Island Adventures on May Holiday

I’ve been having an enjoyable 7-day vacation here. This is the May 1 labor day holiday here. It’s a very popular time to travel in China, and I didn’t have any clear idea of where I wanted to go so I decided to stay in Zhoushan and visit other islands. Also, I’d been meaning for a while to take some long walks in the countryside around here.
The first day I took a 25 km walk out to the west of Dinghai, walking out a very pleasant road that Mary and I had biked last fall. It’s an old road passing rice paddies and villages, and it’s full of activity with people biking and cars and buses careening by you. I stopped at a temple and had a nice vegetarian lunch with a bunch of temple visitors. I also stopped to read for a while by the roadside. My back was hurting me for some reason and that slowed me down some. I stopped for a while at a town called Cenggang, and then meandered through its beautiful countryside until a beckoning pass led me over to another seaside village. I then followed a coastal road past shipworks and more farm fields out almost to the western tip of Zhoushan Island until I decided I’d better get on a bus before they stopped running for the evening. I half an hour later I was back in Dinghai and after a search had found a favorite Lanzhou (NW China) noodle shop for dinner.
On Wednesday I set off for an island called Shengsi not knowing where it was, but having heard about it from a number of people. I guessed that boats to it left from Shenjiamen at the east end of Zhoushan Island so I rode over there, only to be sent off again in search of another port, whose name a friendly person scralled in unintelligible Chinese characters on the back of a card. Eventually I made it to a place called Three Rivers Port on the north side of the island, and bought a ticket. Since I had a few hours to wait I watched the end of a Golden State Warriors – Dallas Mavericks NBA game and then took a long walk along the north coast to another town and back.
It turned out that Shengsi is an island in the far NE of the Zhoushan archipelago. The boat went first to Big Sheep Mountain Island, where there’s a long bridge to Shanghai, and then on to Shengsi. On the second leg of the two-hour boat ride I befriended three Chinese people, a husband and wife and her younger brother, all Shanghai residents. At Shengsi they helped me on a bus to the center of town, found a small hotel, and bargained down the price for me. We went out to dinner together at a special seafood restaurant area for tourists and had a wonderful but very pricy dinner. We ate periwinkles, octopus, vegetables, and a fish that cost half the price of the dinner and was the best I’ve eaten since that Chilean Sea Bass (endangered and really shouldn’t be eaten) in my cooking class at Williams.
The next morning I got up early and walked back out to the port, on a spit of land, to ask about boat departure times, and then walked down Shengsi’s Route 1, a road hugging its western shore. After a stop at a beach I found myself walking over a hill and down into town again. I wandered some, ate lunch, and read EB White in a pleasant park while kids drove by in toy cars churning out awful recordings of classic American songs. I was feeling rather aimless so I walked back to the port to catch a 3 pm boat to Zhoushan Island. While I was waiting I ran into my friend Jesse, an English teacher at Zhoushan Middle School. He’d just gotten married and was on Shengsi to have his third wedding party, this one with his wife’s family and friends. He claims that he’d told me she is from Shengsi – so I guess that’s part of how I got the idea in my head to go there.
Jesse convinced me to stay another night so I rode back into town with him and walked up to his wife’s parents’ home. I met the family and Jesse and I went for a very pleasant walk over a hill and by a must-see beach that I’d neglected to visit. We returned for a great dinner with her family and then went out for an evening of KTV karaoke (somehow my first in China) with her friends. I struggled through the few English songs they had – My Heart Will Go On and We Will Rock You – and only showed my true talents with (yes, again … but this time with the real words) Edelweiss. The following morning her father woke me up, made me a nice Chinese breakfast of porridge, steamed bun, egg, and preserved vegetables, and took me down to catch a bus to the port.
From Shengsi I headed directly to the island of Zhu Jia Jian, east of Shenjiamen, where I had arranged to meet my photographer friend Li Zhong Yi and some friends of his from Ningbo to go out to a small island. Getting there tested my knowledge of the Chinese public transportation system, but with some prior knowledge and the help of yet another friendly ticket woman on the bus to Zhu Jia Jian I made it out to the small village Zhang Zhou on time. I met Zhong Yi and his friends, two sisters Xu Hong and Xu Lan, who work as a nurse and a librarian respectively, and we ate lunch in a small restaurant. The plan was to take a ferry over to a small island called White Sand Island, that Zhong Yi knew. We missed the ferry, but chartered a small workhorse boat to take us over. It felt like being in Maine, riding right on the water past rocky shores. All four of us like photography and we immediately started shooting away at each other.
White Sand Island is a beautiful quiet island of fishing villages and rocky beaches. The boat pulled up at a little wharf and we walked up a little hill past some homes, and over to a nice beach. We spent a pleasant couple hours there meandering and eating canned peaches and oranges by another dock. We caught a 3:30 ferry back to Zhu Jia Jian and a little girl who spoke a little English gave me a hermit crab. A half an hour later we were in Shenjiamen where we ate no less than 3-5 dinners, depending how we counted. First were wontons, then Shenjiamen’s famous fish balls, then various vegetables and meats in a soup broth, then blackberries, and then some fried noodles at the night market. We wound up sitting on an old wooden boat tied up at a dock, talking for a while. As I walked back into my apartment complex that night our neighbor who showed up to cook dinner for us once nabbed me and took me to her older sister’s apartment so I could meet her nephew who’s a student in Hangzhou. I had a nice conversation with him and the neighbor’s daughter while the mothers proudly listened to their children communicate.
The next morning I met Li Zhong Yi and Xu Hong and Lan and we headed over to visit the small island Pan Zhi Dao across the harbor from Dinghai. Mary and I had been there with Zhong Yi a few weesk before. It’s a very pleasant island with quiet farm fields, a lake, and boats tied up along the way. The island’s only road winds around its perimeter. We passed a narrow strait between Pan Zhi Dao and another island, and I saw the strongest tidal currents I have ever seen – they looked like rapids on a river, pretty startling. After riding around the island we took the ferry back to Dinghai, ate a Sichuan lunch, and walked in the Bamboo Park memorializing an Opium War battle against the British. Then Xu Hong and Xu Lan headed back to Ningbo and Zhong Yi and I ate dinner at that Lanzhou noodle shop and walked back to his apartment so I could drink Hangzhou tea, look at pictures, and get my bike.
Sunday morning I headed out for one last adventure, to an island that Zhong Yi recommended called Qushan, partway out to Shengsi Island. I left from the Three Rivers Port again, much more easily found this time, and slept for most of the hour-long ferry ride. Before I’d left the ferry terminal though, I’d been befriended by a Qushan police officer. On arrival he shuttled me into a police van and took me to a nice hotel where he used his stature I guess to get me a sweet deal for the night. I helped five or six hotel employees interpret my passport, ate lunch, and then headed out on a walk. Qushan is a great view into Zhoushan archipelago life. There aren’t really any tourist destinations, and there are only 60,000 people on the island, mostly just fishermen and farmers. The island has a central plain dotted with typical brick and cinderblock farmhouses, and hills around its rim, with little harbors in between. I walked up a high mountain called Guanyin (a goddess) Mountain where people were hard at work blasting away a hillside to build more temples. I found a quiet path down the other side, and then spent the afternoon walking out the main road going the length of the island. There was incredibly frequent bus service up and down this road, and at 5:45 a young driver stuck his head out the window and ask me what I was planning to do. He and the ticket woman on the bus had been passing me all afternoon, and were concerned I might miss the last bus on the route in just another 20 minutes or so. They were great people and gave me a free ride out to the end of the road and back into town. I got back to town pretty tired and just ate dinner at a cafeteria and went back to my hotel, where I caught a Wuhan-Dalian soccer game on TV. I’d arranged with the police officer to meet him for breakfast at 7 am (I thought) and at 6:25 he showed up at my room, luckly after I’d already been up for 10 minutes or so. We ate wontons and baozi and then I took off for the port and my boat back to Zhoushan Island.
So now I’m back in Dinghai and I’ll be teaching again tomorrow morning, although we only have our younger students this week since the older ones are having midterms. Just before the break we learned that we won’t be teaching our Junior 2 students (8th graders roughly) anymore after this Wednesday. Instead they’ll have us teaching some students that have just been accepted to be Senior 1 students (10th graders) at the school next year.
It was a great break. I’m really happy that I decided to stay in Zhoushan and that I got to spend time with some of my friends. I have a much better sense of Zhoushan and other islands. I really enjoyed walking so much, and it gave me a lot of time to absorb what it’s like to be living in China. It was also great to use public transportation so much – it’s really a great system here in China because people use it so much. I hope I’ll get out for some more adventures on weekends, but my time here is running out. I have seven more weeks of teaching – just a month and a half – and then another three weeks after that of being in China. Mary’s boyfriend Dan has been visiting on his way back to America from Thailand. He’s about to the end of his time in Asia, and it’s been interesting to hear his perspective. I’ll be there soon too.

