Surviving the Tundra

  Yangshuo, China
Thursday, January 31, 2008

    Before I left Kaifeng, I spent my time wrapped in my sleeping bag near my heater where heat lazily drooled out of the pipes. It was the only way I could grade and keep my fingers from cramping in the cold.  After I signed my name for the last time on that last graded essay and handed the semester's worth of work to Duan Yu, I bolted from Kaifeng to what I thought was going to be the sunny, balmy warm South of China.
 
    After I left Hong Kong, my barely-kicking heater never sounded so good.  Nor was it so depressingly far away.  I finally arrived in Yangshuo, a small town on the Li River famous for its limestone karst peaks, its rice patties, and its mild weather all-year-round.  What I got though was freezing rain, snow for the first time in fifty years, and whole lot of power outages.
 
    The plan was for Erin and her sister Lindsay to meet up with me the day I arrived in Guangxi Province.  Since I took a sleeper bus from Shenzhen, I arrived in Yangshuo early in the morning and was able to set us up in the dormitory of the English school we were volunteering at in exchange for food and a place to crash.  But what ended up happening was I spent that entire day sleeping in my sleeping bag covered with the room's three blankets - recovering from a bumpy and adventurous spin on my first sleeper bus experience, running away from the relentless chilly rain and what I'm convinced was my body going into survival hibernation mode to protect itself from the tundra temperatures inside our dorm room.

Cocoon!

  The problem was that I was below the Yangtze - the national heat line.  Once you drop below the Yangtze River, heat is almost non-existent in buildings, per government regulations to conserve energy and more likely, money.  This isn't an insane government regulation because 99.9% of the time, the South is warm enough year-round that heat isn't required, you just need a couple extra layers of clothing. 
 
    Our room was freezing  - I didn't dare get out of my sleeping bag because every time I did, my fingers and toes would cramp up from the cold.  I couldn't take a shower because the pipes were frozen and water barely came out, never mind the fact that the water in my water bottle was turning to ice just sitting on the room's desk.  I eventually did leave though to head over to the school, where I heard a supposed rumor of a fire going in the main office.  As I walked along the town's cobbled streets and white-washed buildings though, I noticed a suspicious amount of vendor's and restaurant owners lighting up candles.  I didn't really think anything of it since the West Gate near campus in Kaifeng frequently loses power for a few minutes before everything comes back on again.  I figured the lights would be on soon enough.  But by the time I reached the office and its "fire" (it was just a big wok with some smouldering ashes.  The room was heated more by body heat than anything else) people's cell phones were ringing and beeping every five minutes.

No power!

 

    "God, people are getting a lot of calls and text messages here," I said to Dane, one of the school's teachers.
    "Yeah, it's the government.  They keep sending out apologetic SMS messages because of the power outage," he said.
    "The provincial government sends out text messages when you lose power? They never do that in Henan!" I said, completely shocked.
    "Oh no, this is Beijing.  It's because of the storm. They're trying to save face before the New Year," he explained.  "People are going crazy because of it."
    "What storm?" I asked, completely unaware that the bad weather wasn't just where I was, but everywhere.
 
    And then I got my own text message from Erin explaining that they hadn't left Henan yet and no one knew where their plane was.  Henan was getting buried underneath snow with no sign of letting up and no one knew anything about when flights would be able to leave again.  After asking around and talking to people, I found out about the storm and how locals in Guangxi were handling everything.  The karst peaks were covered in frost, a phenomenon only the eldest locals have ever experienced.  No one could remember when power had been out for this long or when it had rained like this outside of the rainy season.  Everyone was scrambling to find candles and handwarmers, and none of the students wanted to leave the school to return to their freezing dormitories.
 
    During the random times where there actually was power, I was able to get on the Internet to find out what was happening around the country. I found out about the country's massive transportation failures that resulted in a million people being stranded in the Guangzhou train station and the 100 tons of trash they were producing every day they were there.  I heard about the food shortages, coal shortages, the overabundance of people upset with the Chinese government for their response to the storm and the Chinese scholars predicting that finally, this would tip the scales and ignite a revolution (which by the way, if that had happened, I would have been very upset with the Chinese people for deciding that a storm was the catalyst for change).

ESL

Luckily though, none of that really affected the trip.  Erin and Lindsey were eventually able to get on a flight to Guilin, albeit the fact that it was almost twelve hours after they were originally scheduled to leave and yeah, I was forced to read Anna Karenina by the flame of my lighter a bit more than my burnt fingers would have liked.  But overall, Yangshuo was able to function as it normally does, just a little bit darker and much much colder.  I didn't really find people livid with the government for their response to the emergency, but I think that was because of who I was around.  We were at an English school that was still conducting classes during the Spring Festival.  The Chinese who were there had already prepared to be away during the country's most important festival and the weather just made their time at the school a bit more interesting since classes and the English Corner were conducted in the dark.  So the Chinese I met during the storm were friendly and found their situation to be ridiculous and amusing.  I was completely immune to the anger being depicted in Western newspapers.
 
    There were also times when it would stop raining long enough for the three of us to hop on some bikes and head out of the town and into the rural areas.  We spent a couple of days taking boat trips on the river or biking along rice patties and stopping in some orange groves to snag some, or several, oranges from the trees to munch on as we explored the terrain.  Getting out of Yangshuo and into the rural part of the Li River area was my favourite part.  Yangshuo itself is definitely a backpacker's haven as the Lonely Planet calls it.  I would never want to be there during the summer or any high peak tourist season.  While we were there on the off-season, it was more of a Chinese town as the locals outnumbered the tourists.  But I know that as soon as it warms up, laowai will be crawling all over this tiny town. 
 
Yangshuo was too clean.  Buildings that were supposed to be white actually were white.  There was no trash on the street.  Everything was well-lit in a logical manner - no area was saturated with street lights that were only separated by five feet of space between them and no areas suffered from a complete absence of street lights.  Oncoming cars slowed down when you crossed the street and only one (but very obnoxious) China Mobile blared loud music from its outdoor speakers, and even then it was on the outskirts of town.  When walking along the stores lining streets, no one hassled me to come in for "a good deal".  Basically, it wasn't a Chinese town.  It was clean and well-ordered and that creeped me out.  We also couldn't find very many Chinese restaurants.  The city was overrun with Western-style restaurants that catered to the laowai crowd advertising their breakfasts, their wood-oven pizza, and other types of food containing cheese.  Which, ok, Erin and I took great delight in and ate at with reckless abandon.

Cormorants.

For one of our meals, we fulfilled every gluttonous American stereotype as we ordered and ate a Snickers milkshake, hamburgers, fries, coffee, Coke, garlic bread, pizza and yogurt.  I know it sounds gross (and large), but it was the best meal of our lives.  Plus, we had spent the whole day biking so it was ok to indulge, right?  But it just wasn't China.  So I was always happy to pedal away, leaving the white buildings behind and head into the little rural Chinese villages that are only spared being classified as piles of rubble by sheer will of the buildings' inhabitants.
 
After a couple of days of wandering around though, we decided to try our luck and see if we would be part of the fortunate few in the South that could travel.  We heard a lot of the highways were blocked off because of ice and snow, preventing most of the bus lines in the region to cease operations.  So, we boarded a bus to Guilin, hoping that we could make it to Ping'an, and left Yangshuo behind.