The Five Policemen

Well... this turns out to be a eventful week......

That Bus....

First there is that bus trip to Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain). In order to save time and money, I opted to take the bus to go from NanJin to the HuangShan Preserve. The trip was sold as a five hour journey when I first asked over the phone, which give me time to look for a place to stay @ the foot of the mountain. Well...It was more than that....

First there was the incessant honking that this particular driver does at about every 30 seconds interval, and then there is his love for driving on the wrong lane, and his refusal to turn on the air conditioner... Well after traveling here for a month, I am use to all that. Nothing a pair of ear plug and the fresh scenery on the side of the road couldn't fix.

The first sign of problem, started when the driver stopped the bus a couple times and did a good looking around the underside of the bus. I though nothing of it at first, but when we pulled in a repair shop an hour later, we learned that we have a broken suspension spring. The co-driver were send to purchase the spring from a near-by town, and we waited, and waited...A hour and a half later, he came back with the part. Everyone were so excited, we surrounded the repair crew when they opened the box....

"Hmmmm??..... How come the old leave-spring had three leaves, and the new one had only two?"

The driver tried his best to convince everyone that the steel on this new spring was stronger than the old one. Oh....Yeah... right... I kept me mouth shut, and tried not to over analyze this with what ever I had learned in those Material & mechanical engineering classes....I just wanted to leave !!!! An hour later we were on our way, with the driver telling us to try to all sit on the left of the bus....Okay?! I guess there is a difference between a 2-leave spring and a 3 leave spring! So, we all sat on the left side of the bus.

(by this time I am more amused then worried)... four hours later, after going though all the road repairs on the way and some hair pin turns in the mountain in the dark we got to the foot of the mountain. (That makes 9 hours total...)

The drive at night is actually not bad. With a full (and yellow) moon up in the night sky, its reflection in those countless rice fields, ponds, and rivers on the side of the road is just spectacular. There is also the bamboo forest, and the little towns and stores on the side of the road with their doors open....

The scenery in HuangShan is just gorgeous, it's probably the Yosemite of China. It is probably the cleanest and the most pristine place I had been to in China so far. Aside from the cable cars and the little tourist traps along the path that is. (One can probably say the same about all the shopping center, and ice cream shop in the Yosemite Valley.....). I opted to stay at the top of the mountain for a night, and watched the famous sunrise before I headed down.

The Five Policemen

You see policemen/guards everywhere in China. In GuangZhou, there is one in every street corners, and a guards at every gate or doorway, but in some way this hardly qualifies this as a police state, because they really do little than just sitting around. Our bus once went head to head with a police car while trying to pass and ended up with three cars side-by-side on a two lane highway, and nothing happened. Who knows?, maybe this is actually legal in China. :-)

Been in China for about a month now, never had any troubles with the police, but this is all about o change. In those next three days, I manged to ran into not one, not two, but...FIVE of them.

The FIRST policemen I met was up in the HuangShan Mountain @ this dorm that I stayed and dined. This young policeman and some of his co workers also eat there. Nice guy, we ate at the same table and shared a bottle of beer.

The SECOND policemen I met were at the same dorm room I stayed and we went and watched the sun rise in the morning and shared the hike back down the mountain. The guy were on vacation.

The THIRD, the FORTH and the FORTH one I met @ HongChun....

HongChun and SiDi are two famous villages on the World Heritage Protection Site list establish by the United Nations on preserving some of the fast disappearing culture and communities around the world. The place in probably more famous for being the filming location of the movie "Crouching Dragon, Hidden Dragon". There is one catch, this site is currently close to foreigners (myself included) without a permit (which are hard to obtain for independent travelers, hearing from a fellow traveler). So... being a law obeying American, I went to the local police station when I came down the HuangShan and asked for a permit, which to my surprise were issued in less than 20 min.