Spring Festival Travels: SW of Lanzhou Feb. 27

Hi,

For the last week I've been back in western China, in the area southwest of Lanzhou. (I'm now in Zhangye, Gansu Province having been through Xining, Qinghai Province).

The train ride west to Xi'an went quite smoothly. Soft sleeper is pretty comfortable, though I think I would have preferred the comraderie of hard sleeper. It's nice to sit and look out at the countryside, though it seemed like people were constantly walking by with bags, forcing me to stop reading, stand up and let them go by. The region from east of Xi'an west is quite dry and dusty with lots of storage and dwelling places carved into loess hillsides (wind-deposited sediment like what's found in the American midwest I understand). I arrived into Xi'an around six o'clock and was able to buy an overnight train ticket on to Lanzhou. I had a few hours so I ate dinner and sat in a pleasant park a few blocks from the train station. Another night on the train and I arrived in Lanzhou. (though Xi'an is a famous tourist site I'll be going back there with my family when we travel in China together in late July/early July so I decided to head on west quickly).

From the Lanzhou train station it was an easy couple of bus rides across the city to the south long distance bus station (public buses in cities are really easy to use in China - I just ask someone what bus to take to a place, and ask the ticket person on board to tell me when to get off - they're always really friendly and helpful). At the station the ticket woman insisted she couldn't sell me a ticket to Linxia and pointed at a man who was harrassing a couple Dutch people. Together we were, as my guidebook puts it, "press ganged" onto a bus by a guy who was actually quite nice when I talked to him later. The ensuing ride was great fun. We crawled out of the station over torn up dirt and pavement streets while the two ticket sellers jumped on and off the moving bus yelling "Linxia" and "Xiahe" and accosting people that stood by the roadside. We pulled up next to three men with piles of bloody sheepskins on the roadside. Our ticket men quoted some price, and the men indicated, no, no. Fine then, the sellers climbed on the bus and it drove down the road 20 meters or so before they jumped out again and said, I take it, a lower price. The men agreed and the bus backed up, they loaded the sheepskins and themselves onboard, and we were on our way.

