Dragon Boat Racing

This weekend is the Dragon Boat Festival (Duan Wu Jie) in which nothing particular happens except everybody eats lots of zongzi, banana leaf-wrapped glutinous rice parcels with meat or nuts or prunes or all of the above inside.  Last year in Pingxiang we ate more zongzi than I could count, so this year I’m taking it easy.

The story of zongzi is that once a well-loved poet, Qu Yuan, committed suicide by drowning himself in the river, after the powerful Qin took over the capital of his homeland.  The local Chinese, ever concerned that everyone is getting enough to eat, dropped zongzi into the river to provide Qu Yuan with sustenance in the afterlife.  The rice was wrapped in bamboo leaves to stop the fish eating them.

People also supposedly went out on the river in boats, either to scare away the fish or to retrieve the poet’s body.  It doesn’t really matter why, since either way it resulted in the fine tradition of dragon boat racing.

Last year I saw a grand total of zero dragon boat races, because they sneakily take place a few weeks before the actual festival.  So this year I was determined to witness the event.  Happily, Xiamen has lots of lakes, so there was a big Dragon Boat competition up in Jimei (just onto the mainland).  Even more happily, the rugby team (which I have recently joined) was putting in a squad.

After extensive training (once or twice, some people didn’t make it to either) on the Jimei dragon boat lake we were ready and raring to go.  Although, after splitting into a men’s boat and a women’s boat we didn’t actually have enough people in either.  Never mind eh. 

Saturday was the ‘qualification’ round and Sunday was the main event.  It was great to see all the pros out on the water.  There were some really rapid boats.

Some pretty good boats.

The boys’ boat.

And us.

When we finally got around to racing (about 3 hours after we arrived), we managed about 5 minutes in the boat before the rudder broke.  There followed a hasty and chaotic boat change after which we were screamed at by Chinese men to race the full length of the course down to the start line, as if it was our fault that the boat was rubbish.  So we reached the start line out of breath and exhausted and, of course, were given no time to recover before we raced back.

I blame the broken rudder entirely on our sad loss that day.

Here we are celebrating for absolutely no reason.

But we had fun.  Not so much fun that any of us wanted to return on the Sunday, when we were invited back in what was clearly a pity/let’s all laugh at the foreigners vote, but some amount of fun nonetheless.

And they put me in the newspaper!

Happy Dragon Boat Festival!

Tai Shan

In April I actually had 2 visitors, though you’d never guess now that it’s June…

My second was Eleri Dawson, intrepid explorer and fearless mountaineer, ready and raring to tackle China head on.  Little did she know that she would be facing her greatest challenges yet:

Climbing 7000 steps up China’s holiest mountain…

Eating anything that looked remotely strange or interesting…

And helping me get a cone off my foot.

The first few days that Els was here I unfortunately had to take a few mid-term exams, but that didn’t stop us from seeing the sights.

Campus.

Zhongshan Lu.

The running track.

Anyone seen any views from Nan Putuo yet?

On Saturday morning, after wisely replacing sleep with tequila, we managed to catch our flight to Jinan and then jumped straight on a bus to Tai Shan.  The city is called Tai’an but this caused train station confusion later on so we’ll just stick with the mountain name.  At Tai Shan (which you couldn’t really see for the mist), we found our hostel in a little courtyard off the main pedestrian street.

Els made us visit the Dai Temple.

Then we got an early night before our big climb.

We decided to walk the entire route from the centre of the city, following in the steps of all the old emperors.  It was a little hard to know when the steps started but after a while it didn’t matter – they just kept on going.

And going.

And going.

(Apologies for the head tilt but my laptop refuses to blog these days and Nacho´s computer, Nachete, won´t let me rotate any photos…)

There were lots of little temples to see so it was all very culturally interesting, but after the first few thousands steps I just wanted the culture to go away.

The most famous stretch of the climb was impressively daunting.

And that wasn’t even the top.

After hours of painful climbing and even more painful posing for photos every other step, we finally reached the summit.

I set about finding the area where you could rent a tent that was supposed to exist and of course didn’t.  Luckily I happened to ask a guy about tent renting who did, in fact, rent tents.  After wandering around a bit in the direction that he pointed us, futilely searching for our tent, a guy turned up with a tent, stuck it on some rocks and that was that.  We were very excited to have made it to the top, rented a tent and sourced an ideal spot for watching the sunrise in the morning.

Then the guy came back, told us there was dangerous mist coming down, and we ended up moving to the nastiest hotel the mountain could offer.

I slept in all my clothes and lined the bed with my coats.  I don’t think either of us slept, for fear of being in some way contaminated by the room.

But it was all worth it in the morning when the mist lifted just enough for a beautiful sunrise.

We decided to descend by the ‘Donkey Trail’ route, which was amazing – in contrast to the thousands of people swarming round us on the ascent there was literally nobody on the whole path until we got near to the bottom.  It took us half the time (which was fortunate, since we managed to bring no water), had beautiful scenery and there were little waterfalls along the way.

We caught 2 buses back to the centre, grabbed breakfast and then decided to make our way back to Jinan.  We had all day, so instead of getting one bus direct to the airport we…took a bus to the wrong train station, took another bus to the right train station, took a super speedy train to Jinan (wrong train station), took another bus to the other Jinan train station, faffed around at the train station for an hour or so, took another bus to some kind of junction under a bridge in the middle of nowhere, asked a local about buses to the airport, had the whole community of Chinese people (living under the bridge) in uproar, were finally directed to the bus stop, and took a final bus through the Jinan countryside to the airport!  Or thereabouts – we had to walk a bit.

We were utterly exhausted from all the climbing, descending and bus riding and were a little concerned that our flight back to Xiamen might be delayed, since the one prior to ours was.  But instead of a delay we received a free upgrade to Business class and flew home in style!  Here we are, very happy about this.  

