Kaifeng and Guanliangcun
Trip Start
Nov 26, 2007
1
35
44
Trip End
Apr 17, 2008
Kaifeng,
Henan,
China
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Kaifeng is a grubby little town (there is a constant haze about town which may be related to the Kaifeng chemical works...it is really amazing that the Chinese build things like chemical plants and power stations pretty much in the middle of residential areas) which really comes to life at night with the night market. The night market is all about food...from flat breads, to cooked hams, to dumplings you can get it all here.
A quiet walk down the mountain...
The whole night market is set up from nothing within 10 minutes after 6 pm. Everything is cooked with coal and they use fans to control the temperature, see the massive flames coming out of some of the pictures. It really is amazing how ones perspective of Chinese towns changes from day to night; it's hard to believe you are in the same place at times. Finding things like bars and hotels can be near impossible as the signs are never in roman script and whenever you wander into a doorway you instantly get mugged by the plethora of staff (there is often more staff than punters in most Chinese places) who won't actually let you look inside!!The town is ringed by an old city wall which as usual has been rebuilt pretty much. We saw some really nice parks and pagodas; all costing money to get into in this fine communist country. The university area was really nice too, almost like Oxford in some places. Kaifeng is pretty much devoid of westerners; I think we met 6 the whole time we were there.
Kaifeng Photos.
Kaifeng isn't particularly western friendly. We ended up in the Dajintai Hotel which is like a Cultural Revolution version of faulty towers. We got a cheap room which was basic but smelt very damp and musty. The shower was a communal affair like we had for after football at school. The best bit was that we didn't get a key to the room; instead there is an attendant (who was not insignificantly akin to Manuel from Faulty Towers) on each floor whose sole job is to open your door, provide flasks of hot water and sell you beer at 17p a 600ml bottle. Breakfast was free and after the laughter had stopped about a westerner entering the canteen I had some rice gruel and steamed bread. The breakfast was possibly the worst thing I have ever been served in my life, the vegetables were stewed in pure salt and served with rice soup with no taste at all and dumplings that contained some boiled noodles. The treat of the breakfast was a single boiled egg which you got handed when you passed over your breakfast coupon. For some bizarre reason we stayed in this hell hole for 2 full nights.
On our first night we met a reporter from the South China Morning Post and her American photographer. They were based in Beijing but doing a piece on Henan province that forms part of a series from around the country to be published during the Olympics. We had some food with them and then went to the only bar in town. It was Friday night but it wasn't exactly bustling. There were a couple of other groups who were putting away a fair bit of beer. Then the karaoke came out (went well with the punch bag by the dance floor). Some of the Chinese have surprisingly good voices. It all got spoiled though when I was selected to replace Celine Dion on the Titanic theme tune. It was actually the 1st time I have ever done karaoke and I was personally quite pleased with myself and I got lots of laughter and applause anyway. I had a good bit of crack with a Chinese man till he got too drunk to even dance properly and then he just seemed to smell of spew after that. The music was just weird they switch from hardcore dance music to ballads in a second. We had so much fun that we missed our 12pm curfew and had to wake up the staff (who just sleep in the hotel corridor and lobby) to get into our room. The 2nd time we spent a night in Kaifeng we went to another random bar and had a mixture of alternating open mic singing sessions and scantily clothed girls dancing. It definitely had a bit of a Chinese mafia feel about it as there were all these young, fat Chinese lads with bored looking girls strutting around. And, even in nightclubs when the guys go for a crap they leave the toilet door open and try make conversation with you while they are wiping their arses!! I really can't get my head around that at all.
One of the most bizarre emails I have had in a while came from Liam while I was in Kaifeng. Out of the blue he forwarded an email about the craziest restaurant in the world...and low and behold it was the path that we were on in Hua Shan Mountain 4 days before. What are the chances of that!!