The new road climbed its way up through a dusty, dry, but pretty incredible landscape with terraced hillslopes and eroded ridges. The region is home to many Chinese Muslims, and I saw them everywhere, the men with white skullcaps and the women with scarves over their heads. They've also built some quite beautiful mosques with minarets at the four corners and silver crescents on rooftop spires. The bus dropped me off on the outskirts of Linxia, and as I got off the woman from the Netherlands told me there was a New Years festival happening in Xiahe, a Tibetan town I'd intended to visit later. I stayed in Linxia to go to a bank and get a sense of the city, but then caught another bus up to Xiahe.

There was a Chinese backpacker on the bus, and when we got to Xiahe we ended up in the same guesthouse dormroom. We started talking and ended up wandering around the Labrang Monastery together taking pictures that afternoon, and then traveling together for the next few days. Her name is Liang Feng Xia and she's a pharmacist in Guangzhou. She remembers little English from her schooling, but was very patient in listening to my Chinese (especially my bad grammar - I forget all the time that time and place come first in a sentence) and very attuned to what vocabulary I'd understand and what I wouldn't. She often acted as a translator when other Chinese spoke to me. "Did you understand that?"

Xiahe (an amazing name in pronuncation, with a quick fouth tone "Xia" and a longer second tone "he" from deep in the throat) has one painfully long main street that I had to walk back and forth from the bus station to our guesthouse. It's lined with Chinese-style storefronts that were mostly all closed for the Spring Festival. West of that was the huge Labrang Monastery complex, and a Tibetan neighborhood beyond. The monastery has several Tibetan temples on the flank of a hillside overlooking a wide area of one-story dwellings and courtyards for monks. The complex is surrounded by a path for circumambulating (a word?) worshippers, with long lines of prayer wheels on the south side.

The first morning we were there we watched some sort of Tibetan ceremony taking place. Many monks were gathered around a stage of sorts where other monks with yellow hats stood near I leader of sorts, in yellow clothing. I have a lot of reading up on Tibetan religion, history and culture to do whenever I get to a place where it isn't banned or in Chinese :). It was like Yellowstone, there were so many photographers around, only these were monks and Tibetan worshippers instead of buffalo and elk. Feng Xia made me somewhat uncomfortable by asking me to "sneak" pictures of her standing next to Tibetan women. I can't complain too much about the photographers, though, because I got to know a couple of them later and they're really nice people. Anyway, thanks to my moral reservations I don't have many pictures of people to show you.

We did a lot of walking around the monastery complex, nad a little walking into the hills. On one of these walks into the hills we ran into an Italian man who apparently travels around China for his life, and goes home to visit Italy for vacations. He shares my enthusiasm for the Tibetan areas in western Sichuan and (along with others I've talked to) highly recommends some river valley (not Tiger Leaping Gorge) in Yunnan Province right along the border with Myanmar. Anyway, he said I really ought to go to Langmusi, a town further into the mountains, so I decided to join Feng Xia in going there the next morning.

At 7 am the next morning we walked in the dark bus station and met a man I took to be a profession photographer, whom Feng Xia had spoken with briefly the afternoon before. He and another photographer we traveling on the same bus to Langmusi. While I gazed out at the landscape (stunning) Feng Xia talked and talked with the two photographers and also a Tibetan girl. I couldn't follow their conversation and so didn't join in, but when we arrived we were walking together to find a hotel without me even knowing who they all were. So we became a little travel and photography fellowship in what was one of my best experiences of this trip and my time in China.

I've already introduced Liang Feng Xia. Now, Lao "Old" Zhang a professional photographer from Nanjing - a specialist in photographing people and a smoker, he had a great sense of humor and traveled (I was amazed) with only his camera bag and one small hand bag. Then there was Lao Ding (nicknamed Hongbo, or "boss" in the local Tibetan dialect), actually not a photographer but the owner of Shenzhen software company that translates software into Chinese on contract. He was decked out with nice outdoor travel gear, a high-end Canon digital SLR like Lao Zhang's, a sweet Leica digital "point and shoot" (he's a really good photographer, though, so he deserves the gear), and a digital sound recorder. He has a great interest in documenting the Tibetan people, and played for us beautiful recordings he'd made of a woman in his Xiahe hotel singing as she mopped the floor. Lao Ding spoke some English and could convey things to me that otherwise slipped my ears in their Chinese conversations. Last, there's Cai Bao, a Tibetan native of Xiahe who studies Tibetan medicine in the nearby city Hezuo, and is currently visiting a classmate in Langmusi. She had no camera but took custody of the Leica in our subsequent adventures.

Langmusi is a mainstreet and a collection of houses in a couple intersecting stream valleys at 3500 m. Hemming the town in are a mesa that reminded me of the cliffs at Aguerro, Spain, a hillside with Tibetan temples and vegetation that looked like African scrub, and a wall of white rugged mountains to the west. The five of us got rooms together at a pleasant hotel, and ate lunch at Lesha's cafe, a place with a lot of character, a lot of signed t-shirts from international travelers on the wall, and a very tall non-Chinese waiter. We ate apple pie among other dishes and then then headed out to shoot up the place from village to ridgetop, before resting awhile in the midafternoon, and staking out on a hilltop for the sunset. That evening we all sat around talking in the guys' room (No. 203) and entertained various talkative Chinese guests that wandered in. It was really incredible for me to be there listening to these folks, and getting to know them. Without Feng Xia's ability to make friends along the road, I would probably never have gotten to know these people. Lao Ding spoke English and was willing to speak slowly in Chinese, but Lao Zhang was generally incomprehensible to me (though it was very funny to watch the others' reactions to his jokes).

