Into China – Hua Shan

So today we crossed the boarder into China. And the China side of the border, their passport control and everything, was sooo much nicer than Vietnams. At the desk where you give your passport to the guy and he checks it out and asks you a few questions, there was this sign that said you can comment on my performance. And there was this machine on the table with very satisfied, satisfied, unsatisfied, very unsatisfied. And there were little happy faces or sad faces under them, with captions like “took too long”, “bad service”. And they were very nice and very efficient, but I was afraid to push any buttons.
We stopped for lunch at what seemed to just be some people’s house, but maybe it was a guest house too. Anyway, it was one of those lunches where they just bring out some food, whatever they decided to make that day. And yuck city. Tofu with tomatoes, eggplant, pork and potatoes (all I really ate was some rice and potatoes), and fried pumpkin (which I tried and ate one whole piece of, but…), oh and some more of that mystery green stuff, which is slimy and also gross. Good thing half of my back pack is full of power bars and I stocked up on biscuits and ritz crackers, otherwise I’d be starving here, I think. And dinner tonight is the same kind of deal, although our trip notes say the food is very good. Hmm… we’ll see about that.
So after lunch I was in a bit foul mood because the food was gross and this cat wouldn’t leave me alone and bees and huge bugs kept buzzing all around me and I had to keep jumping up from the table and causing a scene during the icky meal. So when I couldn’t stand sitting at the table anymore I sat across the yard, listening to my ipod and this is what I wrote in my notebook:
What the fuck am I doing in southern rural China?! Ugh, the cats and the bugs and the dog don’t want to leave me alone. It’s like they can sense that I hate them and they are just trying to fuck with me. And then on top of that they always play the worst, I mean WORST, cheesiest karaoke cover songs that I have ever heard. Celine Dion must be like a god here in Asia because everywhere you go they are playing that “near far, wherever you are…” crap song, and most of the time it’s not even her singing but some horrible cover. It’s really bad. If I never hear another Celine Dion song, it will be too soon. “I’m your laday…” and all that shit. Ugh… it makes me want to kill myself. And my ipod is crapping out and I can only get about 5 hours out of the battery but it’s 5 hours I will cherish of absolutely no cheesy love songs. I’m so glad I have so many good mixes and good music on my ipod or I would be going insane right now. No wait… I’m already going insane. How can these people be so ape shit over music that sucks sooo bad?! Like that alone is almost enough to make me write off the entire Asian culture all together. I’m sorry, but your taste in music is just too awful to tolerate. Your cheesy love song covers ruined it, people. You’re done. (JK) I’m sure my music drives other people insane, although no, there is no fucking way it is as bad as this crap they are playing right now. Don’t come to Asia without an ipod and some ear plugs! You’ll die. I wanna get a big henna tattoo that says, “fuck Celine Dion, she suck!” They’d probably have a heart attack and drop dead in the streets. Tattoss are still pretty taboo here so when they see someone with a tattoo, they stop and stare and point and stuff. Ha ha… ok maybe not a tattoo, but I at least want to make a shirt that says Celine Dion, with one of those big red circles with the slash through it, meaning NO Celine Dion. Yes, I think that is a must for my next Asia trip. Another reason I’m realizing that Asia and I don’t gel 100% is that I absolutely hate karaoke. Not that I’ve ever actually been, because I can tell already that I would hate it, but if I was forced to go, the only way I could deal would be to make the biggest joke out of it possible. And here you can’t even joke about karaoke. They take it way to freakin’ seriously. It’s not fun and games at all, it’s like a life long passion. (Are you kidding me with that crap?!) And all they want to sing are cheesy, often sad, love songs. Why?! There is no way in hell I would ever enjoy a night of listening to that. Puke city. Just go ahead and kill me now, please. I’d never live through a night of that, let alone a life time! I don’t see how they can be so into it. It truly is the one cultural different I just can’t get over. Go ahead and eat kittens or dogs, spit and smoke cigarettes everywhere you go, fine, whatever. I can get used to that I guess, or I can at least close my eyes and pretend it’s not happening. But I will never be okay with the cheesy love song karaoke bull shit. I feel so bad for all the young people who grow up thinking that is cool. But I guess its their choice. They fucked up. There has to be something else out there they could be listening too, doesn’t there? Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s all there is. No, that can’t be possible. They truly like it and choose it for some unexplainable reason. Anyway, back to me wondering what I’m doing here. We are going to spend our whole time in China in the Guangxi Region, which is the Southern most and poorest part of China. It is mostly rural and agricultural, with a lot of ethnic minority villages, which we will be visiting and saying in. (The exact opposite of the kind of stuff that I tend to like, great!) It is a much slower pace of life in this region (aka boring as hell). And seriously, I’m wondering what am I doing here. What was I thinking? Well, I know what I was thinking… I need to get myself back to Hong Kong, I’ve always wanted to go to China and the dates of this trip worked out perfectly. So here I am. Oh, and I haven’t told you about our new group yet. It’s down to just 4 of us. Anne and myself. Then this utterly typical German guy, Andreas, and our “guide” Pete, who is a 26 year old from Colorado who has virtually no sense of humor or personality, and although he totally doesn’t, likes to sort act like he knows everything. He’s not afraid to say “I don’t know” when you ask him a question, but he’s got that sort of George Bush air of confidence about him, when he does try to talk, that makes me want to throw my shoe at him. (That’s how I feel about George Bush anyway, it hasn’t gotten quite that bad with Pete yet). Pete’s run this trip about 5 times and knows a little Chinese, what he’s been able to pick up in the 6 months he’s been here. But it is definitely different to have such a small group. The good thing is we certainly don’t look like a tour group, we just look like 4 white people traveling together. The bad thing is that these are not people I would have really ever chosen to travel with, except Anne, who is super cool and I’m thankful every single day that she is here with me otherwise, I’d really be pissed off right now. And I’m not really pissed off right now, I’m just realizing this isn’t going to be my dream trip through China. But that’s ok. It will be an adventure none the less.
