After arriving to China and settling down a bit, I gave Mao Xinyu a phone call. Mao Xinyu and his wife Xu Ting are two Chinese friends from Hangzhou who I had met two years ago while travelling in China, and since then we had kept in touch through the Internet. “I am planning a two-week trip to Sichuan and Yunnan with some friends”, he said, “would you like to join us?” and naturally I did.

The plan was to start the trip from Chengdu (capital of Sichuan province), where we would rent a vehicle along with a driver (if you are surprised about the driver bit, you should re-read this post). We’d then work our way through some places in the mountain areas of Sichuan, visit a few places in Yunnan province and finally end our trip at Kunming (capital of Yunnan province) where they’d head off home.

The first bit went more or less as planned, but after getting to Yunnan we had gradually split up. As it had turned out, I did not go all the way to Kunming but am currently mid-way back towards Chengdu; Nonetheless the trip was quite fun.

These were my brave companions during this mini-trip:

From left to right: Ben Ben Niu, Xu Ting, Xing Hai Wan, Mao Xinyu.

All the Sichuan bit of the trip was in relatively high altitude (all of it higher than 3000m), with the “core” of the trip being Yading, a mountain nature reserve, ranging over 4500m. My experiences during the trip deserve several separate posts, so in this post I’ll mostly stick to posting a few pictures to try and give you the “feel” of the places I’ve been to:

Plus a panoramic sweep I did of one of these places, because only a 360-degree picture can do it justice:

And finally, to keep this post from being boring, an anecdote:
As you may have noted we had been six people (five of us plus the driver), comprised of four boys and two girls. Since much of the time we had stayed in lodges offering twin-bed rooms, the best arrangement was putting the two girls together in one room and split the four boys between two more rooms. Mao Xinyu and Xu Ting, a married couple, did not seem to mind this arrangement. After a while, at Yading park, we had slept (along with a few other travellers) in a ramshack cabin up in the mountains: On each side of the cabin was a long bed on which five travellers could lay side by side in sleeping bags. Next to me lay Mao Xinyu and Xuting, who had conveniently interlocked the zippers of their two identical sleeping bags into one big queen-sized sleeping bag. This was the first time in more than a week that they had slept in the same room and, as it seems, they had missed each other’s company very very much. They were relatively quiet; The bed, however, being basically one long and thin plank of wood, was an excellent conductor of vibrations. I did not get much sleep that night.

When I was asked, after returning from my first visit to China, what was my favorite place there - my answer was always Xi’an. When asked why, I couldn’t really answer. So this time, when visiting Xi’an for the second time, I tried to focus and define what was it in this city that made me like it so much. The Chinese are very proud of the city’s long history but frankly, being someone who has lived most of his life in Jerusalem, it does not really impress me. So what is it? What is that different quality?

At some point I realized that the difference is in the people on the street. At first it was hard to put my finger on it, they just seemed to “cute”. Gradually I realized that it’s all in their body language and facial expressions - they all seem friendly, benevolent, well-at-ease, as opposed to the closed and guarded expressions that are usually worn by people in cities worldwide. The Xi’anish personality is simply kinder than other places, and this is expressed not only in words but also in actions. For example, whenever I entered a store on the street to look for something and they did could not sell me that product/service, the clerks would always direct me to some place that can. If that place was not very close, they would also write the address for me on a piece of paper. In one paticular instance one of the store’s clerks actually decided to take me to the other place himself, which resulted in a half-hour-long wild goose chase in which we went from store to store to store, stood together in queues, until we finally managed to change cash into my cellular phone (not a small feat, as it turned out to be).

During my first visit to Xi’an, when I had been here with Yifat, we had made friends with a local girl named Hu Yuan, with whom I’ve later irregularly kept touch through the Internet. During that first time we had severe language-barrier problems (she doesn’t really speak English and my Chinese, at the time, was very bad) and the truth was that I’ve had my doubts about meeting her again; I was afraid that, now that we could more or 
less communicate, we would find that we actually have nothing in common. Fortunately my fears were unjustified, and we had spent together two wonderful days in Xi’an before I boarded my pre-booked train towards Hangzhou. The end of the second day was particularly endearing to me:

