Hiking Trip

The weekend before last saw me embark on yet another short adventure. This one promised to be much easier for one big reason: I was traveling with some locals. I went on the trip with Dave, Cao Xingxing, and Qin Chen (the second two are obviously Chinese). Xingxing has been one of the coolest and most helpful people I have met here. She is a senior Business English major, and I met her because she is also the student assistant to Teddy (our advisor) and to Teddy's boss. She is always eager to help with shopping, translating, or about anything else. Well, she and some of her friends and their boyfriends were planning a trip and invited me and Dave. Then, in typical Chinese fashion, all the boys (who are all the same major) had something (meeting, test, immunization, military training, practice test, (I didn't ask, but those are all plausible possibilities)) come up, so they couldn't come on the trip. This caused two of the girls to also bail. So it ended up just being four of us, which of course didn't really affect me or Dave. So we took the midnight train south to Anhui province. I was unexpectedly able to practice my Spanish for my first time with a group of Mexicans. They were exchange students studying in Shanghai and headed to Huangshan (the mountain I visited last month). They were eager to chat, as they were enduring the overnight train by making it a booze cruise.

Once we arrived, the trip was up and running. After a quick change in the delightful (insert considerable sarcasm) Jixi train station rest room, we made our way through town to the bus station. Our bus took us as far as the bridge construction, which we passed on foot, and then loaded another bus. This is what a detour is in semi-developed China, a short walk across a cement beam crossing a not so shallow river. We soon made it to the trail and had a wonderful day of hiking. The scenery was gorgeous, the air clean (a rare occurrence in the Yangzi River Delta), the weather nice and cool, and Xingxing and QinChen were lots of fun to talk with; we learned some Chinese and they some English. Like always in China, there were some other tourists on the trail, but they were so few that almost every corner provided an amazing and gorgeous view.

We spent the night in a delightful little family hotel, which was genuinely 'in the the middle of nowhere'. The food was delicious, the beds comfortable, and it was a great stay. The outhouse, though, did fall in line with the normal quality of Chinese restrooms, and was just a little dirtier than the one I remember from Boy Scout camp. I went out and sat around a small campfire with some of the other patrons after dinner. They were playing some sort of mafia (find the killer) game...needless to say I didn't follow, or even think of participating.

The walk down was a great time as well, after a breakfast of rice porridge (yes they eat rice at every meal) and hard boiled eggs (which are uber-popular here). One of the best parts was a walk through a small village. It was also a walk back a few hundred years. There were pigs in the bottom floors of many of the houses, as well as one taking a stroll down the street. An old women was sitting on a wooden stool cracking chestnuts by hand in a very primitive nutcracker. I entered, and in my best Chinese and hand gestures, asked if I could try cracking a nut or two. She smiled and laughed, but told the girls that I couldn't because it was her job and needed to maintain quality. Apparently the tourism revenue isn't making back to her household. Another women was washing clothes in the roadside canal/trough, which also seemed to serve as a trash can/sink in other parts of the village; but she didn't seem to mind.
This completed the trip, and after the town we took a bus to Hangzhou, the capital city of Zhejiang, the province we had hiked into, and then back to Changzhou. I did make a never before made purchase while we waited for the bus. Two elderly women approached with baskets of nuts and fruits. Those items did not interest me, but the hot pepper sauce in a reused Coke bottle did, and I bought what turned out to be very good (and spicy) hot sauce. Only in China, right!