About the Author:
Keith Jones specializes in gray whale tour, blue whale tour, gray and blue whale combo tour, giant panda bear tour, walk a tiger tour, shark tour, African safari tour, African gorilla trek, arctic narwhal tour and Magdalena Bay whale watching tour. He also writes about Baja travel and gray whales. Keith Jones is the author of Gray Whales My Twenty Years of Discovery.
He will share to you his experience in Ya’an City, Sichuan Province
Today our Panda volunteer group will begin their second day
of volunteer work. I was at the Bifengxia Panda Preserve yesterday with
them as they began their first day of actual work with the panda keepers. So today I had free time.
I rode in the van with our small group of 5 to the entrance
gate. This entry point is 30 kilometers
from the City of Ya’an or Yaan, where our hotel is located. My goal was to walk back to the hotel from
Bifengxia. 30 kilometers is about 18 ½
miles. The road is two lanes, one in
each direction and it has some very steep uphill and downhill sections. This seemed like a challenging one day
endeavor.
Thinking that I would not need to carry a lot of excess
stuff on this walk, I left my daypack in the hotel room.
My attire for this mini-adventure walk consisted of a
brilliant red Russel Athletic T-shirt with black accented sleeves bought in
Covina, California for $17.95 in March, a pair of mud brown cargo pocket shorts
that I had a seamstress cut extra short and that I bought in 2006 for $8 at a
Bass Pro Shop in Southern California, wicking type fast drying underwear from
REI circa 2008, a pair of black low top socks from Costco and my trusty Columbia
Birke hiking shoes with the very good skid resistant soles that I bought at REI
for $69.95. Sadly this pair of shoes is
worn out. I have a new pair recently
purchased online and waiting for me back in the USA, but until then I am
walking on a less than perfect pair of foot beds.
Leaving the van I pushed a broad brimmed hat that I bought
two years ago in Vientiene, Laos for $1 down on my head. The neck string dangled loose beneath my
chin, but was still capable of keeping the lightweight hat from blowing away as
I crossed bridges and river beds. A pair
of Polo sunglasses with gray smoked glass lenses that I purchased on Wangfujing
Street in Beijing, China in December of 2007 for $150.00 dangled from a black
string around my neck.
My small digital camera went into the right front pocket and
my cell phone and some small Yuan notes like one, five and ten Yuan bills went
into the left pocket. In the front right
button pocket I placed a small rectangular package of toilet tissue that sells
in China for 1 Y. or about $.15 US and is an essential element of every outing
in Asia. In the left button down pocket
I placed a small glass cleaning cloth. A
waterproof gel type pen was slid onto the neck of my quick dry T-shirt. My passport and some 100 Yuan notes went into
the left rear button pocket. The right
rear button pocket held my reading glasses and a small notebook that I bought
in Manila for about 4 Philippine Pesos or about 10 cents. I carried a 500 ml. bottle of water along
with me switching that from hand to hand as I walked.
Before leaving the hotel I prepped my face and neck with SPF
50 sunscreen and I felt I was ready to go.
Because I wanted to be in an adventurous frame of mind, I did not
shave. The dark black stubble gave me
the appearance of someone who had stayed up all night, but also making me feel
as if I had a little Indiana Jones’ spirit within me.
The morning air was languid and heavy with moisture. Warmth from yesterday’s sun still emanated
from the gray concrete of the parking area at the entrance gate to the Bifengxia Panda Preserve. At 8:00 AM there were already cars and buses
parked haphazardly around the paved area.
A dense growth of trees and underbrush, growing on three
sides of the parking lot, shrouded my view of the surrounding mountains. Drops of water like tiny crystals glistened
on the spider webs that industrious arachnids had woven between pine trees and
the bamboo growing in the shade of those evergreens.
At the entrance to the parking lot the green forest crowds
in on both sides of the roadway. This
idyllic atmosphere was shattered by noisy groups of Chinese tourists walking up
the road from two local style inns. The
scent of pine and bamboo was smothered by billowing clouds of black diesel soot
blowing from the exhaust of a dozen buses.
Our van with my guide and small tour group drove through the
park entrance stopping momentarily to drop me on the edge of the parking
lot. Today I had decided on a small
adventure that seemed perhaps a bit more than I could manage to complete. I planned to walk from the entrance to the
Bifengxia Panda Preserve back to the Ibis Hotel in the city of Ya’an, where our
group is staying in the evenings while they do their volunteer work program at
Bifengxia.
At the entry gate to the Panda Preserve as I stepped from
the van I wished the group a good day and told the driver to keep her eyes wide
open for my BRIGHT RED shirt as she drove back to the hotel at 4:00 PM. There were so many things to see along the
way, I did not know how far I would get.
Thirty kilometers seemed like a very long way.
