The
last visit of our trip was to Songpang, a town of about 70 000 people
a couple of hours from Jiuzhaigou. The center is beautiful, with the
old city wall and beautiful streets, and you can see in the distance
on a hill an impressive temple. Next day we start our 3 day horse
track to Ice Mountain, an impressive mountain with its 5 600 m peak.
We go with two locals: Go Chao, 27 years old, with two children (10
and 8 years), and another guy who is 18 and whose name is impossible
for me to write. The place has an oustanding beauty and we go through
small villages of a few hundreds of people at the most. Their small
temples, their houses, their cementeries, their prayer wheels, their
Tibetan flags, everything is magical there. I will constantly think
of these small villages and people's smiles and greetings when they
saw us. At the end of my time in China i was reading this book about
the peasant's life in China, which is now banned in mainland China
and which deals with all kinds of corruption mostly at the township
level, the excesive taxation burden leading to loss of life among the
peasantry, sometimes directly through murders and i recall these two
examples in 1989 that took place in Sichuan. I will think of the
beauty of these villages, people's smiles and this book, depicting a
horrifying life in the countryside. The first night we camp at 3 200 m
and we have a very nice evening chatting as much as the language
barrier allows with Go Chao. The night is frezzing and with
temperatures likely to be lower than 10 degrees below zero, i can
hardly sleep, my feet are too cold. It has been snowing for many
hours and i get out of the tent for just a few minutes, enough to see
an amazing moon illuminating the night and giving a tenuous light
blue color to the sky and showing everything covered with snow. The
feeling was undescribable...
Next
day we made it to somewhere above 4000 m, when we had to head back
since the weather was getting pretty bad and we did not have good
guear for that. That evening in the camp Go Chao wants to make a deal
with me: i stay here in the mountains with the horses and the guear
and he keeps my princess. Tempting but things stay the way they are
and we enjoy another cold night, this time a sky filled with starts,
probably one of the most beautiful night skies i have seen in the
northern hemisphere. It has been three days and two nights in which
we have been the only travelers and that was awesome.
I
want to add that throughout my time in China i could observe that
there is an absolute lack of ecological awareness among the ordinary
people in this country. You will see them all throwing litter
everywhere. I gave some snack to Go Chao and the first thing he did
was to throw the plastic on the floor, and this is just the most
stupid example. Going to a national park can be really painful if you
have to face the incredible amounts of litter that accumulate in some
places. A few times i shouted no! And i saw how the person who was
about to throw something just looked at me surprised, with no
understanding at all of what was going on. These people are directly
going to self-destruction, with most of the rivers terribly
contaminated and with CO2
emissions which are expected to double those of all other industrial
countries together by 2025 but...they do not have any education on
that. The growth is at all costs and you can see that these people
have never been told anything that can bring some environmental
awareness...
Anyway,
bus back to Chengdu and as terrible as it was the one to get here. As
incredible as it sounds, we made 3 stops for 6 hours and a half of
journey and in all of them they cleaned the bus on the outside, while
people were spitting all over the place inside throughout the whole
journey. I have only one more experience to add and i hope you have
made it til here. The last day in Chengdu we visited the People's
Park, which is simply incredible. Thousands of Chinese making groups
to dance together all sorts of music including breakdance. Women
putting a red carpet and doing as if they were models on the catwalk,
groups of people doing exercise, other playing table games, other
singing or playing badmiton and the best of all a place were there
are lots of ads hanging on trees. These ads are from men who are
looking for a wife so they write on a piece of paper their profile,
the type of woman they are looking for and their address and phone
number, fantastic. We even met these two guys who write stuff on the
floor with a big brush and water. They say a few things in Spanish
and also in Czech! They went crazy with Katka when they found out she is
from Czech Republic and tell her a lot of stuff, one of them talking
about the Russain soldiers and that he was with the Soviets once as a
soldier blah blah blah...i do not remember well but uauuu, that was
good. This is also another fascinating thing about Chinese people and
it is all this social life and activities outside, which they also
make in mass. We would sometimes be walking on the street and all of
a sudden find a group of women together dancing in the middle of the
street or stuff like that...
It
is time to finish this endless Red Giant post. We take a train back
to Hong kong and this time we do not think twice about it, we get a
hard sleeper. I am reading this book about the peasantry in China, I
am reading also about the environmental problems China is facing. I
am thinking about the many souls i have seen in China. I am thinking
about the misery i have seen and the crazy growth of the cities, the
KFCs and McDonalds next to the hammer and sickle symbol, all the
fancy shops and malls etc. I am thinking about how nice this people
are and also the hygienic issues they have. I am thinking about the
mass travel, the business they are making with tourism and the lack
of independent, explorative travel. I am thinking of the innocent
questions like why they cannot have facebook and also some of the
restrictions and limitations that are imposed on them. I am thinking
of something i realized and it is that throughout all this time, i
have hardly seen anyone reading. I think i can count them with the
fingers of one hand and i would have a few left, and they were just
magazines. I am thinking of the large number of Chinese books and
docummentaries i want to see and hope to have time for. I am also
thinking of how many months or years i could spend traveling in
China. I am thinking of their ancient history and of their Communist
era. All this on a train that offers me wonderful moments like that
of a child pooping on the sink or another child peeing on the trays
and everyone throwing the rubish on the floor. This does not matter
any more, I am used to it and the views outside, those i am watching
through the window are simply spectacular...
No comments:
Post a Comment