We rose early the next morning for a cold but beautiful sunrise, the light touching the mountains and then the town below. We had a good time taking pictures of each other along with the scene.

We'd been invited by Cai Bao's classmate (also Tibetan) to a housewarming party his family was having. We placed our gifts on a table outside and walked up the sets, though the porch, and into a house full of Tibetans of all ages. They sat us on couches behind glass coffee tables full of food. They gave us Tibetan milk tea and dishes with rice and sugar and something unknown. I was gratified to watch my Chinese friends politely say thank you to and ignore our hosts' suggestion that they carve pieces from the huge hunk of perhaps beef lying on the table (it's an art I often practiced at dinners with Xiao Sheng's family). Lao Ding asked if anyone would sing, and a woman sitting on the floor in a corner of the room bent her head over a microphone and sang with a voice full of emotion. He recorded her and later a teenage boy that the room cajoled into singing (until his voice cracked).

Before long Lao Zhang and Lao Ding were up and about taking pictures of the people, and Feng Xia, Cai Bao, and I went outside to join the dancing. I tried my best to mimick whoever was in front of me, whether Cai Bao, seven year old girl, or teenage boy, in various traditional dances. A favorite of mine had us trotting in a circle swishing our hands back and forth, then turning inwards to reach an arm down towards an outstretched foot, followed by a dip of the knees, with hands on hips and rear end out. After a while we retired to the porch, and the wireless microphone circulated. Somewhere in this world (on Feng Xia's camera where I hope it will never reach you) there's a video of me serenading (walking around and everything) a housefull of Tibetans to the tune of Edelweiss with made up words (about flowers not Jasper this time - there was one English speaker on the scene). Lao Zhang and I also teamed for a brief rendition of "One Night In Beijing," a current Chinese pop hit that may or may not have reached your ears. Then Feng Xia and I held one of Cai Bao's classmate's several older sister's twin babies. Lao Zhang has a great picture that I hope will make it back to me. Actually he and Lao Ding got a ton of excellent photos of these people - I'll try to pass a couple on if I can get ahold of them.

Lao Zhang, Feng Xia, and I were planning to catch a 2:30 bus back to Xiahe but first Cai Bao led us up to a cave next to where the White Dragon River (soon to be filled with trash) emerges from the mountains. We arrived back at the center of town on time, but found we had (perhaps partly intentionally ... I at least was torn about whether to go or not) missed the bus. So we stayed another night. I took a walk back up to the White Dragon gorge, and into the rocky limestone ridges beyond, where it was beautifully silent and I got to watch wild turkey-like birds hop and flutter up cliffs opposite.

We ate dinner again at Lesha's and returned to the Tibetans' home. Walking up the dirt lane to their house felt like entering an off-campus party at college (not that I went to any). People were milling around inside, and entering first, I was captured and led to a couch where a drunk Tibetan explained to me in slurred Chinese that he is male, I am male, and beer is a man's drink ... another man kindly gave me an overflowing cup of orange soda. Feng Xia rescued me with word that there was dancing. On the way out someone grabbed me and placed a long, white, silk-like scarf around my neck.

We danced in a large cicle in the dark yard, stumbling over rough ground and pile of dirt. People started setting off fireworks, including some duds that brave souls ran in to relight. After a time the music changed to something more modern (if a techno beat is modern) that I don't quite know how to describe, and I who had been fumbling through the group dances became a star (whether as an American or an impressive dancer I don't know). There was a kid of maybe eight or ten running around in army pants and a leather jacket, with the front of his head shaved and a huge lock of hair coming off the back (whatever that's called). He was going crazy throwing himself around in the crowd of dancers, and we had a good time doing a little dance off with him.

Around 9 or so we decided to bow out and return to our hotel. We said thank you to the family elders and wound up dancing and twirling our whites scarves down the main street of town, to the amusement of the folks in Lesha's. We rounded off the evening sitting on our beds eating some kind of seed or nut as we (mostly they) talked. That night Lao Ding decided to stay on and record enough material for an album of their singing, but Feng Xia, Lao Zhang, and I got on a bus early the next morning, and transfered in Hezuo to another on to Lanzhou.

In Lanzhou Feng Xia and I parted ways with Lao Zhang at the train station. I found that train tickets east to Shanghai (I was looking for one for a few days later) were sold out, but we both managed to buy train tickets to Xining, to the west in Qinghai Province. The train ride was uneventful except for the crush of people getting on and a really nice couple and their seven-year-old daughter sitting across the table from us. The girl was really cute and was entertained for quite a while by a game where she covered a pile of pumpkin seeds with her hands and Feng Xia guessed whether it was an odd or even number. I again experienced how relaxing it is to sit and eat seeds with people as time passes by. Feng Xia managed to buy a ticket from Xining to Shanghai for me (for tomorrow evening) and her friend back in Guangzhou websearched us a hostel (a curious but comfortable place down a dark alley with no sign, and a dog that barked ferociously as we walked outside to and from the bathroom). We ate in a great night market and the next morning we parted ways as she headed off to a Tibetan temple, and I bought a ticket to Zhangye.