The first 2.6 kilometers were easy to measure because a huge
sign at a Y in the uphill roadway points to the left and says “Bifengxia 2.6
kilometers”. There is a large electrical
generating plant at this Y in the road, powered by the rushing Qinyi
River.
My walk from Bifengxia to Yaan began at precisely 8:00
A.M. I arrived at the Y in the road at
8:40 A.M. Along the way I stopped to
talk to various local people working the small plots of vegetables that they
have planted along the roadway. Most of
these workers were women 45 to 80 years of age.
Each of them carried a round basket on her back, shoulder straps holding
the basked in place and in which they loaded whatever vegetables they were
harvesting this morning.
It was really funny to stop near one of the workers, say Nee
hau and then listen to their reply. Then
we would carry on a one or two minute conversation, during which neither of us
understood one word that the other person said.
After a couple minutes, I would say goodbye and wave, they would laugh
and smile as I walked away.
Along this stretch of road, carved into the rock face of the
mountain I came upon two small shrines.
These were in the local style and depicted an old time demi-god. The work was intricate, exotic and the paint
had been renewed many times. The name of
this figure is “Grandfather Earth”. In
Mandarin they call him Tu Di Gong Gong.
In the ancient religious/political beliefs from the earliest
times of the Warring States (roughly 2,500 years ago) and the Imperial
Families, there is a hierarchy of Godliness.
At the top of this pyramid is God and below God stands the Emperor along
with several other all powerful gods.
Below this level were the animalistic, natural bound demi-gods such as
Tu Di Gong Gong (Grandfather Earth).
Each of these demi-gods was believed to have power over some particular
area of the natural world. Father Earth
could affect crops and weather and movement of water and the earth, such as an
earthquake.
These demi-gods were and are now looked upon with fondness
rather than fear. Farmers burn incense at the shrines I passed to wish for a
good crop or a badly needed rainstorm.
In current popular Chinese entertainment Grandfather Earth and
occasionally Grandmother Earth are depicted as short jolly looking figures who
come up to about the waist on the average Chinese. They frequently provide the comic relief in
dramatic works on TV. They are similar
in current comedic drama some ways to the Leprechauns of Ireland or the happy
dwarves of European mythological fantasy.
I stopped and paid a minute of reverent silence to this
interesting Grandfather Earth figure before my revelry was broken by the harsh
strident sounding of a very loud electric horn as a big bus whipped around a
120 degree turn in the road. I walked
away from the roadside shrine wishing the road was quieter, but thinking that
even with the frequent interruptions by traffic passing by, this is the kind of
thing that you just cannot see unless you take the effort to walk a few miles
in a strange place.
I continued downhill, passing through an area of cool
morning air and enjoying the walk because I did not have a 15 kilo pack on my
back. Somewhere around the two hour
point in the walk I began to feel a bit fatigued. So I sat on one of the many concrete road
markers and took a 10 minute break.
Starting up again, I felt renewed and my stride seemed to pick up
speed.
There is a section of the road that is carved into the side
of the mountain bedrock. The rock
actually hangs out 25 feet from the inside vertical face of the roadside,
looking like an enormous ocean breaker about to break onto the roadway. The outside of this rock overhang has no
support. It is almost incomprehensible
that this half of a tunnel doesn’t collapse and bury the entire roadway.
Beneath the overhanging rock canopy, rivulets of water
splash continuously onto the road. The
road was slippery with moss and algae, but I could not avoid walking through
this downfall for fear of downhill speeding vehicles. I walked fast here and was glad to get past
the rock overhang without falling on my butt.
A few hundred yards downhill from the overhanging rock two
old women who looked like great-grandmas, were at work in the drainage ditch
that runs alongside the roadway. One
woman repeatedly pushed a two wheeled wheelbarrow across the road and dumped
mud and rocks over the side into the steep river gorge. The second woman was down in the ditch, roughly
one meter below the road level. She was
shoveling mud and rock up into the barrow to clean the drainage ditch.
I stopped and the three of us chatted together, laughing but
not understanding a thing that we said to one another. As I walked away, their supervisor drove up
on a motor scooter. He was wearing a
bright orange safety vest and carried a walkie-talkie. He stopped in the downhill lane closest to
the river gorge and shouted over to the pair of workers. They said something back and the conversation
got louder. At first I thought that they
were arguing with one another. But
suddenly he laughed and they laughed and he just drove off. It was a typically loud, three way Chinese
conversation.
My walk was going very well.
It felt good to be walking in the overcast and wet climate that
dominates these mountains. It felt
especially good to be walking without a pack on my back. I think that at times I was almost speed
walking. Something that is quite unusual
for “Slow Walkin’ Jones”.
Again I stopped for a two minute break at a point where the
road got particularly steep. Walking
downhill here was jarring my shins.
