Anyways, I felt like it would be fine, and it was. Yes - the road did suck. For the first part (from Wan'an to a village called Meicun), the road was a slosh of mud from the rains the night before. That road is currently being prepared to be paved next year, so they have taken all the rocks away, leaving huge expanses of mud. However, my bike was much more nimble going through the road than the trucks even - which would often get stuck in muddy sections and take a long time to get through steeper sections - which made it that I made it to Meicun quicker than almost all vehicular traffic (other than motorbikes, of course). It was actually a pretty fun road to be going on.
Some terraced rice farmland near Meicun on the way to Laiyuan from Wan'an.
From there, I went to a village called Zhuguan - here the road was newly paved. I stopped in Zhuguan for lunch and a chance to chat with the locals for a bit. Zhuguan is a small village of only 600 people - although they said that about 200 of them had left for coastal cities in Guangdong for work. Most Chinese villages only have primary school education - but in Zhuguan, they didn't even have that - they had to go to Meicun for primary school. If they wanted to keep going to Junior High, or even high school (only completion of Junior HIgh (grade 9) is officially mandatory), they would have to go all the way to Wan'an. The students would acttually live at the school during the week. Pretty intense. Anyways, given the sorry state of the road from Wan'an to Meicun, many students are unable to make it to school - sometimes for weeks at a time if rain has been especially intense. Pretty crazy. Which makes me think that there are probably a lot of children who never even get a chance to study Junior High School - proably many don't even complete primary school. Interesting.
After Zhuguan, I struck out on the road that was not listed on the maps. I hadn't originally planned on going this way, but after someone mentioned to me the existence of this road, I felt it would probably be the best. It's condition was similar to the road that leads up to the trailhead of Gargantua caves in Alberta - heaps of rocks, and stream crossings. As I was going along the road I was extremely worried that I had gone the wrong way because the entire 20km route, I did not see another person AT ALL! It was a pretty crazy feeling being completely secluded and alone in the middle of nowhere in China. I was happy to find that it is still possible to get away from it all, even in China. Luckily, this time, I was smart enough to put my camera in an accessible location, so I took lots of photos of the bamboo forest and such. Pretty cool. Anyways, after slogging it through the Chinese wilderness, I finally started to descend, and came into Laiyuan pretty quickly - I got into town around 2:30pm.
A look into the bamboo forest on the small road between Zhuguan and Laiyuan.
A small waterfall beside the road on the way to Laiyuan - I didn't see anyone along this road the entire day!
Laiyuan isn't a large place - the population is around 5,000 people, but it is remote enough that it had more rooming options than Wan'an had - I got an actual hotel room, with a sit down toilet! Interestingly, the hotel had satellite tv, and in addition to the regular Chinese channels, also had a large selection of Indian, Pakistani, Arabic and European Channels (none from North America though). I watched the Al Jazeera English network for a channel for a bit, and was interested to see that they had actually hired foreign correspondents - as in white people to do the broadcasts - an interesting comparison to China's English channel, which is dominated by Chinese people speaking heavily-accented English.
That night, in Laiyuan I went to go grab dinner at one of the hole in the wall restaurants. I was watching tv with my back to the outside, when I looked back and saw around 50 (literally) children standing there staring at me while I ate. It felt a little bit too much like a zoo exhibit where you might sit and watch a panda eating bamboo or something like that. Anyways, I shouted "hello" at them, and they all freaked out. Eventually the owner had the sense to go out and ask them to leave so that I could eat in peace - it was pretty annoying.
However, that night, as I was just getting ready to go to sleep, around 10pm, I get a knock on my hotel door and there are two Chinese schoolgirls who are probably around 12 years old - I was pretty annoyed that they would actually knock on my door, just to get the chance to talk to a foreigner or whatever, and that the hotel people hadn't stopped them. Also, I have no idea how they found out that it was my room, but I was getting seriously creeped out. So I told them that it was late and that I was going to bed and that I didn't really want to talk to them - I am sure that their parents would not have been excited to find out that their daughters were knocking on the hotel room of a foreign man at 10pm at night.
Laiyuan isn't a large place - the population is around 5,000 people, but it is remote enough that it had more rooming options than Wan'an had - I got an actual hotel room, with a sit down toilet! Interestingly, the hotel had satellite tv, and in addition to the regular Chinese channels, also had a large selection of Indian, Pakistani, Arabic and European Channels (none from North America though). I watched the Al Jazeera English network for a channel for a bit, and was interested to see that they had actually hired foreign correspondents - as in white people to do the broadcasts - an interesting comparison to China's English channel, which is dominated by Chinese people speaking heavily-accented English.
That night, in Laiyuan I went to go grab dinner at one of the hole in the wall restaurants. I was watching tv with my back to the outside, when I looked back and saw around 50 (literally) children standing there staring at me while I ate. It felt a little bit too much like a zoo exhibit where you might sit and watch a panda eating bamboo or something like that. Anyways, I shouted "hello" at them, and they all freaked out. Eventually the owner had the sense to go out and ask them to leave so that I could eat in peace - it was pretty annoying.
However, that night, as I was just getting ready to go to sleep, around 10pm, I get a knock on my hotel door and there are two Chinese schoolgirls who are probably around 12 years old - I was pretty annoyed that they would actually knock on my door, just to get the chance to talk to a foreigner or whatever, and that the hotel people hadn't stopped them. Also, I have no idea how they found out that it was my room, but I was getting seriously creeped out. So I told them that it was late and that I was going to bed and that I didn't really want to talk to them - I am sure that their parents would not have been excited to find out that their daughters were knocking on the hotel room of a foreign man at 10pm at night.
No comments:
Post a Comment