damp (I've invested in an umbrella, something that I never entirely saw the point of in Oregon, where it is rarely both hot and raining and the same time). Yesterday we walked around the West Lake (one of thirty-two or so West Lakes in China, but this is the famous one) and a pedestrian commercial district (pedestrian like "people traveling by foot," not like "unimaginative"). The lake seems like it must be very pretty, but it was so misty yesterday that we couldn't really see much of it (the mist was also pretty in its own right). Today, we might take a bus out to a Song Dynasty kiln where you can make your own pottery (Katrina will blow the other tourists out of the water with her mad pottery skillz) and a village where they grow China's famous Dragon Well tea.

Suzhou, the Venice of the Orient

Suzhou, city of gardens and canals, gets a somewhat lukewarm description from the Lonely Planet as a mostly fairly typical modern Chinese city-- nice enough, but Hangzhou is better, apparently. We came to Suzhou early early in the morning armed with names and approximate locations for a few hostels, and we spent most of our time walking the city; when we were awake and happy and well-fed in an attractive part of town, it was rather pleasant, but when we were tired and hot and our feet hurt walking alongside perfectly unremarkable tile-covered convenience stores and clothing shops, it was less enjoyable.

Suzhou is famous for its canals (the city became prosperous as a trade city on the Grand Canal) and its gardens, and while we visited both (and they were nice), what I'll remember Suzhou for is the food we ate. Lunch on our second day town was at Mario's Ristorante, run by what seemed to be a real, live Italian person (his name may even actually be Mario). The restaurant was expensive but not crazy and definitely worth it; we ate real pasta and real cheese and the pesto that I ordered was fantastic (I will never admit it to the students in Fenyang, but when I told them that noodles were among my favorite foods, I was thinking at least as much of pesto and parmesan as zhajiang mian and kaolaolao), easily and absolutely the best Western food we've eaten since Thanksgiving. For dinner, we went to an Indian restaurant near our hostel, and on our last day in Suzhou, we ate tasty Xinjiang-style food.

From Suzhou, we planned to head to Hangzhou via a night boat down the Grand Canal, but, alas, the passenger boat service appears to have been discontinued, and we had to take a bus instead. Sigh. More on Hangzhou later.

I'll post some pictures another day

(this post (this will probably interest no one) is being typed on an Eee PC (the old version, not the new one with the nicer screen (too hard to find and probably too much more expensive, in the end)), which after months of lusting after, I finally bought last week; it is tiny and portable and perfect to be useful while traveling, and the keyboard, though small, is pretty much fine for my hands, except for that dumb right shift key being in the wrong place)

Continuing our streak of always getting sick just when we ought to be leaving for vacation, Katrina caught a cold the day before she and I originally planned to leave Fenyang. Even if she hadn't, we probably wouldn't've left on time; we still had a lot of cleaning and packing to do. We bummed around town for a couple days and packed and tried to hide in our apartment so no one would realize that we hadn't left yet.

On Tuesday(?), we left. We decided that we'd spent enough time in Taiyuan already, and it isn't the most attractive city, so we decided to begin our southward journey by going to Pingyao. Pingyao was very nice-- familiar from our last visit, but not as familiar as Fenyang. We stayed at Harmony Guesthouse, where the owners are very helpful and the cheapest room is pretty darned cheap (much cheaper than the place we stayed in the fall, though possibly less cool and lacking in cat), and we spent a lot of time in the hostel sleeping and recovering. We also went out to see a dance performance, Wild Jujubes, which I really liked.

After Pingyao, we headed for Luoyang by night train. The train was really cool; my other experience with trains in China had been not entirely pleasant (though not really unpleasant, either), and our train wasn't even leaving Pingyao until about 1 am, so I did not have high hopes. The bunks were really comfortable and the car seemed (relatively) spacious; they only sold as many tickets as there were beds, so it wasn't so crowded. In Luoyang, we evaded a quite persistent woman who wanted us to come stay at a hostel she knew (she followed us to a restaurant, waited outside while we ate lunch, then ambushed us when we were finished and tried to tell us that the bus we wanted wasn't running that day and we needed to find a place to stay (untrue)) and took a bus to Dengfeng.