These places were very nice!!! one villages (SiDi) were surrounded by mountains, bamboo forest, rice paddies, and streams.... The second (HongChun) had perhaps the clearest lakes I had seen in China so far. And the centuries old buildings... then one of the guards asked me to show him my permits, which I promptly provided, but I was asked to take a ride to the police station with them anyway. That's where I met No.3, No.4, and No. 5.

We got to the police station and asked to sit down, and give them my passport...Then one of the guy bought in two extra chairs, and I was suddenly being interrogated by these three guys. Things I had only read about.... :-)

Well... apparently, the police station on the HuangShan area have no authority to issue the permits. "How am I suppose to know that?!" That's when No. 5 bought out the little booklet on foreign travelers laws and regulations.... .Okay..... This lasted for about an hour, and after they accompany me back to my hotel room to inspect my luggage, I was released with a warning on not to over staying my permit, and not to go out at night after 7PM.

All these guys were pretty nice through the whole thing, in their words " we are responsible for the traveler's safety, if you get into trouble, we are in trouble".

So.... my friends, If you don't hear from me in the next couple days, then I am probably in a Chinese jails for violating my curfew and get caught on the way back to the hotel. Hahhahahh.... :-)

I just hope this policemen trend just doesn't continue .... :-)

NanJing

My last hours here @ NanJin, will be catching a 5 hr. bus ride to HuangShan(Yellow Mountain) in a couple hours. Since leaving ShouJhou, I had the most pleasant time here in China by far. Got a chance to visit two of its more famous canal towns (Chinese Venice?). I rented rooms mostly from the the locals, which made it quite a personal experience than I had wish for. The hosts are the most pleasant people U meet, they really made you wish you haven't bargain with them so hard @ the beginning. The rooms are quite pleasant as well, one over looks the canals and it is over a hundred year old wood house, that even comes with red lanterns in the room. :-) Much better than that horrible place in ShouZhou.

TongLi and ZhouZhuang is quite nice if you want to get a more rural feel of China's YangZi river basin, it's got the transportation of a major tourist area, but just a short walk to the near by villages, where few if any tourist bother to go. U can walk through these narrow dirt path that wind through the fishing ponds and rice fields, and go from one village to another.

I rented a boat after some hard bargaining to go from ZhouZhoang to TonLi, and it was worth every penny of the Y$60(US$8). The hour long trip takes you through the fish farms on the lakes, and pass through these small villages along the way. It sure beats going at it with a bus.

NanJin is quite OK, got a nice museum with the famous jade burio suit, and a working weaving/stitching machine, that they used to weave some of the famous local cloths. They even hired two artists operating it, and actually making these cloth for the museum stores. It is a thing of beauty, to a mechanical engineer :-) , the thing got so many moving parts and thousands of threads running all over the place, I gave up trying to figure out how that thing worked. And they designed it hundreds of years ago... .

Any how, must get under way for the HuangShan trip now. I timed it to be on a Monday, no tourist.... I hope. If it rains, even better. I just might have the whole mountain myself.... .

Leaving ShangHai

think I had enough of ShangHai already, the high light is prob. the old city with the antique market, bird/flower market, the food.... and walk in the back streets. People are really nice there, Started out with a strange stares, and some even start speaking Japanese to me, but got a chat with some of the people in the markets, it is too bad that they will be taking down this part of the city soon. . .

Made a visit to some of the temples and gardens, but there is just too many tourist around to enjoy it. Looking for a quite spot in China is pretty hard, one of the first thing I notice is that on my bus trip to Canton is that there is a sign next to the TV that read "Please don't hesitate to ask the volume to be turn up". :-)

Good thing I bought earplugs. They were for the snores in the Hostels, but turn out to be great for everything else. Anyway the Hostel I am staying in is quite nice, the place is like 150 years old, and close to everything. I think I am heading to SuZhou next and check out ZhouZhon and head for NanJin next. I was going to take the boat to NanJin, but 20 hr. long in a boat is too much. The train only takes 3. Well my half hr internet time is up and gone, talk to U all later.

