Saturday, November 25
When we awoke at 5 am, the Victoria 5 was docked at the city of Jiujiang.
This morning at breakfast I had a chat with Bob and Shari as to possible future places to go together. We decided to try destinations where none of us have been – Alaska, the Maritimes of Eastern Canada, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia or Machu Pichu. We have a good balance when traveling – some time together, plenty of time alone. That’s good. I hear it’s hard to find people with whom you travel well.
After a buffet Western-Chinese breakfast, we boarded buses for a trip up the mountain to Lu Shan, a resort area. This is what my reference book has to say about Lu Shan:
Lu Shan’s cluster of wooded hills rises to a sudden 1474m from the level shores of Poyang Hu, and have been praised since ancient times by poets and travellers for their beauty…. Once covered in temples, in the mid-nineteenth century Lu Shan became a resort area for wealthy Chinese and European expatriates, who were carried up in sedan chairs. Chiang Kaishek built a summer residence and training school for Guomindang officials up here in the 1930s, and, unlike most of the temples, these have been preserved, as have the sites of more recent meetings of the Communist Central Committee.
Lu Shan is very crowded in the summer, when the lowlands are hot, but we were there in the off season and, though the temperature was still in the 50s, there were not hoards of people there.
The distance from the dock to Lu Shan is only 36 km, but it took nearly two hours because of stops and a slow, curving road. On the way we passed through several villages. On the hillside next to one was a cemetery with square, pictureframe-like mausoleum monuments. The tour guide said that people had to buy the land and the mausoleums, but that the person is actually buried under the ground. The name of the place was the Night Club. I asked what happened if people could not afford such a burial place. Iris said in that case the person’s ashes were kept by the family. On the adjacent hill was a crematorium, black smoke rising upward from its chimney.
In the villages along the road, there were no fences or other property-line indicators like the ones at home, and every little piece of ground had vegetables growing.
Our guide, Iris, was privately dubbed “Chairman Iris” by some of our group. Reasonably fluent in English, she could be understood if we listened carefully. Iris told us that a couple in China can have only one child. If the child is a girl, they can have one more to try for a boy. I heard this is because the boy can work hard and also because a boy will take care of his parents in their old age, whereas the girl will move away to her husband’s family. Because more labor is needed to work the fields beyond what a small family can do, water buffalo do the heavy labor. The Chinese build huts for the animals to live in – thatched igloo-like structures with straw inside. The animals are an asset and they are well cared for.
We had an Australian woman in our group who, rather than taking pictures, made sketches at our stops. She was sketching a water buffalo shelter and a dozen children surrounded her – all under 6 or so. Fortunately, another group member took a picture of that.
The road to Lu Shan has 396 curves – very winding and decently trafficked even at this time of year. If a car wants to pass on the narrow road, it honks. We saw some close calls, but our driver was very skilled and careful. Near the top of the mountain, Iris sang a simple English song to us.
Once at Lu Shan I put on my pedometer. I’m a regular walker, and I wanted to see how much distance we actually covered, in footsteps and stairs, on our outing, so I could record it in my walking log. We made several stops – at a lake, at a restaurant for lunch, at the villa of Chang Kaishek. Iris led us through the villa, stopping at a wall of photographs to point out Chang Kaishek, his wife, and Chairman Mao. It was clear that these people were heroes to Iris; she spoke of them with reverence.
Overall, the buildings of Lu Shan reminded me of an old military site – most of the buildings were 50 years old or so. Shari commented that the place looked like just what it was - a summer resort area, off season.
I had heard people talking about Chinese toilets, both before our trip and while we were in Shanghai. While at Lu Shan I experienced them for the first time – one in a marble-floored room with stalls and doors, where the floor toilets flushed automatically after use, and one outdoor place with doorless, low-walled stalls and a shallow cement trench running from one end of the room to the other. I was fine. I’m sure I haven’t seen the really awful ones – but a clean or reasonably clean “squatter” is just an unfamiliar alternative, not bad at all. All you really need is strong leg muscles and your own toilet paper!
I expected that the views at Lu Shan would be very impressive. I could see the shadows of many narrow peaks, but the haze was limiting. I think some of it was fog common in the mountains, but there was extensive air pollution in this region, so I suspect that added to the limited viewing.