I had three days, and apparently there wasn't a whole lot to see in this season around Xining, so I decided to go up to Zhangye, on the Silk Road in Gansu Province. It was a long bus ride away, but bus rides have been one of my favorite parts of travel in China. This one didn't disappoint. I knew that the Silk Road in this region followed a narrow corridor between mountains, but was expecting most of the drive to be across a dusty monotonous landscape. Instead we wound our way up through barren rocky hills, on a rather precarious road (under reconstruction) around a reservoir, and through a tunnel into a huge, normal-fault bounded valley on the scale (though not the vertical relief) of Death Valley. The valley was beautiful, a cross between the Basin and Range and Montana, plus dusty Chinese villages and herders' homesteads. We drove up this valley to the northwest, and over no less than two 11,000 foot plus passes (modest compared to the 14,000 foot passes I went over on the way to and from Litang ... everything is high here), before dropping (quite rapidly on the downward, curving road) onto the flat Great Plains of the Silk Road valley.

Zhangye is, true to Lonely Planet's word, a relaxing, pleasant city (of apparently over 400,000 people, though it is noticeable smaller than Dinghai) with nearly all its streets lined by willow trees. My aim here has been to relax, and I spent my morning today walking around the streets taking pictures. It's nice to spend two nights in one place and not have a whole lot in particular to see. Tomorrow morning I'll get on a bus back over that great road to Xining and spend the late afternoon in that city before boarding a train to Shanghai around 9 pm. It'll be two nights and a whole day to Shanghai. I bought the last ticket on the train evidently, a soft sleeper, so it should be comfortable. I was torn for a while by the alternative of taking a bunch of long distance buses east from here to Xi'an, then Wuhan, then Shanghai, but it's good to know for sure I have a way back on time to start teaching on March 5. I arrive in Shanghai at 6 am on March 2 and should get home early afternoon that day. That'll give me 2 1/2 days to get settled in Dinghai before I start teaching again on March 5. I'll be busy with pictures, and getting back in touch with you all (eventually!) through e-mail, phone, or video conference.

I hope you've enjoyed these e-mails - gosh this is long.

Best wishes to you all,
Tyler

Spring Festival Travels: Spring Festival With Friend Near Shanghai Feb. 26

Hi!

It's been a while since I last wrote in Chongqing, and since then I've been all the way back to Shanghai and out to western China again. It's been nice to hear back from many of you while I travel! I'm now in Xining, Qinghai Province and I'll be heading back to Shanghai and Zhoushan in a few days. I have one more expedition left before I get on the train back east.

On February 16 Mary and I flew east from Chongqing to Shanghai. It felt strange to travel through airports in China after growing accustomed to bus stations and roads. On the flight I read the Chinese national English language paper, the China Daily, which is always unsatisfying and sometimes infuriating. The front page news was a story about China, India, and Russia meeting to declare their mutual commitment to world peace, and a story about how some college students are paying fellow students to pretend to be their significant other over the Spring Festival holiday to please their families (the article suggested they really shouldn't be doing this). The only news about anything really happening in China was a story about how packed train stations are with people heading home for the holiday - bad news for me. The foreign policy article had a note at the bottom about an editorial on the same subject. Like the news article, this editorial commented that this was really a very good thing indeed.

The Shanghai mass transit system is wonderful (except later when I was physically assaulted by a mass of people getting on the subway from the People's Square) and we got through the city and out by bus to our friend Xiao Sheng's area quite easily. On the way through Shanghai I stopped at a train ticket office and bought a train ticket to Xi'an, the closest I could get to Lanzhou given the Spring Festival rush.

Xiao Sheng's (full name Chen Sheng Feng) family lives in the countryside a half and hour outside the city of Haiyan, southwest of Shanghai and north of the Hangzhou Bay. This is a quite prosperous countryside with large, solid two-story houses spread across the land, with farm fields in between and factories here and there. The landscape was mostly gray and green - cloudy skies and gray buildings, and the lush green of the fields. There are muddy tracks and tree-lined concrete roads. The view out from the second story balcony of their house at night was wonderful.

Xiao Sheng's family includes his two parents, his grandfather in his early 90s, his older sister and her husband and three-month-old baby. Two sets of aunts and uncles and their children live just 50 meters away, and his older sister lives with her husband near his family a couple kilometers away. His family are farmers, and his sister's husband's family owns a small clothing factory. Their house is large and very spare, with high ceilings, and they leave everything open to the outside when they're home. A pig lives in one ground floor room, and next to that is the kitchen, then a couple large rooms for sitting during the day and having big dinners. A balcony runs the length of the upstairs connecting rooms and there are extra empty rooms. Xiao Sheng uses one as a tennis court. I was stuck by how little stuff Xiao Sheng has accumulated. His room had more or less a bed, a bedside table, a desk with a stereo system and his CD and MP3 players, and posters (and his own bathroom). I'd say probably his stuff was at school, except I've seen students' rooms and even as seniors they share rooms with three other students and their only personal space is their bed and small shelves over their desk (for comparison I had my own room and a huge common room last year).