A Taste of Home

Got to Canton, China a couple days ago. Oh god, this place scared the day light out of me. The people here drive like a bunch of mad men, people drives in the middle of two lanes for no reasons at all, and the taxi drivers drive without lights at night, to save the precious light bulbs, and there is no left turn lights. The way to turn left is to try to block the on coming traffics, before they block you.

Then there are those jaywalkers that cross the street without looking left or right, and some walk in the middle of the road like there is no one on the road. My relative dragged me trough/cross a six lane road by my hand like a early morning stroll in the park, while my hair stands on its back the whole way with the on-coming traffic come to a screeching stop and swirl around us... and he is calm like he just got out of a yoga secession. Couple days later, I ended up doing the same myself, because there is really no other way to cross the street. :-) I had thoughts of doing a tour of China on my touring bike in the future before I got here, such romantic notions disappears rather quickly as I watch this daily.

A strange thing.... I have yet to see an accident despite what is happening around me....

Spend the last few days wandering in the city. A lot have changed. Skyscrapers are everywhere now. Stores popped up everywhere, selling everything under the sun. I walked into a shopping center to get some presents for a friend, only to come out empty handed, because I feel so intimidated by the up-scale nature of the place and the strange stares. Maybe it is my T-shirts and shorts outfit. People dressed so nicely that shorts and T-shirts are a rarity in this place. Everyone dress nicer than I. By all means, I think Canton had surpass Hong Kong in all aspect now days. Twenty years ago people wanted to go to Hong Kong anyway they can, now they wouldn't even want to stay there a day longer than they have to.

At first look, nothing familiar had remained, but there are still signs of what remained from seventeen years ago. Most of the old houses that I have lived in still remained. Spend much of the last few days going back to my kindergarten, grade school and High School campuses and visiting old friends. It surprised me that how many people I used to know are still around, including my old kindergarten teacher!! It's easy for them to remember me, especially when your nick name is "Big Head Boy" (sounded more catchy in Chinese, Hhahaha... :-)

Things long forgotten from 17 years ago come back one by one. . I went to sleep with the sound of people playing Mahjong and watching geckos hunting for mosquitoes on the ceiling . . . woke up in the morning to the cicada singing in the trees and the sweet smell of the "White Orchid Tree" flowers. This is the summer in Canton, that I remembered!!! Oh yeah, the mosquitoes. Ahhhh..... I remember them well too. :-) I used to sleep with a flash light inside the mosquito net when I was a kid, I had to do that again, so I can hunt for those few mosquito (the smart one) that manage to comes in. Ahhhhh.... . That reminded me to add a mosquito net to my traveling gear.

One surprise that comes out of my visit here in Canton is my lunch with two of my cousins today; originally, I was going to ShangHai and HangZhou to start my way up the Yangtze River to SiChuan and YuanNan, and possibly Tibet. Half and hour later, all that had changed... That's when I founded out that my cousin and her husband had planned to go on to this month long (2-3000 km) trans-Tibetan trip that goes from (Golmud, QingHai)-->(Lhasa, Tibet)-->(Kishgan, XinJiang) with a 4WD. Being a soon to be a FOUR times!!! independent veteran Tibet traveler, she had me converted in a matter of minutes, and we talked for hours about the trip. This is too good of an opportunity for me to pass up. And we are leaving in a few days....!!!! :-). Now, I have to go return that train ticket to HangZhou that I bought... Boy, it's so strange that after separating for 17 years, that our timing, and interest can be so precise.

The plan now is to go to SiChuan and YunNan and the 3-Gorges/Yangtze afterward.

Oh yeah, I am growing a beard. :-) It makes me look more scary, I think. Scare away the thief & robbers I hope. Hahahah¡­. Have to shave it later when I cross the border¡­ Hahhahah

Well, hope things goes well @ home, best wishes¡­..