Maybe We'll Travel?

Hiking in DeHang, Hunan Province -- A quick 8-hour train ride from our home in Zhuzhou!

Does school start this week? "Maybe." Do I teach class in 15 minutes? "Maybe." Do we have a holiday tomorrow? "Maybe, I will confirm." Could you please, please fix the leak in our ceiling? "Maybe next week." Okay China, enough with the "maybes!" If I come back to the states saying "maybe we go to the store," you will know why. China is flexible; China is last minute; and China does NOT have a calendar!!! If you had to pick two countries that had polar opposite views on timeliness, it would without a doubt be China and the US. I am not kidding, there is no school calendar. Nobody knows when the holidays are. For goodness sake, we didn't officially know that we were supposed to start teaching on Monday, September 1 until the Sunday night before. I think this lack of planning is going to make my heart stop beating!

For example, China has a few significant national holidays. Because there are no sick days or paid vacation days that you get to choose, virtually the only time you can travel is on these national holidays. While these holidays are set by the government, your employer decides which days you actually have off. That sounds fine, right? However, the frustrating part for us westerners is that many employers wait until the last minute (literally) to decide which days will be days off of work. SO, all of China waits to the last minute to plan a trip (in fact train stations do not even let you buy a ticket to your destination until 3 days prior to departure!) Due to the last minute time frame in which everyone must book travel, coupled with the fact that online reservations have not yet made their way to the Chinese train system, all of China converges on the train station immediately before the holiday. It's an interesting sight to observe, but it is incredibly frustrating if you are fighting the rest of the local population to get a ticket. It also seems that there are more people who want to travel than there are train seats & beds, so you are often left with standing-room-only seats for a 16-hour train ride.

So, we had our first holiday this past week: Mid-Autumn Festival. The actual holiday was Sunday, September 14th this year (coinciding with the Full Moon), but we got a 3-day weekend because our school decided to observe the holiday on the Monday. For Mid-Autumn Festival, people celebrate the beauty of the Full Moon by spending time with family, eating feasts, and nibbling on moon cakes (a dessert that looks like a thick cookie and is filled with a filling -- typically fruit jam or egg. The type of filling you get is a surprise unless you can read the characters on the outside!!!). People here compare this day to our Thanksgiving. That comparison seemed accurate to us, but the bird of choice at the dinner table was mainly duck instead of turkey. This was evidenced by the large numbers of slaughtered ducks we saw people cleaning that day.

Locals cleaning duck in the river in DeHang on Mid-Autumn Festival

Despite the last-minute notice we were given that we had a 3-day weekend (we actually never got official confirmation of the holiday from our school, but had 'reliable' information from a fellow English teacher), we were able to get train tickets to our desired destination: Jishou, the gateway city to 2 beautiful minority villages in western Hunan Province about an 8 hour train ride away. Buying train tickets at the station was quite possibly the most difficult task I have ever attempted in my life. Imagine a line of Chinese people (a contradiction in itself because people generally do not tend to line up at all here) enforced by the metal bars leading up to the ticket counter (although people still try to push / cut their way to the front -- there are no spatial boundaries here!). After making our way to the front of the line, we began to try to purchase our tickets in Chinese. We had everything written down; train numbers, the Chinese words for the various classes of seats (soft seat, hard seat, soft sleeper, hard sleeper - you can't just ask for "a seat"), and we thought we were totally prepared. However, trouble occurred when we asked for various combinations of trains for the return trip from our destination and seat classes (in Chinese, no less) the woman at the ticket counter always replied "Mei you," or "We do not have any left." It appeared that we'd have to stand for the 8+ hour overnight train ride home from our destination if we wanted tickets on our desired dates. That just sounded too miserable, and we settled for a return trip coming home a day early.

Of course, the crowd of people in the "line" behind us grew impatient / angry as we tried to complete our purchase because it took so long. One man decided he spoke better English than I spoke Chinese and felt the need to push me along and insult me in my transaction: "Why are you here if you don't speak Chinese." "Why don't you go home and come back with a translator." It was maddening and frustrating!!! We left with tickets in hand for an adventure I wasn't sure I was ready to take. If buying tickets was that hard, how would the trip go??

On the way to Jishou, we had booked Soft Seat tickets for our 9 pm to 5 am train ride (we'd preferred sleeper seats but none were available). These seats were just fine. They were more spacious than an an airplane seat, leaned back further, and were actually softer. Not too bad, right? Things got a little uncomfortable as our car filled up with travelers with "Standing Room" tickets. It seemed that all of the "Standers" were fascinated with us foreigners and wanted to stand in our space and stare at us as we tried to sleep. Thankfully, one of the train attendants noticed what was going on and made most of them relocate to other parts of the train. The other uncomfortable things about our car full of Soft Seats were (1) the fact that they do not turn the lights off at night and (2) the vendors who walk up and down the aisles regularly hollering about strange fruit they want to sell you at 2 am as you're trying to sleep. On the way home, we purchased hard sleeper tickets, which are meant for sleeping and a bit more private (They were great!).

