Dave and I have met the cliche of our generation, having backpacked through Europe. We lived in Hungary for 5 months and we jumped rickety trains and casino-style ferries all through Eastern Europe. We learned a bit of Hungarian and managed to pick up words and phrases in each town, enough to get by. We relied on our guidebooks and maps to point us in the right direction, and they generally did.
But this style of unplanned travel seemed out of reach for our family in China. First, we travel with two young children, and so our needs have grown immensely. We bring along luggage than we can comfortably carry on our backs. We walk less and taxi more. And we require afternoon naps and slow mornings. Besides these advances in our traveling style, we've found China much more difficult to explore. Our Mandarin - although enough to "get by" in Shanghai - is embarrasingly limited. And we recognize very few characters. Studying a map posted on a street corner in China will not help us at all, and comparing my Lonely Planet map to my surroundings rarely works because I can not read many street signs. For too many reasons, our old style of simple exploring would not work in China.
But this weekend, I left the children and their luggage and their schedules behind. I partnered with a friend who has studied Mandarin diligently for nearly 2 years. I speak enough Mandarin to get by in Shanghai. She speaks and understands enough Mandarin to get by in Ningbo, which made her a wonderful traveling companion.
I left home on Saturday morning at 10:30, headed to Shanghai South Railway Station where we had arranged to meet. The train station is enormous, with multiple floors and most signs written in Chinese characters. We arrived with our tickets in hand, so although the signage was confusing at best, we simply showed our tickets to various official looking folks and were eventually pointed in the right direction. We learned that departures approach the train from the top floor and arrivals enter the train station from a lower floor. We also learned that Chinese train begin re-numbering by class. We rode 1st class in car 1. We walked all the way to the front of the train, and tried to board car 1. We were turned away in Mandarin that neither of us could understand. We walked the length of the train, with each conductor telling us the same information - keep walking. Eventually we found a second car 1 at the end of the train, and this car had fewer seats. This may have been the only difference. Inside, the train felt much like travel through Eastern Europe. The seats were relatively comfortable and the overhead racks held our luggage. But the seat covers looked ancient and rather grimey, and I would not have chosen to sit on the floor. We also learned how to squat on a moving train, as this one had no Western toilets.
Our intention in traveling to Ningbo was to visit Putoshan, a mountain and island covered in Buddhist statues, temples and caves and purportedly beautiful. This guy's webpage is a bit silly, but it shows where we had intended to visit.
We arrived in Ningbo on a rainy afternoon, and after checking into the hotel we only had a few hours of murky daylight left. Our hotel was wonderfully located, an easy 10 minute walk from the sights of town and so we headed out to explore. But our daylight disappeared too quickly and our hunger appeared in full force, so we quickly ditched our touristing efforts and sought out dinner. We rejected a few places because they looked filthy. We rejected a few places because they were empty. We rejected a few places because someone cooked up stinky tofu on the street outside. And we finally settled on our restaurant because they had English on the menu. We're not sure what we ate, but had it not been swimming in grease we would have had no complaints. As it was, the flavor was great. We headed back to the hotel, planning for an early night so that we could head out early to Putuoshan.
Hours of talking and a late morning later, we jumped into a taxi at nearly noon on Sunday. In our faltering Mandarin, we told the drive we wanted to go to Putuoshan. This left the poor man quite confused - taxis can not drive to Putuoshan, as it is a few hours and a river away. We expected this, and asked him to take us to the ferry. What we did not expect is that to reach the ferry, you must first take a bus. We called in a hotel manager to help us translate. He leaned in the window and advised us not to go to Putuoshan. A taxi ride to the bus station, waiting for the next bus, an hour bus ride to the ferry station, waiting for the next ferry, and another hour plus ferry ride to the island would have been a wasted day. He told us to go to Xicou instead.
Reveling in our ability to fly by the seat of our pants, we directed the taxi driver to Xicou and embarked on a really interesting day. The drive out of Ningbo went through factories and warehouses, and eventually into hills and villages. The scenery never became American rural, but quickly became China rural - fields and gardens adjacent to dense piles of grimy tiled housing blocks.
Xikou was a lovely restored village, much akin to Colonial Williamsburg. We could enter a few restored houses and temples, and in 1 hall we walked by various army implements - appropriate, as Xikou is famed as the birthplace of Chiang Kai-Shek, the president of China under the Kuomintang. We breezed through the buildings, watched a trickster balance a bike on his forehead, and tried stinky tofu (not good - but not as bad as Dave described it!)
After an hour or two of exploring this town in the drippy rain, we found a driver to bring us to Xuedou Mountain and Xian Zhang Yan waterfall, which made an astounding drop off of a sheer cliffside into thick haze. We walked a stone path through a canopy of draping trees and bamboo, passing stone Buddhas and hidden pagodas. As the rain slowed and the haze gathered, our walk became more pleasant while the crowds diminished. We reveled in the smells of trees and water, the air empty of the scent of diesel fumes or pee. The hours spent away from crowds fumes, away from the city, made the entire weekend worthwhile.
Luckily, we had asked our driver to wait for us. Because once we exited the forest, the haze was so thick that we could barely see our car. And it took us a moment to notice that his was the only car in the large lot. As we rode back down the mortgage, our eyes avoided the windows as we could rarely see more than a few feet in front of the car. We asked the driver to help us return to Ningbo, and he brought us to a taxi stand in Xikou. A row of old pick-up trucks sat on the side of the road, each with a TAXI sign lit on top of the cab, and we feared that we would be sharing one of those seats for the 45 minute ride back to the hotel. I sought out a bathroom first and found not only one of the cleanest public bathrooms I've used in China, but also that we were in fact dropped at a bus station and that the bus to Ningbo would leave in about 5 minutes.
I emptied my bladder and took one of the last seats on the bus. Quite a few people rode without seats, and many folded out seats in the aisle. Even as a full bus, we still stopped to pick up men standing on the side of the road. We bounced off our seats many times, but rode cheaply and rather comfortably in our seats to Ningbo.
After a fully Chinese day, we headed to Pizza Hut for an unexciting dinner and the slept soundly.
Monday we met the return train at 2:30 in the afternoon, and spent our morning exploring Moon Lake in dry morning weather. The gardens surrounding this lovely, small lake were beautiful and the lack of crowds left of enchanted.
Overall, we enjoyed Ningbo and Xikou, and we loved the quiet of the mountain and waterfalls outside Ningbo. But I reveled in the backpacking attitude we were able to take as we explored China - an adventure well worth doing.
1 comment:
wow..these are really postcard perfect pictures
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