Escaping the city for a week

  Guoliangcan, China
Thursday, October 11, 2007

    "You have no idea how many people there are in China until you try to ride a train during national holiday," Jackie told Max and I a couple of weeks ago.  Taking Jackie's advice, Erin, Max, Ben and myself boarded a bus to Xinxiang, the first leg of our first real journey within China's borders.  The destination: Guoliangcan - a small village of 300 people in the Wanxian mountain region, recently only accessible by a perilous stone staircase called the Sky Ladder.
    Before we could reach the small village, we had to take three buses and a death beng-beng on Henan's highways.  Traveling through Henan is equal parts depressing and fascinating.  Every village, every city, every bus stop featured the same derelict housing pressed up against trashy streets where garbage seemed to bubble up out of the ground.  Mangy dogs trotted and sniffed through the treasure piles of waste.  Old men tottered underneath the burden of rusty plows as they worked their sullen looking fields against the slate gray October sky.
    But as the bus sped further and further into the country, autumn's gray sky was chased away by highways literally paved in corn.  Large sections of the highway and entire lanes were kidnapped by local farmers and their overflowing harvest of corn.  Everywhere you looked, corn was being shucked, piled, organized, shaved, sorted and dried.  The local farmer was fighting back against New China's incessant development and construction and saying a hearty thanks to the government for building the perfect place to dry and sort the fall's corn harvest.  Cities carried crowns of corn as every roof stored large piles of the yellow grain that could not fit on the highway, making the cities pop alive with color against the grays and brown of Henan's farmland in the fall.  The countryside was drenched in butter yellow as the corn's yellow kernels rubbed away any sign of economic defeat or neglect.
    After spending some hellish hours on the bus next to a man who believed that his crotch deserved more room than I did, the four of us were finally dropped off at the bottom of the mountain.  We had two options - we could take a taxi up for an exorbitant amount of money, or we could climb.  Strapping on our backpacks and stripping off our coats, we started the two kilometer hike up the road.  All I have to say is thank God I worked at a day camp this summer where all I did was sweat.  It made me not care about sweating in public, which is good because I was nasty by the time we reached the top.

mountains

        When we finally made it to the top, all sweaty, gross, tired and hungry, we started to wander around in search of a place to stay.  A short woman with a striking Asian resemblance to one of my aunt's came up to us and made the body sign for sleeping.  It was late and the mountain was going to plunge into darkness soon, so we automatically said yes.  Following her, we climbed up a wet slippery stone road until we reached a house set into the mountain side.  Climbing up more stone steps, we entered into the family's courtyard.  After offering us a room with three beds for four people, Max and Ben began to negotiate food.  Not really understanding the woman's dialect, we followed her around until we realized we were being taken to the chicken coop.  There, we chose the chicken we wanted to eat for dinner.

dinner!

We were then shown where the bathrooms were, which were of course right next to the chicken coop and equally stellar.  They were essentially the basic stone foundations of a house with no roof and a big slit in the ground.  Later the next night, as Max made the trek to the bathroom amidst the fog and the damp stones, Max turned to us and said, "I really like how we have to travel through 14th century Paris to take a piss in the middle of the night."  Which was pretty much true because there were no lights outside at night.  But despite our somewhat meager housing conditions, they were really cozy.  It was cold, wet and foggy most of the time we were there so it was great to share the three beds with four people. 
    During the days we were there, we spent the whole time climbing up and down and up the mountain again.  I have never climbed so many steps in my whole entire life.  The best part about climbing up a Chinese mountain is that while you're sweating profusely, you're being passed by old Chinese men on canes and other Chinese tourists who don't sweat at all.  The four of us were baffled at how the Chinese just seemed to float up the side of the mountain without any difficulty at all, while we had to take more breaks the further up we climbed.
    Every time we passed a Chinese person while we were climbing up a mountain or down the Sky Ladder, they always told us "take care!"  Except there were no safety railings throughout any of the walks or climbs we did.  Not even when I was walking around in the most intense fog of my life.  The fog was so thick and dense that you could not see anything five feet in front of you.  We would be walking along what we knew to be a large cliff and saw only our feet, the plants next to the road and then pure whiteness.

good idea? bad idea?