Hard Sleeper train seats purchased for our return trip -- pretty comfy!

After all the effort we expended and strange experiences we went through to get to our destination, it was definitely a trip well worth the effort. You have probably never heard of Fenghuang or Dehang, the two places we visited, and will probably not hear of them again. Maybe that was the most amazing part about the whole thing. These places had miraculous views and people, and up until a month ago I didn't even know they existed. When you go to the Grand Canyon, it is truly amazing. But, before you go there you've read about it in a guidebook, history or science books, etc. You know how it was made, how old it is, how tall it is, and who lives there. This trip was so different in that respect. What a thrill!

Our 2-day trip had two parts: We spent one day in FengHuang, a village on the river known for it's "gondolas", buildings on stilts, and traditional ways of living. They call it FengHuang or Phoenix Town because legend has it that 2 Phoenix birds flew over the village and found it so beautiful that they hovered overhead for days. We spent our 2nd day in DeHang, a tiny village with no real hotels to speak of, surrounded by some of the most interesting mountains we've ever seen.

Mountains in DeHang, Hunan

Fenghuang and DeHang are a couple of hours apart, and both are home to a minority group in China called the Miao (Fun fact: minorities in China do not have to abide by the one child policy). In DeHang, the Miao grow rice and wheat in terraces on the sides of the mountains -- even near the top. We saw Miao peasants harvesting wheat BY HAND, knocking the plant against the side of a box until all the wheat falls out. Further, once the wheat is harvested, the farmers carry it in a bag a good 1km or so down a mountain trail into town. That is surely tiresome and backbreaking work! And all this work on a holiday weekend!

A Miao woman in Fenghuan, Hunan


Harvesting Wheat

Farmer carrying wheat into town on his back

In Fenghuang, we enjoyed walking around the river, a scenic boat ride, and simply walking through the city to see the old-style architecture that has been well maintained over the years. The river was the life of the town, with fisherman casting their lines, hotel owners cleaning their bed linens, and villagers cleaning their dinner (duck, mostly) in the water. Strangely (to us at least), it appeared to be okay to clean bed linens in river water 2 feet away from where someone was gutting a duck!

Fenghuang, Hunan

Doing Laundry in the River in Fenghuang, Hunan

We spent our day in DeHang hiking mountain trails past waterfalls, water buffalo, the largest melons and gourds you've ever seen growing in the strangest places, and ducks swimming in the mountain streams (surely awaiting their fate as someones Mid-Autumn Festival feast!). All told, we hiked for 6 hours that day (exhausting!). It was like a Chinese storybook. I hope our pictures speak a thousand words, because despite my rambling, I just can't explain the goosebumps you get in a place like that.

A house on a stream in DeHang, Hunan

Liusha Waterfall on a hike outside Dehang, Hunan

Of course, finding a place to sleep upon arrival in DeHang was a challenge. Since we were unable to really plan this trip in advance, we showed up to DeHang without a place to stay (not our style, but we were told that is the only way to do it in that small town). We were told by the 1st hostel we came to that there was no availability. We got the same answer at a 2nd hostel. This made us a bit nervous, as it was late in the afternoon and DeHang is a VERY small town with literally only a few places to stay. Running out of options, we ended up going back to the owner of the first hostel and tried asking for a room again. However, this time we offered him a cigarette as we made our request. Somehow, our simple gift (the cigarette) prompted him to inform us that he had a couple of rooms at a different inn that our group could have for the night on the condition that we all had our passports on us. It is amazing what doors a small gift can open up here (see earlier entry below on Guanxi).

After learning that we would in fact have a place to sleep for the night, we began to relax a bit. The sun was setting over the sharp peaks as the fog rolled in and the traditional drums beat in the background; it left me with a spine tingling, mysterious feeling that I'm not sure I've ever experienced. We checked into our hotel rooms (which were actually nicer than expected) and afterwards started to head into town for dinner. On our way out of the hotel door, we were abruptly stopped by a local policeman. He had come to make sure that all of us actually had our passports and wanted to take down our passport / visa information (which is required of all Hotels in China hosting foreigners to have on file -- but many smaller places tend to not follow this rule). While the two of us had our actual passports in hand, a couple of people in our group only had copies (which is technically not good enough). After some tense moments of wondering whether or not the police officer would let us stay in the hotel for the night, he eventually decided not to kick us out. Still, he was not happy about some of our group not having their actual passports in hand and was sure to let us know. I'm honestly not sure where he would have made us go if he had not let us stay in the hotel the night, and I hope to never find out.

Waiting to give the Police my passport information :)

While the entry above references some of the struggles and hardships we've experienced our past couple of weeks here, I really must reiterate how happy we are to be here. Most of our difficulties have simply come from cultural differences, but learning about / observing those cultural differences are a couple of the primary reasons we wanted to come here. It has definitely not always been easy, but we've sure learned a lot in our 1.5 months!