And feeling sorry for the previous Xiamen flight that still hadn’t left.  But not that sorry, because we were in Business class.

We had a few days together back in Xiamen (during which time we visited Gulangyu, experienced a flash thunderstorm and Eleri had her first foot massage!) before Els had to fly home.  I was sad to see her go, after all our adventures.  The weird and wonderful foods of China were sad to see her go as well.  But maybe her inevitable cravings for mantou and jidan, and the red parcel nut biscuits, will entice her to return; after all, legend has it that whoever climbs Tai Shan will live to be 100, and there are plenty more steps in China...

Yichang to Chongqing - The Three Gorges

Over a month ago my dear mother came to stay.  Let the lateness of the post publication in no way reflect my enjoyment of her visit.  China’s just been keeping me busy.  And doing a very good job of blocking blog sites.

Mummy Tan was fortunate enough to avoid most of the strangely early rainy season that Xiamen has been recently enduring.  On her first day, I took her to a beach party.  Now, I’m under strict instructions to only publish photos where Mum looks nice.

So here’s Nada and I at the beach party.

A couple of days later we headed north to the Yangtze River, where we would embark on a cruise along the most famous stretch – the Three Gorges.  After much deliberation, we decided to go upstream, as it gave us longer on the boat and meant that we would avoid an overnight stay in Wuhan.  However, this plan also meant that instead of boarding in a nice big, major, easily accessible city (Chongqing), we would dock in Yichang, another fairly sizeable city that I for some reason imagined to be a small fishing town.  


There were no direct flights so we flew to Wuhan first and got on a shuttle bus from the airport that dropped us on a random street that was fortunately just around the corner from a long-distance bus station.  As is protocol at Chinese train and bus stations, they tried to avoid selling us tickets by pretending to not understand me but after bypasssing their regulations we got on a bus, which eventually eased its way out of the station where it proceeded to crawl along the streets at the speed of a caterpillar.  When it stopped at a service station we presumed that they just needed petrol, but instead we picked up a small family (despite the bus being full) and continued along the road.

Then the bus broke down of course.

Luckily, another bus came and picked us up and about 4 hours later we arrived in Yichang.  We were dropped at what we thought was the port, since it was on the river and there were boats, and someone said it was the port.  So we wandered around a bit, had dinner, bought some fruit, then tried to find our way to our boat.  After asking many people I worked out that our ‘port’ was, in fact, nowhere near where we were but about 30km away.  A taxi driver told me you could take a bus for 2 hours and then walk a few km to get there, or he would take us.  After much bargaining we drove off.  It wasn’t until we were driving through some kind of mountain village slum that I started to worry about whether the driver really knew where we were going/was going to murder us for our passports.  We drove through back alleys and half formed roads, then down the side of a cliff where the road just ended.  There were 2 boats there; thankfully one was ours.

Everything was much less scary and much more fancy on the boat.  We got a cheap upgrade to VIP and everything.  There was a bath in the bathroom.  One usually only dreams of such luxury in China.

And so began 3 days of decadence – sitting on our balcony…

Sitting at dinner…

Sitting in our VIP coffee bar…

Etc.

We went on 3 excursions.  

Firstly, to see the Three Gorges Dam, a rather controversial feat of engineering that boasts the world’s largest power station and should reduce the risk of flooding, but involved the relocation of over a million residents and originally flooded many cultural sites.  Discuss.

Here’s our boat entering the first lock.  

There are 5 locks in the Three Gorges Dam so at first it was quite exciting.  Several hours later, not so much.

Secondly, we went on a small excursion down Shennong Stream to see the Lesser Three Gorges, which were probably more beautiful than the main ones as they were more narrow and less polluted.

We took small boats powered by locals who rowed 2 hours just to meet us and 2 hours home after our trip.  The oldest was 86 and he was still rowing with pride.  It was very impressive and just a little disconcerting.


Here's Mum on the boat from this boat back to the other boat.

The third trip was to Fendu Ghost city, where there were no ghosts, but a lot of steps.

Here’s Mum taking as many steps as possible over a bridge so that she’ll be very rich and healthy.

Here I am standing one-footed on a stone to see how pure my soul is.

Back on the boat I volunteered for an acupuncture demonstration, which hurt, but not as much as the ‘cupping’ demonstration that I did not volunteer for and left a beautiful red circle on my neck for 3 days, because I had too much yang and not enough yin.  Or was it too much yin…?

Each time we passed through one of the Three Gorges, Kylie, the boat manager/event coordinator/customer helpline/host/dancer would introduce the scenery.  Often it was quite windy up on top deck so no one wanted to be there.  But Kylie had to be.  Here I have captured the classic moment in which poor Kylie, sheltering from the vicious wind, is upstaged by Brian in his shorts.

All in all, the cruise was a very beautiful and relaxing experience.

Chongqing, when we docked, almost wasn’t.  It was a big city and you couldn’t really see anything for the smog.  Luckily, at the metro station, we met a guy whose name I forget, who directed us to the Chongqing Exposition, a massive area of lake, hills and gardens designed in the style of every culture (99% Chinese, but of course).  We spent the entire day here…

…before flying back to Xiamen, where I made sure Mum had the classic Xiamen experience:

The University

Good old Gulangyu

Coconuts on the beach boardwalks

And, of course, the karaoke that’s a treat for both the eyes and the ears: KTV.

I think Mum enjoyed China, despite the lack of English tea and corruption of the fine English tradition of queuing.  I, for one, very much enjoyed having her here.  Because whose life abroad isn’t improved by a visit from their Mum?  You can’t take a suitcase full of chocolate, magazines and moisturiser for granted out here.