We had done in everything that Kaifeng had to offer within 24 hours and set off to check out a small village called Guoliangcun which is used as a set for Chinese movies due to its traditional architecture. Guoliangcun was not an easy place to reach; it takes 3 different buses from Kaifeng to get within walking distance of it. The key to these little trips we have found is to leave the big bags at a hotel and just take a tiny rucksack with essentials in it. The previous times I had emptied out my big bag and used that but this time I decided to buy a new bag...it cost 1 pound fifty for a cheap bag in Kaifeng...it has now become my mission to keep this ₤1.50 alive for the rest of my trip. The journey was through the industrial heartland of China; factories making everything from electric motors to fridges. You see all aspects of China from smog to horrible communist era blocks of flats to modern majestic hotels. In the towns (I say towns but even a small town in China often has 2-4 million inhabitants (compared to Manchester's 1 million!!) people don't really know how to take you and just stare. The stare can often be broken with a big smile and a hello in Chinese.
After much traveling we arrived in Guoliangcun. The woman on the bus saved us 10 Yuan on the ticket by pretending that we weren't on the bus. She did Ok out of it, 10 Yuan for the bus and 50 Yuan for the tickets that weren't tickets. We then had to walk up a really amazing cliff path that had been blasted out of the rocks. Until this road existed a few years ago the only way up to the village was steps cut into the sandstone cliffs! The village economy is now based on tourism but one really wonders if they've ever seen western people before. By the end of our time there we felt like celebrities - I tried to capture what I mean in the video attached. Every time we meet someone they wanted to take pictures with us. If they go past on a bus they all shout hello in English at you and then laugh. If its young girls they will say hello and then all giggle once they are a safe distance past - it became a bit of a game trying to guess the 'giggle distance' once a cluster of girls went past. There were lots of children in Guoliangcun (well you say children as they look and behave like children but in fact most were 18-21 years old - strange to see kids behaving like this when ours back home would be getting drunk and having kids rather than giggling and getting their pictures taken with foreigners). They were all art students there to paint the mountains and old town.
You have to check out some of the signs that we saw in Guanliangcun in my ongoing signs compilation...
It seems that Guoliangcun is all about the weekends as the hotels weren't really that interested in our presence and it was hard work getting hot water (hot water requiring that they stoke the cooker with coal) and such things out of them. So as it didn't look like they were going to offer us any food in the hotel so we wandered off down to one of the little food shacks at the side of the road. We had some cabbage soup which wasn't the most inspiring meal I've ever had but once we'd finished a teacher came and joined us and before we know it we were having a party with 'The Chef' who owned the food place. At his own expense he pulled out bottle after bottle of rice whiskey and provided free meat on a stick. It turned into one of those macho drinking sessions with lots of gambe's (cheers) being shouted. It hit a point when the glass got so big it was hard to drink and I had to send myself home straight after that. A woman who could speak English also came by as word had got round the village that there were some foreigners in town as she wanted to meet us. In the end we turned chef into a bit of a cult personality and his place was henceforth full every time we went there. All in all chef was the best chef in the world as his food was pretty bland I have to say but he was a top bloke, we had to hide the second night we were there though in case he persuaded us in again for more of that sore head alcohol.
Once we had drunk 3 bottles of water and 2 bottles of coke each the morning after the chef experience we felt well enough to go walking into the hills. Again it was a sort of Chinese walking theme park, the highlight being a slide (made out of solid granite tiles!!) right down the mountain. However, the scenery was spectacular, almost like the Grand Canyon with vertical sandstone cliffs. The steps that the locals had originally cut into the cliffs before the road was built were just amazing - we went down about 50 meters before deciding not to risk it any further.
On our second night we managed to find a hotel with hot water and cable TV (every room had a TV with fuzz on it but only one room actually had a satellite decoder to get a picture...China amazes at times). We watched CCTV 9 (the English propaganda channel) most of the night...to the point where Dave had memorized most of the adverts. It is funny watching the interviewer correcting the people he's interviewing when they say something that doesn't correspond with the current party line.
Guanliangcun photos.
Now another thing about China...wherever you go for a cold drink or a beer they have a nice big fridge with all the drinks in but the drinks are never bloody cold. I think it is the same problem we used to face when we sold equipment to the Chinese...they have a national obsession with switching everything off all the time. They do use a hell of an amount of electricity though; I never realized before I came here that most motorbikes etc run off batteries rather than petrol.
We have discovered a new fruit...the Chinese have this fruit that is the shape of a pear but tastes more like and apple...henceforth it will be called a papple...