Our camera broke during our trip to Lu Shan. We bought a one-use camera for 48 yuan (about $3.84) at one of the tourist shops, and then started looking for a small screwdriver so Art could take a look inside our camera. (His hobby is dismantling small appliances and fixing them, though he has been known to dismantle and then leave the parts lying around for long periods of time.)
We spent some time at a mountain pass. There were stairs to climb, which would have been fine except that they had no railings. I am afraid of heights (actually, I’m afraid of falling from high places) so the trails were a challenge. There was a cable car running between the pass we were on and the next one, but not enough time to ride it – even if I had been interested in being suspended from a thin cable over a deep chasm in the Chinese mountains.
Once back on the bus, our guide counted noses and found that we were missing three people – Natalie and Tamara from the taxi-to-the-airport episode, and John, a young man they’d taken up with. As we waited for Iris to track them down, some of the tour group members started to mutter about “these thoughtless young people”. Iris returned to tell us that the three had taken the cable car to the other pass. There were groans from others on the bus. Pat, Natalie’s mother, sat quietly and read the book she’d brought along.
The decision was made to leave our rear-guard guide (Doreen, a staff person from the Victoria 5) to wait for the threesome and catch a taxi to the commercial center of Lu Shan, while the bus took the rest of us down for some shopping.
During our half-hour stop at the shops in the center of town, we found a hardware store. Art went in while I looked around outside. When he didn’t come out after a few minutes, I went in to fetch him. He’d had no luck finding a screwdriver to work on the camera. I caught the eye of the shopkeeper and pointed to a standard-sized screwdriver in the glass case. When she started to reach for it, I shook my head and held up a finger of each hand, a couple of inches apart, to tell her I wanted something smaller. Her face lit up and she went down to the end of the counter. She retrieved a small plastic case with a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers – exactly what I was looking for. The set belonged to the shop, for making repairs. But we arranged a sale for 15 yuan, about $1.20. Everyone was happy!
As we walked past the shops, schoolchildren said “hello”. We said “nee how” (that’s hello, one of my two Chinese words) to tiny bundled-up children. The parents smiled and nodded. The children were hesitant and grabbed their mothers’ legs. This was not part of the official tour, of course, but those moments of connection with another person are the ones we remember best.
We returned to the bus and the three young people showed up. They were only slightly apologetic for inconveniencing the group. They said they’d asked how long the cable car ride took and they were told 20 minutes. What they missed was that it took 20 minutes each way. I told Art that if we’d brought our kids along on the trip, they would have done exactly the same thing. How can you pass up a thrill ride when you’re young?
When we were leaving Lu Shan I checked my pedometer. On our various walks and stair-climbing stops I had covered the equivalent of 3.9 miles.
The return bus trip was uneventful, though we did stop for a few minutes to photograph a young water buffalo tethered to the ground by a rope attached to a ring in his nose. Art went out and spent a moment with the animal – I think he must have missed Bud, our pig!
Back at the Victoria 5 we attended a Captain’s reception and dinner. What that meant was, put on a dress (me) and coat and tie (Art), stand around chatting with our tour friends, listen while the cruise director translated Captain Chen’s welcome, then go to another Chinese banquet.
I heard other people in our group complaining about the quality of food and service, narrow bus isles, “party line” tour guides, the halting English of other tour guides, the taste of food. And comparisons are made with other trips they’ve taken. For myself, I think attitude makes the difference. I had no expectations and so everything we saw and experienced was interesting.
I do think, though, that tour groups have their pros and cons. On the advantage side, they are convenient. We don’t have to do much planning or decision making. We just show up at the designated time and get on a bus, or get to the dining room and eat. We don’t have to know the local language. We get to meet other Westerners and compare our experiences on this and other trips.
On the down side, there’s not much of an opportunity for spontaneity. You go with and do what the group does. You can’t decide on the spur of the moment to stay an extra day in a particular place, or to leave a little early. If your dinner companions are chronic complainers it’s hard to get away.
I found most of the people in this group to be travelers who usually go places on a tour – not too many independent travelers who make their own way. The “Western bubble” phenomenon prevails. Art and I have talked about a tour being good for going places where the culture is different enough, or English speakers limited enough, that we’d be hesitant to go on our own. This is the first tour we’ve been on. We made the right decision as far as China is concerned. But I doubt that this mode of travel will be a common one for us, at least for as long as we’re able to get along on our own.
We decided to skip a Chinese fashion show after dinner, and went to bed at 8:30 instead.