Under the Waterfall and Back Again
Trip Start
Feb 03, 2008
1
2
33
Trip End
Aug 16, 2009
Huang Guo Shu, Guizhou Province,
China
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Silver tassels dangling and jingling in the waterfall draft, they giggle and check each other's red and blue garb while they arrange themselves around Dad, their bright clothes eclipsing his black baseball hat and blue jeans.
My mother stands to the side; I can't decide if she wants the same fame my father is experiencing or if she's hoping that they don't notice the blonde, blue-eyed woman standing around. She looks hopefully up the trail, in the direction of the waterfall we want to walk behind.
First though, comes Dad's 10 minutes of fame. These girls, and the other people who stopped him throughout the day to take pictures, are tourists too
Friendly Girls dressed up as Miaos
. The girls' headdresses and elaborate Miao are novelty items shrewdly rented to the hordes of tourists who come to Huang Guo Shu-China's, maybe Asia's, largest waterfall. The Miao, the largest local minority, have beautiful traditional dress, but the woven patterns are outshone by the gigantic jewelry. The headdresses, more like crowns, reach a foot high above the girls' foreheads, and free-hanging wands and tulip-shapes of silver caress the ears. Full costumes are completed by huge crescent yokes of silver as necklaces and bracelets of bells.
Enjoying the dress-up game, our girls poke their tennis shoes and cuffed jeans under the hem of their costume skirts, call their friends on bejeweled cell phones and twitter when they try to speak to Dad.
My father has been in China two weeks, and in that time has mastered one useful phrase: "I want a beer." He tells them, optimistically, that he wants a beer. They giggle, but provide no pleasing beverages.
The costume renter, a tiny woman wielding a photo album of past clients, finally gets annoyed at the girls and calls them back to disrobe
Waterfall
. We continue down the path. My camera starts to fog up from the mist thrown up by the waterfall. There's so much water in the air we can taste the river. The water is low now, and I wonder how people can take pictures in the high summer season without drenching their equipment.
We ascend the mossy, well-worn steps that lead to a hole behind the water curtain. This takes us to a reinforced path with dangerously low, toddler-height barriers, a sort of dragon's lair behind the watery plunge. Behind, the air is more humid than a Hong Kong summer, and despite the cold I feel sweat on my face and in my shirt.
The falling water is whiter than icicles, and because it is winter, there are some sparse patches where we can glimpse the steady line of people working their way over the slippery walkway and past the costume-renters.
We plug up the narrow walkway for awhile taking pictures, dodging behind stalagmites of dubious veracity to let big groups past. Water drips and glistens around us, and the whoosh of the water above us is quieter than I expect, an ambient surreal, calming sound
The Greens modeling
. Even if the sound is soothing, the feeling of knowing that water is rushing over your head a few feet away is thrilling. I want to put my hands in the flow of water that cascades past us, but think that the power of the water could easily pull me over if I lost my footing on the mossy, concrete footpath. Dan and I both have carefully-selected waterproof shoes. Unfortunately, they are waterproof, but perplexingly have no traction when faced with water. So our feet are dry, but we slip easily.
Finally wet and thinking we should take a bathroom break, we leave the waterfall behind us. My parents buy trinkets from hawkers on the path, and we oblige other tourists by letting them take our pictures. Our photos are all over China, by now.
Crossing back up to the other side of the river over a chain bridge, we find a concrete clearing surrounded by bamboo where a troupe of Miao minority dancers in full costume are waiting for tourists to entertain.
We sit on saw-horse-type benches and watch them. The girls bang sticks together and hop over and between two bamboo poles their colleagues move rhythmically, parallel to the ground
Local women in traditional dress
. It's like bamboo jump rope, really. The boys do the same thing, but with higher hopping and louder slapping. At the end of the dance, the girls search for volunteers. Of course they pick my father; all of the other tourists must have understood what was going to happen and declined. They enacted some ceremony during which Dad had to put on a red cape, a hat and a purse, and then asked him for 40 RMB.
We laughed and pretended not to understand the request for cash-although I am really not sure why they wanted the money. This wasn't a charge for watching the show, as none of the other audience members paid anything. They finally backed down and we thanked them, and walked off wondering if Dad had just been made an honorary Miao.
Afternoon was still in full swing, so we went back up to the parking lot and caught a tuk-tuk (motorcycle-truck hybrid) downhill to another, affiliated park, called Tian Xing Qiao, or Star Bridge. I was expecting a bridge, but when we finally got there (after some misunderstandings with the driver of the tuk tuk) it was a giant river drainage area through small but impressive karst outcroppings
Dan behind the water curtain
. Most of the path through this area was made by individual stones surrounded by water, so you had to be careful to step exactly on the stone and not on the edge if it was slippery. It reminded me of Indiana Jones or Eddie Murphy's the Golden Child or another one of those 80s fantasy-action movies where the hero has to hop from one rock to another over an abyss. There was no abyss here, though I think falling in the mold-green water would have been a bad idea nonetheless.
This park, while beautiful, was a little mystifying as we didn't know how to get out of it. There was only one path, although sometimes we saw some poorly-translated signs leading off to other attractions. The park closed at 6:30 p.m. and we thought in two hours we'd have plenty of time.
At first we lingered and took lots of pictures, but after awhile we realized that our stone-hopping path was virtually endless and that there were few people headed our direction, but most people were going the other way, meaning perhaps that the other entrance to the park, which seemed to be where we were headed, was pretty far away and these people were trying to get out. Our path went on and on, sometimes leaving the "bridge" and onto solid ground, up little inclines and to tree-shaded viewpoints of the same river that upstream had rushed over our heads when we went behind the waterfall.
Then, the trail would lead down to the water level and we would again be skipping from one stone to the next. At last we reached a pavilion with a gift store and thought we had reached the other gate, but no, the gift shop employees pointed us along another lake, and up to a medium-sized cave lit by colored lights that did nothing for the actual geology of the cave but did make it look like a dwarves' castle or a cave-themed disco bar
Dad and the Miao Dancers again
. After the cave we made friends with a group from Guiyang, an extended family of thirty or so people on a day trip. They were also trying to make the far gate and so we hurried along together, trying bits of uncertain English and poor Chinese to make conversation about the area and the pictures we were still trying to catch in the failing light.
These new friends proved to be a blessing, because when we exited the park a good half hour after the official closing time, there was only one taxi waiting, and that taxi driver wanted 50 yuan for a 5 yuan ride. The most outspoken of the family, whose English name is Apollo, refused to let us pay this and so insisted on giving us a ride in their van.
Then, when they dropped us back to the main gate of the waterfall park, about 10 minutes later, the whole group got out of the vans again so that they could take a group picture with us.
Happy for the kindnesses of strangers, we went back to our hotel and had the best dinner of the trip so far-the wife of the man who had rented us the room cooked some simple food with whatever they had in a kitchen the size of a public toilet stall and let us drink beautiful Li Quan beer until we were all tired.
The next day we were set to look at another waterfall and visit a traditional Bouyi village where they live in stone houses and make batiks-or at least, they sell them.