Xiao Sheng's family was very kind and welcomed us in all their Spring Festival (New Year's) celebrations. I came away with a really strong impression of the value of family, and what it's like to live closely together in a rural area. We ate large dinners, all together with the extended family on the New Year's Eve, and in various other groupings other times. In between meal we biked to a nearby town, walked around, and mostly just sat around. One of my best memories was an afternoon sitting and reading on the second story balcony. Xiao Sheng's grandfather's 12-year-old granddaughter from his first marriage wandered upstairs and very patiently talked to me in Chinese. We eventually moved back downstairs and sat around eating sunflower seeds and drinking tea in a lazy sort of way with her mother and Xiao's Sheng's mother.

After dark on the New Year's Eve the countryside around their house lit up with fireworks. Quite substantial fireworks going off everywhere. After an evening watching CCTV programs at his sister's house we went to her husband's family's factory and were treated to a huge fireworks display of our own. We stood in the corners of the courtyard as her husband and a relative set out large cardboard boxes with fireworks in tubes inside and lit them off. I stayed the night at his sister's house and managed to lock myself in the bathroom for a couple hours in the morning (there was no doorknob on the inside as in turned out ...). Unfortunately due to poor communication his sister and her husband thought I'd locked myself in the evening before and spend the night there.

This was an incredible experience in a quiet way. It meant a lot to spend time with Xiao Sheng and understand the world he comes from - to get to know his family, and see their interactions and the pace of their life. I'm really glad that I came all the way back from western China, because I learned things from this that now amount of travel could have taught me.

On the 19th I got on a bus to Shanghai and spend the late afternoon at the Shanghai Museum in its new building with its fine collections of Chinese ceramics, calligraphy, painting, and more. I then walked down Nanjing DongLu (East Road), a bunch of neon lights and American fastfood chains, and ate dumplings on the boardwalk overlooking the Huangpu River. They have boats going up and down the river with huge football stadium-sized TV screens showing advertisements. I think that's all I need to say about Shanghai. At 10 o'clock I got on a train west to Xi'an, soft sleeper because that was all that was left.

I think I'll write the next part in another e-mail so you aren't overwhelmed!

Tyler

Spring Festival Travels: Travels in Western Sichuan Feb. 14

Hi,

So, last time I wrote I was in Chengdu. Since then I've been traveling in western Sichuan Province, first climbing a sacred Buddhist mountain, and then heading into the mountains towards Tibet.

After our time in Chengdu, Mary and I caught a bus to Emei Shan, a 3100 m sacred Buddhist mountain. We left our big packs at a guesthouse at the base and headed up that afternoon. The mountain is huge, with many kilometers and perhaps 2500 vertical meters of steps. The lower parts of the mountain are lush forest, leading up to high mountain forest with rhodedendrons, and snowy pine forest towards the top. The steps go on and ON. There are monasteries all along the trails, and snack shops dotted along the way. The first and last night we spent at a very pleasant little hotel run by very friendly women. It is on a slope above a clear blue lake, below a monastery perched between two mountain streams. The night in between we spent in a room in a monastery high on the mountain, in the fog and snow. It was cold, but an interesting experience. The last stretch to the top was snow-covered stairs (climbed in sneakers!) and then beautiful walking through snowy forest that reminded me of places I've cross-country skied. We didn't spend too much time at the top, where there's a huge golden elephant/goddess statue and a lot of restaurants and hotels for tourists (there are buses and cable cars most of the way to the top). We took a different route down the mountain, which led us down a stunning succession of drops, following a valley down to where we'd stayed the first night. This was the kind of terrain you see in Chinese paintings, with monasteries tucked in below rocky crags and trees and mist (and also pollution haze unfortunately). The vertical drop on these steps was amazing - I was glad we hadn't come up that way, though we must have walked up just as many steps!) Wild monkeys also made this walk exciting. They barred their teeth at us and reached out for food. One jumped on Mary's bag and clung there trying to rip it off her - pretty scary. We walked the rest of the way down with big rocks and a stick to club them with, but didn't run into any more problems. By the end of the day my knees/shins were hurting pretty badly, but we made it back to the place we'd stayed and liked. The following morning we walked back to the base of the mountains through some beautiful sunny forest and collected our packs.

We decided we wanted to go down the road towards Tibet, we first caught a bus to Leshan, and nearby city at the confluence of two rivers with a huge Buddha we didn't see. We did have a very nice walk along a river to our hotel, and then a really enjoyable evening strolling around the streets and eating hotpot (our best yet ... with lettuce, nian gao (pounded rice flour cut in slices), meat balls, mushrooms, etc. dipped in a boiling spicy soup to cook) at an outdoor restaurant with a famous local tofu dish delivered from the restaurant across the street. The next morning we caught a bus to Kangding.

Kangding is the gateway city to the roads west into Tibet from Sichuan Province. From the Chengdu/Leshan area you climb a long river valley, switch-backing on narrow roads over a rushing stream, then go through a tunnel that pops you out in a whole different landscape. The western side is high above a wide valley with views west over many mountains. You switch-back down to a river valley, staring down at the greenish river and alluvial fans covered in light green farm plots. We followed the base of that valley north and west to Kangding, and town in a tight valley between mountains. Kangding is a mixture of Chinese and Tibetan culture. There is a river running the length of town, with Chinese-style shops and apartment buildings on either side. But there are also Tibetan people and shops and restaurants. It was a great place to spend a little time before heading further into the mountains.