Most people probably go to Dengfeng to see the Shaolin Temple and the warrior monks; we spent some time watching students at one of the many local martial arts schools practicing outside, but what was most exciting to us were the mountains. The mountains are just like in Chinese landscape paintings; they are beautiful. We spent most of a day exploring the geopark area. The first mountain we tried to climb, we went up and up and up and there were lots of stairs and a wide stone path and then we got to a large rock with these characters painted on it: 游客止步. Tourists, stop walking. It was like we climbed three-quarters of the way up the mountain just to get to a big “Dead End” sign. There were still footpaths leading up, and we followed them for a while, but in the end, we decided that we wouldn't be able to get to the top and we weren't sure where we would find ourselves if we did follow the path, and we headed back down to find another mountain.

The second mountain was actually the one we were aiming for the whole time. It started with an expensive ticket for a cable car to the halfway point, the longest cable car in China (taking a cable car felt like cheating, but we didn't have much time; we needed to be back at our hotel by seven to pick up tickets to a show we wanted to see at eight) and continued with a path that the Lonely Planet says “hugs the cliff” (p 461); that description is pretty accurate. The path is built of concrete and supported by concrete beams leaning into the mountain and under the path there is a whole lot of air before there's any more mountain. It's... a little freaky.

We climbed up and up and up again and finally got to the point that we decided was our goal (we didn't have time to make it to the top and still get back down by seven, we thought); the Rope Bridge. It's a scary scary bridge (scary mostly because in every movie, a board breaks under the foot of the brave protagonist). We crossed the bridge, took some pictures, crossed back, and tried to book it back to the cable car. “If you want to take the cable car down, you'd better hurry,” called a woman as we passed, “They're going to turn it off soon. And by the way, would you like to stop and buy some water?” As we panted up the last few steps, though, the reassuring sound of the motor running the cars came to a halt, and when we huffed and puffed our way to the door, the guys manning the station shook their heads, said they were closed, and pointed (very helpfully) to the stairs down. It was not our happiest moment of the trip.

We pretty much ran down all of the stairs to get to the bottom in time (which is why we're pretty much hobbling up and down any incline planes we happen to encounter now), but a couple of expensive taxi rides later, we had made it back to the hotel, picked up our tickets, and arrived at the venue just in time to see the beginning of the show. The show we were watching was the Shaolin Monks' Zen Music Grand Ritual, and it was... pretty good. I think Katrina enjoyed it more than I did; I got hung up for a long time on trying to decide if the music was live or recorded and it distracted me from enjoying the dancing and wu shu. In the end, I think it was prerecorded, which is too bad, but it was beautiful music and the setting for the show is gorgeous-- it's an outdoor theater with mountains rising up in the background (the mountains actually have lights set up on the ridgelines that are used in the show). I'm glad we saw it, but I wish it had been a little less expensive.

For the last couple days, we've been in a small village called Guoliangcun. It's a pain to get here; it involved a train, multiple buses, and (in the end) a taxi, but we had heard that it was worth the effort, and what we heard was correct. The village is in the middle of a national park. The taxi we rode in with drove through a long tunnel carved by hand by 12 villagers from 1972 to 1977 called (at least on the local signs; the guidebook gives it a different name) the Long Precipice Tunnel; the cliff just falls away from it and it's very dramatic. Prior to the building of that tunnel, apparently the only way into or out of the village was a loong staircase called the Sky Ladder (unfortunately currently closed). There are well-maintained pathways to hit some scenic highlights in the area, and the scenic highlights are gorgeous. It's misty and mountainy and very, very green. We didn't do a lot of exploring beyond the marked paths (our legs are still tired from the other mountains), but we saw pretty much everything that's marked and open. A few sights are closed right now; we briefly thought about trying to sneak into the Red Dragon Cave to see what it was like, but decided in the end that if even the Chinese government thought it was too dangerous to let tourists in, we didn't want to mess with it (the path is littered with signs saying things like “Caution: this area is extremely dangerous, move along quickly”). One thing that we got to see and do here that neither of us had ever seen before was a slide. It's a stone slide that starts pretty high up on the mountain and goes to the bottom; it's enclosed a little bit to keep out weather and debris, and it costs about two dollars a person. After you pay, the man at the top gives you a pair of pants with a reinforced butt and some sleevies to protect your arms. You can control your velocity with your arms and legs, but gee whiz was it fun. We almost wanted to climb all the way back up the mountain so we could do it a second time.

Mm, that's all for now. Tomorrow, we're going to head on to Suzhou to see silk and gardens and canals and things. It should be a good time. :)