It was one of the most awesome things I have experienced in the literal sense of the word awesome. 
    At the same time, Guoliangcan was the most exhausting place I have been to in China.  The village is a definite Chinese tourist spot and since we were there during National Holiday, the Chinese tourists came in droves from all over.  They came from places where they have probably never seen a foreigner before so the sight of four white kids walking around was an experience for them.  I can't even tell you how many people came up to us wanting to take our picture or how many home videos we are now the stars of.  Dads videotaping their small children playing in the mountain would end up ignoring the children and just spend long stretches of time videotaping the four of us lounging by the river or sitting on rocks.  And the picture taking was accentuated by the intense concentration of "hellos!" Everyone wanted to say hello to us, all the time and every time they saw us.  I thought I had grown accustomed to this because it happens all the time in Kaifeng, but the concentration of this occurrence on the mountain was more intense than anything I've experienced in the city.
    Despite the exhausting amount of stares and attention, the trip was great and I'm so glad we went.  One of the best highlights of the trip was being inside the mountain ball.  On our first day in the village, we were walking up a long trail when we all of a sudden we saw this large pond on the side of the mountain.  On top of the pond were three giant clear plastic balls with people inside of them.  The four of us all looked at each other and then we practically ran to the water.  After negotiating with the ball caretaker in our pidgin Chinese and the man's mountain dialect, we gave him some kuai, took off our shoes and hoped inside the deflated and suffocating plastic balls.   
    You climb into the ball when there is no air and they zip you inside of it, leaving just enough room for the air hose to poke through.  Once they fill the ball with air, they let you free and you just start walking off the dock.  It was one of the best and most surreal experiences of my life.  Once the ball is inflated and you roll off the dock, you can see the clear water (clear water! In China!) underneath your feet and all around you were the foggy mountains of China.

balls

And the surreal effect was made even more bizarre by the sound the ball made as the water splashed up around it.  You couldn't really hear anything except for this strange "wooooooosh woooooosh wooooooooooosh" noise.  Then of course you got distracted because a small Chinese child would roll her ball over to you to knock you down and then you had to fight like two hamsters in a wheel. 
    Before we got in the balls there really weren't that many people watching, nor was there a line to get inside the ball.  But as we continually slipped around, fell down and rolled around inside the giant balls, a large crowd of Chinese started to gather round to watch the crazy waiguoren.  When we started to get out because we realized that either our balls were leaking (in Ben's case) or that there was no way you were getting more oxygen in the ball and that you started to feel a little bit lightheaded (like Max and I), the owner came up to us.  He was trying to convince us to stay because we were good for business.  And indeed we were as now the balls were the most popular spot on the mountain.
    The rest of the time was spent sitting in a riverbed as clean water flowed by drinking pijou, sitting on the side of the cliffs and avoiding the massive amounts of Chinese people on the move in the wilderness of the mountain.  It was relaxing and refreshing to not be surrounded by construction and people all the time.

sweet stone bridges

I didn't realize how nice it was and how much I appreciated the stillness of the mountain until we got in the bus to head back to Kaifeng.  As the bus took us down the mountain and back to Huxian where we needed to transfer buses, large groups of people started to reappear along with the dilapidated housing of Henan's poor cities.  Car horns started to blare all the time and everything was no longer green and healthy looking, but brown, gray and sad.  I just sat in the back of the bus and kept shrinking in my seat underneath the weight of knowing how crowded China is and how I had to get back into the mindset of city living.  The smelly, crowded buses didn't help.  Fighting back, I put on my headphones and listened to music to combat the bad smells of the people sitting in front of us and waiting for the bus ride to be over.  I was so happy to get back to Kaifeng.  All I did when we got back to city was sit on my living room floor and relish in the quiet of being completely alone.  It was the perfect way to end break.