When we arrived at the Kangding bus station we ran into a New Zealand woman Glennis we'd helped arrange lodging for at a monastery on Emei Shan, and a man from Bilbao, Spain, Josu. We four decided to walk together to a guesthouse,and shared a dorm room, with a balcony overlooking the river and main streets. Then we had a Tibetan meal with beef/yak, momo's (dumpling-like), and yak-butter tea. The next morning we went out looking for breakfast, and Mary, Josu, and I climbed one of the hills flanking the town, with a few Tibetan temples on it, and later went inside a VERY colorful Tibetan temple at the west end of town.

Josu is a 30-something native of Bilbao who works as a postman for part of the year, but travels the world during his one month paid vacation and an additional three months vacation he takes every winter, when it's cold and gray in Bilbao. I admire him becuase he's realized that he cares more about enjoying life than developing his career, and therefore works this post office job that leaves him free to pursue his life interests, both day to day when in Biblao, and when traveling (he's been to Nepal, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Peru, Chile, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, etc). He's also pretty inspring for having mastered English so well, mostly on his own initiative, through reading English books and magazines and looking up words (and I got to speak Spanish with him some). His vocabulary is incredible for a non-native speaker. It was great fun to discuss Spain, Spanish, Spanish and American politics, world affairs, etc. with him (he's an avid reader of the Economist). He also taught us a great deal about how to travel light, and do laundry! He's traveling byhimself for these three months in China, and joined up with us for the next few days.

The next morning we boarded a bus early for an incredible 9 hour ride over the mountains to the Tibetan town Litang on the southern road to Tibet. This road took us over three passes, some of which might have said 4600 m or so on the signs. We started before dawn and climbed up a snowy pass as it grew light (I've got great pictures out the front window of the bus), went down a valley past many Tibetan houses, stopped for lunch in a town clinging to the cliffs above a big river, and climbed a dusty valley which led us into the high barren hills near Kangding. The small bus was full of Tibetans heading home for the New Year, and our driver was great with a fur hat and sunglasses, complaining about all the foreigners on the bus.

Litang itself is at 4000 m on the north side of a wide plain bordered by hills on one side and snowy peaks on the other. It's a real Tibetan town, though the Chinese have built a wide main street with Chinese-style shop fronts. The sidewalks and side streets of the center part of town are full of Tibetans in the afternoons, striding around in colorful clothing, full of character. A typical sight was a man with a skirt of sorts, a thick coat wrapped over one shoulder and under the other arm, with long thick hair, a fur hat of sorts, and sunglasses on his dark sun, wind, and cold-weathered face ... riding a motorcycle covered in colored streamers other decorations, with a colorful patterned rug on the seat. Women walked around with jackets over skirts with colorful cloth attached at the belt on the front. The town felt like the American west, only Tibetan-style. They are really friendly, upbeat people, and it made for a great atmosphere in the town.

We stayed at a guesthouse where there were also other interesting people passing through, some Germans, a Japanese anthropologist, and Minnesota native we'd had dinner with in Kangding. The place had no running water, because it's so cold the pipes would freeze (water in buckets in the bathroom was frozen when we got up the first morning), but it was great fun to stay there. The first day Mary, Josu, and I decided to hike across the plain. It was a beautiful setting under a sunny sky, surrounded by mountains. We never made it to the other side because we hit a confusing bunch of streams meandering the valley floor that were too deep to cross, but we walked a long way out there. We then spent time wandering the streets and market in the late afternoon as the sun went down. The next day we walked up to the Litang monastery, and climbed a hill behind it, and then visited two Tibetan households on dusty streets that local youths led us to. They live in really sturdy, cosy homes with rock walls and wood beams and nice Tibetan decorations. At the first house we ate cookies, and watched a whole extended family make more, and at the second house we ate thick Tibetan bread and drank yak-butter tea while we talked with a boy who's very excited about learning English, having begun only 7 months ago with a great teacher apparently. It was very interesting being in a Tibetan area given the history of Chinese invasion and their continuing oppression of the Tibetans. Unfortunately I have still read very little about their history and culture, but I'd like to. I did get to see a Tibetan being arrested by the Chinese police while a crowd of Tibetans pressed passively in around the police jeep. I need to learn more about Tibet.

Yesterday morning Mary and I parted ways with Josu, who was heading north to Ganzi, and caught the bus back to Kangding. This time the bus was full of Han Chinese heading back to their hometowns for the New Year. This time we were on a bigger bus, but seeing as we chose the seats in the very back we were bouncing out of our seats the whole way. I hit my head on the ceiling once and we had some good laughs with the Chinese guys next to us ... we spent most of the ride with our hands on the ceiling to prevent any more head banging. The ride was just as incredible in the other direction ... the landscape and the Tibetan houses were endlessly interesting. We spent another evening in Kangding in the same guesthouse (a great place to meet interesting foreigners traveling through the area). A policeman called some kids out of an apartment building to show me where an internet cafe was, and it was snowing lightly as I walked around the town. This morning we caught another early bus, to Chongqing. The ride out the valley on the east side of the pass was great, with picturesque mist floating amid rocky crags and snowy forest. It felt pretty strange driving down an American-like expressway to from Chengdu to Chongqing. At a rest area people looked just like Americans climbing out of their cars. The small villages and fields of rural China line the highway, though, so it was an interesting ride. As we drove into Chongqing I saw how HUGE a city it is ... we'd only been in a small part before. It is a dirty, gray, congested, intriguing, and alluring place. Right now I'm in an internet cafe in the ultra-modern city center ... many people here are so westernized they don't even look Chinese. I'm looking forward to a full day of walking around the city tomorrow before we fly out Friday morning for Shanghai.

