Things you will always see on a trip to rural China: A snake slithering inside your village hotel. A snake’s head snapped in half in front of a crowd after it was found inside the village hotel. Girls going up hiking trails wearing pencil skirts and platform sandals while carrying comically large handbags. A truck filled to the brim with pot-bellied pigs.
This past weekend, I escaped Shanghai to go white-water rafting in Baiji (close to 黄山 The Yellow Mountain) on a bus of 50 people, through a trip with Dragon Adventures. I don’t usually plug travel companies or businesses in particular, but these guys were great and the tour was incredibly well-organized. Jerry – our 5’2″ wife-beater-wearing tour guide – was on top of his game but also a little crazy. Jerry was the first to pop open the beer coolers, the first to cliff dive off a 20-foot waterfall, and the first to light an irresponsible amount of village fireworks at night. It was Jerry who brought three full coolers of beer just for the bus ride to Baiji, and for that, Jerry was our favorite.
We left Shanghai around 7:30 on Friday evening, backpacks and the coolers of Qingdao in tow. Jerry (did I mention his guy was incredible?) saw the tiny bluetooth speaker we brought on the bus and pulled out a foot-high subwoofer from the back to blast Justin (both Bieber + Timberlake) for the next five and a half hours. Needless to say, we didn’t make many other friends on that bus.
When I used to take long bus rides in middle school and high school, the best part was always the rest stops. Rest stops were great because no matter where you were, there would always be a place that sold greasy pizza slices the size of my head, a place to get oversized candy bars, and (if one was lucky) a Chipotle. In China, the rest stops are decisively the worst part of travel. Stepping into the bathroom with the four lonely squat toilet stalls for the entire rest stop complex, my promises of burritos and guacamole slowly faded away, replaced by the stench of stinky chou tofu and the said squat toilets (at some point the two become indistinguishable). And above that, it wasn’t even the lack of a decent coffee shop that was most unnerving, but the emptiness of the stop. The whole place felt abandoned, as if we were the only bus to come there in weeks. Perhaps we were.
The next morning, we set out for the Baiji Grand Canyon (now, where could they have gotten that name?) to go water-rafting. I had never gone rafting before and this being China, I had no idea what to expect. The first surprise was that they made us wear life vests. The second that the rapids were one of the best parts of the trip (minus the sunburn) The third that our boat didn’t flood even though by the end of the course it was more than two-thirds full of water.
The (not-so) farm-to-table meals
After the rapids came our first encounter with the food of Anhui province. I usually love grimy local food – jiachang cai 家常菜- as it it called. I love the oily vegetables and the soy sauce vinegar sauce doused over every dish. I love two kuai bowls of rice and the grumpy old women who throw them down on the table. The food in Baiji was not home-style, it was the most unsettling China-stomach experience I had since I came to Beijing in the winter of 2014. Everything we ate tasted muted, grey, faded and brown. We had sheep tripe, turtle and snake soup (more to come on the snake), chicken feet, duck beak, celery stalks in raw bacon. As appetizing as it all sounds, it was hard to get down. It’s hard to say bad things about the food, because despite us being in a small village two hours up a mountain from the main city, each time we had a meal, the guest house ayi filled the table with a dozen plates, half of them untouchable. But we still ate them, and because of it, my stomach is weeping.
Cultural differences:
What does “wife-beater-wearing” mean? Over here the lager Stella has earned itself the name “wife beater” because – supposedly – whatever is in it is supposed to make certain types aggressive.
Also you rode buses to school in America so far that they’d stop and let you all off?
The big Chinese news over here (aside from our new Prime Minister snubbing you as you were about to build us a nuclear power station) is your new super bus that drives over cars. Have you seen it? Have you been on it? It’s supposed to have been tested in Hebei province.
Wifebeaters are a type tanktop, usually white and worn really casually, but also the more I say the name, the more wrong it seems to say it, since the implications are quite awful. here is a (stereotypically american) picture of one! https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/72016025/wifebeater.jpg
In terms of busses, usually we only had rest stops for long trips to New York or Boston growing up, the kind where you take large coach busses and stop every 30 minutes because someone inevitably needs to pee. It’s great, because highways back home are designed with long drives in mind, so there are always pit stops every few exits.
I have’t seen one of the busses yet, but i remember being really excited by them in the news! my only concern is that these will never be more than novelty (like the Shanghai Maglev) because the chinese engineering is quite inefficient at times..
That just looks like a vest to me, but it is something casual I imagine Stanley would have worn in A Streetcar Named Desire. Was he a wife beater? Not sure.
Good luck in finding one of those buses. Up top it looked all science fiction as it’s just a big moving viewing platform. I did think that accidents looked inevitable, not much room underneath, but then it looks like it’s on rails so maybe everything will be fine as long as nothing bigger than a van is in sight.
Oh absolutely. I’ve seen Stanley in a wife beater in all the performances of Streetcar that I’ve seen. It’s a very blue collar thing. Or a ‘show off your muscles’ thing.
Definitely agree that accidents are inevitable. There’s always going to be a car that’ll try to chance it. All of our bus drivers were insane when we drove to Baiji and back
Oh yeah the great Chinese rest stops, witnessed at such places sights I will never be able to forget.
So far it seems I have been lucky when going to rural areas in China as there were always several dishes I could eat without trouble but then again they never offered any snake, raw bacon or similar :p
I really have a feeling that they gave us whatever food they had leftover and didn’t want to eat, because some things like the breakfast baozi were actually well made, but I don’t know if I want to believe that..
Girls wearing ridiculous outfits for climbing was something I noticed, so many heels and short skirts!
I couldn’t believe it! Our hike up took almost twice the time because we had to wait for the poor girl in flip flops to catch up to the group..
I remember seeing a girl wearing his boyfriend’s shoes that were obviously far too big for her while he had to walk down barefoot holding her heels!
Ha! And here I was thinking ‘wife-beaters’ were a particularly Aussie piece of fashion. Very, very funny!
Hahah yeah, they’re a major rural China staple here, but my favorite is the ‘beijing bikini’ which is that look, but with the shirt raised to expose the stomach areas.
Beijing bikini? Ha, I LOVE IT (the name, not the look.) Belated response, sorry!
Not a problem! 🙂