During the late-afternoon we were spending time in an area in the northern part of the city, not far from where she lives. As evening approached, she warned me that the bus lines from there towards where I stayed were soon going to stop running. I said no problem, I’ll just take a cab, and she said that take a cab would be expensive: over thirty yuan ($4-$5, 15-20 shekel). I really didn’t mind paying that money for spending a few more hours together (the following day I was leaving town), and after explaining it to her again she grudginly agreed. And so we hung out a few more hours, until it became late and was really time to go. But, as it seems, she had still not come to terms with the fact that I’ll be spending 30+ yuan just to get home from where she lives, and thus she had reached a decision. First we went to a storage yard, which was already closed for the night, where she begged the nightkeeper to let her in and fetch her electric-powered bicycle. This bike is slightly larger than a regular bicycle so a second person, me in this case, can barely sit behind the rider. And so we rode for about half an hour, until finally reaching a bus stop from which a bus line arriving near the place I stayed was still supposed to be running. We then waited together for the bus. And waited, and waited, until we came to the conclusion that no more buses will be arriving until the next day, and there was no choice left but taking a cab. She estimated the cab fare to be, from that point, over twenty yuan, and was still not pleased. And so she ordered me to stay where I am and wait for her, while she approached a taxi driver and haggled with him until he had agreed to take me (with no meter running so the money would go directly into his pocket) for ten yuan. All this effort on my behalf, while it was obvious that I’m not exactly short on cash, had left me deeply moved.

People have been complaining that this blog does not have enough pictures, so here’s a picture of Hu Yuan and me together:

Ten years ago Hu Jun, Lin’s cousin, was motorbiking through the border area between Hebei province and Inner Mongolia along with two of his friends. This area is a raised plateau (about 1900m high) of grasslands spotted by villages, and the population is partly Chinese and partly Mongolian. They had looked for a place to spend the night and ended up at a house belonging to a poor family which doubled as a guesthouse, where they were given food and a place to sleep. The next day, before leaving, they each handed the family 2 yuan (a modest sum) for their expenses, which the family refused to accept. Hu Jun and his friends thought that they had offended with too small an amount, but the family was stubbornly refusing the money and it was too late to try and give more. As they left the house and passed through the village center, they found all the villagers assembled and coming towards them. This scared them, as they had thought the villagers had gotten together to beat them up for not paying money for their stay, but as it turned out the villagers had simply assembled to “send them off” and wish them farewell.

Ten years later Hu Jun, Lin and I arrived to the same small village. Hu Jun had, since the first visit, been there several time and they had immediately recognized him and warmly welcomed us. During these last ten years local tourism has risen and the family had profited from it along with the rest, and had erected a new building housing several small guest rooms. Each room consists of a large (about king-sized) bed which is meant for four people, with not much room for anything else.

The beds themselves are quite unique (in my opinion): Each bed is hollow and actually serves as a sort of furnace. Firewood or coal is inserted through a hole in front and you sleep on top of all of the warm contraption, with the fire burning inside. Since the place is pretty far north and in a high altitude, a bed of this type is a necessity (or at least a luxary?) during winter. The fact that the room is small and four people sleep in the same bed also contributes to saving warmth.

After being given food - thrice as much as we could possibly eat - we asked if we could ride their horse. They gave us both their horse and a horse belonging to their neighbour, which we took to the wide open grasslands next to their village. There we just rode around until it became late (or in my case - until my muscle cramps were too painful). During Hun Jun’s past few visits they had never taken any money from him, and this time was no exception, so were had to literally force some money into their hands (apart from the expensive food I think that they had also paid their neighbour for use of her horse).

At some early point of our stay they had noticed that we had brought a camera. Since they have no camera of their own, they asked to have their picture taken with us and if we could later send them the picture (by mail, as they have no computers). We had also taken some pictures of our own, here are a few:

In one of the second-year Chinese courses in my university we’ve studied, throughout the year, a series of short texts - the first of which was called “dao le beijing” (”Arrived at Beijing”). These texts tell the story of an American student who came to Beijing to study Chinese at some university. Unfortunately, most of what he does in the texts is complain - starting from how he is cheated by food vendors, through how the dormitories don’t have air conditioning, all the way to how public toilets never have toilet paper.
To me, Beijing gives a very different first impression. Even memories from two years ago seem slightly off. People always seem to treat foreigners fairly (usually it seems as if they’re just shy of us), most places do have air conditioning, and public toilets are abundant - much more common than what I would expect to find back in Israel (franky, in Israel, when I’m in a public place such as downtown I simply don’t expect to find a toilet). I’m also amazed at the size of the city. I have a map of Beijing, and simple bus rides from point A to point B take way longer than they should (even taking traffic into account), probably because the map scale is much smaller than the scale I am used to. Other than that, public transport is pretty convenient (as usual in Asia).
I am getting the best hospitality I could ask from both Lin and her family. As fitting of Chinese, this hospitality includes stuffing me full of food - dumplings (jiaozi) yesterday evening when I arrived and peking duck (kaoya) today at lunch. Lin herself is vegetarian, a fact that her Chinese family has never quite gotten used to, so they seem overjoyed that finally someone is eating meat (”Lin’s friends”, as she to call it) and drinking beer with them. I’ve already been invited to two more family events later this week…
Unfortunately I don’t have a camera yet. I plan to buy one here in the near future, so you’d have to wait for a while for pictures.