"The Most Scenic Mountain in Southeast China" read the travel brochure.
I seriously detest building your entire holiday around a package tour, for they offer you little freedom. They are a great way to cover a lot of ground quickly, but you never get to truly experience the local culture, and instead are herded from place to place with inevitable stops at tourist traps selling 'unique local specialities' along the way (which inevitably turn out to be cheap trinkets and pointless crap). Your guide's priority is to keep life as smooth and uneventful as possible, thus negating the possibility that you will experience all the wonderful misadventures that make travelling so much fun.
I softening from this position somewhat, however, when we arrived in Wuyishan and cast my eyes upon our young, fair skinned, doe-eyed guide, Ms. Liao. Suddenly the tour became a lot more interesting. Eye candy seldom hurts.
To be fair, she was very professional and took us on an excellent tour of one of the mountains and sent us off on an enjoyable trip down Nine-Bend river (where I even tried my hand at punting- ha! Who'd've thought I'd get a chance to use those skills in China?), along with the obligatory stop at a tourist trap selling the usual local speciality (in this case, tea). The mountain was spectacular, although I had other things on my mind. The moment I reached the top I pulled out my mobile and rang one of my friends in the USA and asked her for the baseball score!
Nine-Bend River was fantastic as well. We started upstream and went downstream, thus tackling the nine bends in reverse order. The rocks, cliffs and mountains have all been given names by the locals over the years, each with their own extremely eloquent description- Inkstone and Brush, Eagle's Beak, Jade Princess, The Three Sisters (the Youngest Pregnant), Clothes-drying Mountain, Monk carrying a Nun and so on. The names are sometimes updated- our boatman pointed out one sharp cliff that looked like the prow of a ship and said it was the Titanic (a big box office hit in China). Oh, Jack!
Sadly, Ms. Liao resisted all my attempts to flirt with her in my broken Chinese. To be fair, she probably didn't understand half of what I was trying to say. However, she did take my cousin and I to her aunt's house, where I met two of her cousins. One is Fujian Province's only female certified tea expert, and she was only too happy to give us a long lecture on tea whilst we sampled some of the best tea from the Wuyishan area. They are a family of farmers, but lived in the town because the government had moved all the farmers out of the mountains and given them homes in the town when the mountains became a protected area. The farmers commuted daily to their farms up in the countryside, and were happy in their clean, multi-storied houses with all mod cons. They also showed us sacks of wild mushrooms which they picked in the mountains at 3 am in order not to tip off other farmers about where the best locations for finding them are. These mushrooms they sold exclusively and directly to their customers, bypassing the shops, as they only had limited quantities. We bought some; they are very incredible.
Wuyishan really had only two industries, farming and tourism. Everyone I met there worked in some way for one or the other, but they all seemed relatively prosperous and increasingly so. As I would discover, this is true for everywhere I visited in China: unprecedented prosperity was arriving everywhere and transforming the lives of the Chinese people dramatically.
I traded email addresses with Ms. Liao and her cousins and promised to return one day. As we didn't have time to climb the highest peak of Wuyishan, but instead tackled one of the easier and more touristy peaks, I think I have unfinished business there. No, I'm not talking about Ms. Liao!
Posted by pj at October 20, 2004 01:28 PM