We'll spend the Chinese New Year in a rural area near Shanghai with our friend from the university in Dinghai, Xiao Shen, and his family. Then Mary will leave to visit Dan in Thailand and I'll take off again for another twelve days of traveling. I've been unsure about what I wanted to do. I've thought seriously about taking the train to Lhasa in Tibet proper (where we were was cultural Tibet, but technically western Sichuan) because I'd liked their culture and landscapes so much. Unfortunately it looks like the timing wouldn't work well and there are complications around getting a permit to go there, and I'd rather go with enough time to trek in the backcountry. Right now I'm thinking I might take a train to Lanzhou in Gansu Province, and explore that area of desert, mountians, and grasslands some. There's apparently a mix of Tibetan, Muslim, and Chinese culture there, where the Silk Road began in China. I still have to read more about it and look into logistics, though.

I'll keep you posted!

Tyler

p.s. The pictures are of me eating hotpot in Leshan and Mary and Josu on the road to Litang.

Spring Festival Travels: Chengdu Feb. 3

Hi!

i'm in chengdu now! it's been a great first week of traveling. the logistics have been pretty easy so far and it's been great to see different landscapes, meet new people, and just do some fresh thinking in new places.

mary and i started off our travels with what we thought was a 30 hour bus ride west to wuhan in hubei province, on the yangtze river. it was a lot of fun, reclining on an upper bunk at the front of the bus for hours. As we discovered groggily at 3 am, when the bus driver kindly asked me if this was where we wanted to get off, that we were arriving at 3 am not 3 pm that day. we got a hotel planning to stay for a day in wuhan, but that same day we took off for our yangtze river tour because that was what seemed to make sense. they said it left at 2 pm ... we assumed we'd be boarding a boat there ... but as we found out over time, we were actually getting in a van to drive to another bus for a 4 hour ride to another city, followed by another hour plus bus ride to the boat just above the three gorges dam. on the way we befriended a new chinese immigrant to america james, back to visit friends in china. he took us under his wing and we wound up sharing a cabin with him and his friends - a great experience getting to know really nice peole.

the journey upriver to chongqing was wonderful. we started off with the chinese tour group until the engine died on the third day and most of the chinese tourists abandoned ship. after that it was us, as skeleton crew, 2 other americans and four really friendly chinese people. we all bonded a lot waiting for the ship to be fixed, and then slowly making our way upriver (on one day we paused anchored in midstream or pulled up against a river bank twice for 2-3 hours because the fog was so thick). all in all it was a wonderful experience of patience, and just enjoying things at the rivers pace. i loved sitting on the deck watching the country go by. also, the three gorges dam has flooded a whole series of cities, with millions of inhabitants, so they've been entirely rebuilt on high hillsides above the water. it was great to peer up at these from the ship and watch the lights at night. i'd love to go back and explore these places.

i really liked chongqing. it's a grimy gray city crammed onto a penninsula between the yangtze and a tributary river. we climbed from the boat up through level after level of apartment buildings. it's like other modern cities in china, except the terrain and limited space make it much more varied and energetic. we stayed in a hotel near the liberation monument (a monument to 1949, but as mary's guidebook points out, really to liberation from communism, give the huge department stores and neon surrounding it) but explored great crowded alleyways with steps, and older streets teeming with everyday chinese street life. we found our way up to a mountaintop park and listened to a man playing the chinese erhu and watched old men walking their birds as you'd described grandpop. i really liked this city and hope to spend more time there later.

now we're in chengdu. we took the train here and we're staying in a hostel/hotel right near the city center. last night we ate indian food with laura age (studying abroad here) a high school classmate and running friend of mine and abby's. today we spend the whole afternoon drinking tea and reading in an outside teahouse in the people's park - a great way to spend time with fun people watching.

tomorrow we head into the mountains. we'll spend three days or so on emei shan, a buddhist holy mountain at 3100 m. then we're looking to go further west maybe to hai something glacier park, and maybe other places. i'm not sure how much cold we'll run into there, though, and how bad the roads might get. but we're hoping to see mountains and get into some smaller towns and do a lot of walking.

on feb 16 we fly east from chongqing to shanghai to spend the spring festival feb 18 with our friend xiao shen from the university in dinghai and his extended family in the countryside sw of shanghai. then mary takes off to thailand to visit her boyfriend dan and i head i'll see where. our chinese friend james from the boat invited me to visit them if jiujiang between shanghai and wuhan on the yangtze and i have thoughts of taking a train out to chongqing again and back. train rides are really nice and i like the idea of spending a few days there just exploring and relaxing ... but i'll see.

i hope you're all doing well and i'll try to send back more news when i can!

tyler

A Long Walk: A Road Out of Town to the East Along the Shore

A Long Walk: A Market Area Along A Canal (Huancheng Dong Lu)

Pictures From A Walk Around Dinghai

... and a dinner we had with our university friends Susie (left) and Dan Yan (right). Dan Yan taught us Chinese for the first two months we were here. Now her friend Winter does.

Pictures of the Where I Teach

Here are some pictures of the school grounds, and one of the teaching buildings where I teach. The classroom is the "computer lab" where either Mary or I takes half of each class of senior school students.

Some more pictures around Dinghai #2