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.
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.
posted by Tyler C-R at 8:45 PM
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