While I was sitting on another of those common concrete road markers a
motor scooter came slowly up the incline.
It wobbled and weaved back and forth. There were two men on this slow moving
scooter. It was weaving erratically
because it was moving so slowly that in fact it was barely moving. They went by me slower than I had been
walking. We said Neehau to one another
and the guy in the rear gave me a really large toothless smile.
Behind them a second scooter wobbled toward me. This scooter held three girls aged 18 to
22. They were laughing and shouting as
they approached me. If possible their
scooter was moving even slower than the first one.
When they were just 5 meters from me the scooter suddenly
veered into the other lane heading toward the river gorge, then wobbled back
toward me and then straightened out, just before they drove into the drainage
ditch. This brought a new round of
laughter and giggles.
When they came alongside me, I mimed giving them a helping
push uphill. This proved to be just too
funny and the girl in the rear jumped (or fell) off the back of the nearly
motionless scooter. The second girl also
jumped off and the scooter suddenly leaped ahead, before the driver brought it
to a safe stop. Once the scooter was
pushed to the side of the road, the three tried to talk to me.
Finishing our brief and unintelligible conversation, they
began to push the scooter up the steep incline and I continued my walk
downhill.
At 10:20 I passed another power plant.
At 10:45 AM I was ready for a long break. Fortuitously a small nameless town appeared
in front of me. I came upon an ancient
stone home which had a small store in front.
There were four older local people sitting there. I noticed some dark red tomatoes and stopped
to buy one. I picked one up and said “du xou chen” which means how much. The man tending the fruit stand was very
old. Perhaps 85 or 90 years (or perhaps
just 60 it is so difficult to judge age here).
I handed him 2 Yuan. He turned to
a younger (perhaps 75 years) woman who said something to him. He then handed me back one of the Yuan. So my tomato was one yuan or about 15 cents.
Another old man pointed at a water tap and indicated I could
wash my tomato there. I said XeXe (thank
you) but washed the tomato with some of the water I was carrying with me. That tomato was perfect! Red, vine ripened, fat and juicy with a
couple minor blemishes where some insect had bit into it, which assured me it
was organic and toxin free. The flavor
of that tomato was so good. I finished
and turned to walk away, when I realized that the old man was walking back to
me, carrying some 1 jiao notes. These
are really Chinese pennies. Ten jiao = 1
yuan. 1 yuan is about 15 cents U.S. So 1 jiao is worth just over a penny. The old man handed me back 4 jiao, so that
tomato cost me around 10 cents.
I left that produce stand feeling very good. Five minutes walk brought me to a roadside
café. Outside the café, by the road
there is a large statue of an ancient fisherman. He is holding a fishing rod, with a fish on
his line and his head is thrown back in laughter. That ancient fisherman was obviously thrilled
with his catch.
I walked up to the two women sitting in front of the café
and asked them if they had any tea.
Cha! One smiled and nodded
yes. The second woman got up from a
chair she was sitting on and offered the seat to me. I sat.
By then I had been walking almost 3 hours and I was feeling really good,
if a bit fatigued.
I sat and sipped tea while making an entry in my
notebook. At 11:00 AM, my 15 minute tea
break was over. I felt refreshed and
ready to continue. Before starting I retied
my shoes and then asked them “du xou chen”.
They shook their heads no. When I
started to reach into my pocket one of the women waved her hand back and forth. They wouldn’t let me pay for the tea even
though this was a roadside café.
Again I walked away with a smile on my face.
I wasn’t sure how far I was from the City of Yaan even
though I had been up the road two times before starting this walk. Things always seem so different when walking.
The next hour I passed through rural housing on both sides
of the road, with large and small plots of corn, rice and other
vegetables. The traffic became heavier,
but the road widened a little bit so that I felt a lot more comfortable
walking.
At almost precisely 12:00 noon I came into the actual city
of Yaan. I saw a woman selling produce
from a three wheeled cart. What caught
my eye was more juicy red tomatoes. I
walked across the road and waited while she finished selling some peaches.
I had picked out a nice big tomato and held it up for her to
weigh. She shook her head no and made a
motion that made it clear she did not want any money. It seems like a foreigner with a smile on his
face can walk through rural China and never have to buy a meal.
Once I finished this second tomato I headed toward the Ibis
Hotel. At precisely 1:00 PM I walked
into the lobby of the hotel, ending the one day walking adventure.
When I got to my room I looked down and realized that my
ankles, above the low top socks, were almost as dark from road dust as those
black socks. I was a little bit tired,
but it had been an interesting walk and I’m glad I did it.
What’s next on my adventure list? Perhaps I should try to walk across the
Sichuan Province without ever buying a meal. . .
The End
by
Keith Jones
July 22, City of Yaan,
Sichuan Province, China
