Sunday morning doesn’t usually begin at 8.30am with a three and a half hour walk through steep hills in rice terraces, but when it does it makes a nice change.
We were walking from Dazai village over to Ping’an; James kept saying it was 25km but there must have been some miscommunication somewhere. As promised it was much cooler up in the hills; actually you’d have to say it was the perfect temperature for walking. We didn’t see many people apart from our group in the first half hour, the exceptions being a farmer taking a horse down the hill or something like that. It didn’t take that long for the group to get split apart into those who felt like walking quickly, those who didn’t feel like walking quickly, those who stopped very regularly to take photos, and those in between the others.
Lilian had come across some kind of flu, and wasn’t looking too energetic, so she walked back down to the carpark we ascended from yesterday, and caught a bus around to meet us. James took us through the hills, and we later discovered that he is from that region of China anyway. So you could say that he knew where he was going, and with the regular stops to make sure everyone took the right turns here and there, and then having to double-forward to make sure people at the front didn’t too long, he probably walked twice as far as any of us.
We had been warned about a four-hour ‘death-march’ style trek which would be much harder than the Great Wall of China, but actually we had more rest breaks on this trek and so it ended up easier. Probably the most difficult thing was eventually eating the last piece of my Shanghai nut cake at one of the little wooden huts we sat in along the way… Goddamn it, that cake had been with me for a while, and I was sorry to see it go. Also, it had softened a lot in my bag and could nearly be pulled apart instead of being hacked with a big sharp knife.
I can’t tell you that much about what Alice did on the walk because we didn’t really stay together, but from my own point of view the sharp drops everywhere around the path and the elegance of the steps in the terraces never did cease to amaze me. That’s why I took four hundred million and two photos.
Along the way we came across a man and a lady carting two rice bags on a bamboo pole across their shoulders. They let us try and lift the bags, which frankly wasn’t happening. Each bag was 20kg, but if you don’t lift them across your shoulders then it feels a bit heavier than that because the bamboo flexes. Of course while we were standing around wheezing and drinking water the Chinese man was having a cigarette. Mike got James to translate and found out that he was 51; he looked younger when he slung the rice back over his shoulders and cantered off the down the path ahead of us. And when I say cantered I mean that he was pulling away from the front of our group..
Further on we stopped in a small town where some long-haired Yao tribeswomen live. It’s traditional not to cut the hair after age 18, and they’re not supposed to show it to anyone until they’re married. Some of the hill tribeswomen hold records for the longest hair (or maybe it’s longest average?), and are only too happy to be photographed for a small price. As we walked away, the price quickly became smaller. “40 yuan, 20, 10,” they shouted after us
The landscape is just so nice to walk in, and the air so fresh, that it was almost a let-down to walk over the ridge and down the last hill into Ping’an. But everyone was starving so lunch was assigned greater priority. The number of bizarre things we have seen on this trip is piling up; here’s another one. No where in Ping’an village is there a road, nor even a path wider than about 1m, nor a hill of gradient less than 15 degrees. Almost all the buildings are two-or-three stories, panelled in dark wood. But in the restaurant we went to there was a shiny glass cocktail bar with blue lights and a variety of spirits.
And because some of the meals were slow arriving the owner bought us out two huge bowls of popcorn and urged us to return later that night when they would turn the music up.
We had more urgent things to attend to upon checking into the Li Qing hostel in Ping’an: going directly to sleep for two hours. Having done that we slothed to the restaurant downstairs only to find that several other people had just woken up as well. The hostel was well set up with the restaurant right next to the reception, all of which led on to a balcony looking over the terraces. And that seemed just as good a place as any to chat away the rest of the afternoon.
Just like our hostel in Dazai, you could hear what was happening in every other room of the building; in fact in Dazai you could almost hear what people were ordering for dinner. And just like in Dazai, our room had a shower head that pointed more or less into the toilet, and possessed the further novelty of being the only bathroom I’ve seen with a Western toilet sitting on top of an Asian squat toilet. The pipes out the bottom (excuse me) of one literally just ran into the top of the other. And the toilet rocked if you knocked it too hard turning around. But once again the shower was brilliant; hot and consistent pressure.
Dinner was great, even we thought we were in for another marathon waiting session; when we ordered they had to ring the chef and get him to trot on up the hill and get started! Several people got sucked into buying a bottle of the Great Wall-brand red wine which was staggeringly average. Why they ordered another after that, I will never know. But it was all in good fun, as we sat and puzzled about why anyone in their right mind would have strung up a very long line of twinkle lights along the edge of the terrace, which stretched halfway down the hill, and we waited around until 8pm when we were booked in to see a cultural performance by some of the local Yao tribeswomen. I confess now to dreading this in advance, just as I had done with the folk songs in Russia and the song and dance in Mongolia. And I confess to being wrong by a country mile. Again.
Our tour group filed into the performance room, and took up seats on one end while the women arranged themselves and ceased giggling at the other end. Dressed up in their white, blue and pink costumes the tiny women (the tallest was maybe 5’4″) started with a welcoming song, moved on to an ornate dance, then took up their bamboo poles for an intriguing dance in which they moved around in pairs, beating out a rhythm on the ground and on each other’s poles.
And then… they asked us to sing a song.
We had a collective mental blank until Lilian translated what they were asking for as ‘An English song, they want you to sing an English song’.
So Dom started singing the first line of ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis, and because we all knew the rest, we joined in. There you are. An English song. Probably should have gone for Yellow Submarine but no one thought of it fast enough.
Then they asked for a dance… so we got some clapping rhythm going while Dom took the middle of the floor and busted out some major-league disco moves. Oh, sorry, that should be Moves (with a capital M). He was good, and it was all in good fun so the tribeswomen loved it.
What next, you ask? I guess it gets very lonely in the hills over winter so they play a game where everyone holds hands and dances around in a circle, and one of the tribeswomen puts on a blindfold and picks out a man. Then the man puts on a blindfold, circle starts again, and the man tries to pick out a woman. Then he takes the woman up in a piggyback, circle starts again, and in they can’t break out then they are married. So now you begin to see the logic of it… After that they drink toasts in three different styles (of the 38% by Vol. rice wine I mentioned), then they really are married.
So that’s how Dom and Myf (Catherine who had been called Myf to distinguish her from Kate and Katie) ended up being legally married in China. I think.
The craziness continued when the circle reformed and turned itself into a tunnel, with pairs of people holding hands on either side. Pairs at the front of the tunnel would through while being hit by everyone else, the rejoin at the end as the tunnel shuffled along.
To finish off, they bought the bamboo poles back out, and set them up in the middle of the floor with two poles longways about a metre apart, and other poles being wielded lengthways by the tribeswomen. With two poles in each hand they moved the poles left and then right in a click-click-clack/ click-click-click clack-clack-clack/ rhythm so that there gaps between the poles but the gaps were moving. We took hands with the remaining tribeswoman, one by one, and attempted to dance across in the gaps, and then back, and so forth. It looked easy but there was a funny half-step you had to do when you got to one side and started back the other way. We couldn’t get it right consistently and ended up out of step with the Yao woman, who knew exactly was she was doing. Of course, if any one us showed signs of being half decent at the game, the women would quickly speed up the rhythm. Lilian, who had led this trip before, was the best by some distance.
We left the room giggling ourselves silly, and would have been happy to go to bed except that some Dutch people staying in the hostel decided that Sunday night was karaoke night, and that to do it right they needed to put on their old favourites from the 80’s and sing really badly. I’m sure they had fun. I hope they did, otherwise no one did.
Greg