And even though this isn’t really the part of China that I’m most interested in, I’m sure there are going to be really cool things to see here, and it’s good that I’m seeing it now, because at the rate that China is changing and developing, this could be an entirely different place in a few years. Sort of like Laos. We are in Huashan right now, which is just a tiny tiny village that sees almost no westerners. Nobody really speaks English in the whole place, even at the one hotel, and at the one restaurant. We are here because along the river there are these minority rock paintings that are about 2000 years old. A farmer reported the paintings to the government in 1954 and a little research has been done on them, but not much. They don’t know who made them or what they mean exactly. We took a boat to go see them this afternoon. And they were pretty cool, but it’s hard to get super excited about a few red paintings after having been to Egypt and seeing all that they build around the same time period. But whatever, it was still cool, and like I said hardly any westerners come here to see it. There were 2 other Chinese tourists on the boat with us, though. This region, Southern China, is becoming a big tourist destination for local Chinese people, that is why it will probably be ruined. Because they will come in hoards and won’t check their development, and soon they’ll turn it into their own disneylandish type of place. While I was in Thailand I saw this program that was talking about development in the Longji Valley (which is exactly where we are going and the first time I had heard anything about this place). It basically said that a few years ago the town of Longji was this pictures perfect place with tons of old buildings and traditional everything, exactly the way it had been for a super long time. And in the local culture there everything in the family, property, business ect… is handed down along the women’s side of the family, not the men’s. So they had their own culture and it was just a really interesting place and there were family that had lived there for a long long time. Then the tourists started coming and they opened night clubs and bars in the little traditional city. And the market in the city stopped selling daily staples and started selling only tourist crap. And soon, the local people had to go to another city to buy basic groceries, and couldn’t sleep at night in their houses that their families had lived in for years and years because of the noise from the night clubs. So the traditional families are now basically be driven out by the tourists, who come to look at their traditional little town. I was like man, that sucks. And now I’m about to be one of those tourists. Shite! I think Intrepid is even considering not taking any more trips through there like maybe next year because it has gotten so bad and they are all about trying to have as positive impact as possible on the places they visit. But I guess it’s also just one more reason to see it now, before it gets totally ruined. I just hate to think that I’m part of the problem. Oh well. I’m already here, not much I can do about it now. And I had so much stuff going on in my life before I came on this trip, that I didn’t properly do my research and I had no idea what I was going to see on this China part of the trip. I only recognized like 2 cities we were going through (one being Hong Kong, lol) and I didn’t know anything about the Longji Valley or any of the minority tribal villages we are visiting or any of that. (I still don’t really).
And I didn’t bring a guide booking, hoping I could just borrow one from someone else and nobody else brought one either. So I’m totally clueless, and so far Pete’s explanations about things have been like 2 sentences max. (He’s busy constantly texting his new girlfriend in Sapa, Vietnam.) Oh and I found out that at a lot of boarder crossings in China (not the one we went through cause it is a pretty small one that hardly sees any western tourists), but they will confiscate your Lonely Planet China book because it does not include or consider Taiwan to be a part of China. Crazy!
So since we are getting into a part of this trip that is going to be pretty boring… well, I shouldn’t say that but in these villages, there is lots of time to read or just wander or whatever. And I already read the book that I brought, which was really good by the way. It was called Fluke by Christopher Moore (thanks for the recommendation Amanda!) and it was funny and interesting and I really liked it. Anyway, done with the book, so my ipod and this blog are my only friends and my only time wasters. I feel so bad for all you blog readers as you try to sort through what is really just my random lucid thoughts. On the plane from SFO-EWR I was typing furiously and when I got off the plane the guy sitting next to me said, “what, are you writing a book?” And I said, “yeah, sort of.” But I’m so sorry dear reader, what a horrible book this must be as there is absolutely no afore thought (is that a word, I don’t even know), no editing, no theme, no plot, no characters, no nothing. Just the random ramblings of a confused mind. I guess that would be the title then: Random Ramblings of a Confused Mind, (as recorded while traveling solo through Egypt, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, China and Australia). Yeah, I don’t think that’s ever gonna get published. (Especially if I keep using words like gonna and lol, lol). So yeah, just want to apologize for all my randomness. Definitely don’t feel like you have to read on. I’m just wasting time, letting my mind wander. I can type just as fast as I think, which lets these words just flow. Hence, the rambling, I guess.
So dinner tonight was alright. Better than the food yesterday or the day before and way better than lunch today. But still, I’ve had better Chinese food at Grand China in Bakersfield! Tonight we did have something I’d never had before and it was actually good/ok. It was Taro, stuffed with something (maybe like minced pork or veggies, or like what would maybe be in the middle of a pot sticker, but only a thin layer of it) and the the Taro thing was fried on the outside. Of course anything fried is always good, right? He ordered sweet potato something, and this is what we got. It wasn’t a sweet potato and seemed kind of like a reg. potato but not quite. Pete says it was Taro, but I thought Taro, like the kind from Hawaii at least, was all pinkish purple, and this was not that. So I guess I don’t really know what it was but it was pretty good. Then we had beef in oyster sauce, cashew chicken and sweet and sour pork and bok choy and rice. Pretty standard stuff, and not bad, but I wouldn’t go as far as saying good either. Just edible, which is more than I can really say for the last 3 meals I tried to eat. (I’m so glad I brought a million cliff bars with me!)