Sunday 28 June 2015

Day 244: Village visit

There's a McDonald's in the little square at the end of Old Street, so we went there for breakfast this morning. In China, breakfast is the one meal of the day where we struggle a little to find something to eat – the locals tend to opt for something more akin to a lunchtime meal for their breakfast and the girls generally aren't keen, so we usually just have some crackers and jam or, if it's available, a good old McDonald's breakfast.

There was a very light rain falling as we walked up to the main road and got a taxi to the bus station. Our plan today was to visit one of the 'ancient villages' located not too far from Huangshan. We had opted not to visit either of the two most popular villages – which are both World Heritage-listed – as their popularity can mean that they get very busy. There are also entrance fees to all of the villages and those for the two main ones are pretty steep (£10 per person). At the bus station, we asked about getting the bus to Shexian, the larger town/city attached to the village. The woman at the counter held up a typed sheet and pointed to a line of text telling us to go to gate 6. When we got there, our bus was ready and waiting, so we climbed aboard – Zoe getting into the front seat beside the driver. He offered the girls some little orange fruits and showed them how to peel them.


The bus trip took about an hour and when we arrived at Shexian bus station we hired a little three-wheeler cab to take us to Yuliang village. At the ticket counter we got a shock, as the woman wanted us to pay 100 yuan – as much as it cost to go into the expensive villages. She didn't speak English, so getting to the bottom of the sudden price hike was tricky and eventually we gave up and walked away to figure out what to do next. While we thought about it, we watched a big group of young schoolchildren busting some moves in a car park across the road. 





When we went back to the ticket counter we managed to sort the problem out – the woman was trying to sell us a tour of the village. The tickets to just go in and wander around were actually only 30 yuan – as we had thought – and we were soon on our way, tickets in hand. The village is located beside a river, which has a 1,000-year-old stone weir built on it. The main cobbled street runs parallel to the river for about a kilometre and a half and the inhabitants often leave their front doors open, offering lovely tableaux of village life through the doorways. Many of the houses have bird cages attached to the wall beside the doorway, each containing a medium-sized brown bird with blue rings around its eyes and a beautiful melodious voice. We were pretty much the only tourists in the village – a small Chinese tour group passed us as we entered and that it was it - and I think we were as fascinating to the village's inhabitants as they were to us.














We slowly wandered to one end of the village and then slowly wandered back again. When we made it back to the beginning , we walked down some stairs to the river and then up the stone path beside the weir. Looking down, I noticed that there were lots of skinny little fish in the pools of water that had formed in the cracks between the stones. We then walked down onto the stony beach on the bank of the river, where we discovered that there were loads of perfect skimming stones, so we spent a while launching them into the river.




Eventually, we walked back out to the main road and headed towards the bus station, hoping that we would be able to catch a local bus back there. We hadn't been walking for long when we spotted an unusual sight - a women pushing a her baby along the road in a little trolley with a seat and table in it. A little while later, we came to a supermarket, where we bought a few snacks. Back when I was growing up in Sydney, we would often go in to Chinatown to have a big yum cha lunch. As kids, we were always slightly horrified by the fact that people were ordering – and eating - chicken's feet. Now that we're actually in China, we've discovered just how popular chicken's feet are with the locals. In this particular supermarket we came across an extensive selection of shrink-wrapped chicken's feet snacks (we resisted the urge to buy any ourselves). 




Continuing on, we found a bus stop and stopped to wait for a bus. Looking up, I spotted our second unusual sight – a whole leg of ham hanging with the washing on someone's balcony. While we waited, one of the little three-wheeler pedicabs drove past, so we hailed it, but unfortunately, we couldn't get the driver to understand where we wanted to go and after a while he gave up and drove away. Not long after, the bus we were waiting for arrived and we hopped on. It took us down into the heart of the city and then started heading out the other side. When we reached the big river that passes through the city, the driver turned around and told us that we should get off. He pointed across a bridge over the river, and although we followed his directions, we couldn't find the bus station. After we had been walking for quite some time, Kate went into a shop and asked some guys for directions. They were extremely helpful and took us out to the main road and flagged down a bus for us.


When we finally got back to the bus station in Huangshan, we got a taxi back to the hotel. It was early afternoon by now, so we decided to see what was on the other side of the bridge outside the hotel. We found a fruit shop, where we bought some lychees and mangoes, a bakery, where we got some little pastries, and a 'general store', where we bought a little fan and some plastic ponchos.

While I was waiting for the girls to choose which fan to buy, I checked out another bridge over another river and came across an extensive tourist development, and when the others came out, we went in and checked it out. The 'marina' has numerous restaurants, an amazing boutique hotel and some really sweet little shops, as well as some extensive fish ponds with bridges over them. There were even sprayers to mimic the mists on Mount Huangshan. Many of the buildings were clearly very old. We came across one that was obviously being developed as a museum. The front door was open and there was no-one around, so we eventually worked up the courage to go in and have a look around. It was remarkably well preserved, full of gorgeous wood panelling, but in areas the roof was open, so the floor was covered in moss, and swallows were nesting inside, creating huge mounds of guano beneath.









After doing a big circuit, we made out way back into town, stopping first to buy some more of the orange fruit the girls had been given in the bus. It wasn't quite time for dinner yet, so we looked around for somewhere we could have a beer and play some cards. Everywhere we found was either too expensive or too charmless, but we finally stumbled across a little place selling little souvenir nick-nacks and... beer. They had some tables out front, so we bought a couple of cans and sat and played a bit of gin rummy. The locals and the Chinese tourists obviously found this sort of behaviour fascinating as they would shout out to us, point, smile, laugh as they passed, or just walk over and stand right beside the table and stare. Beers downed, we walked up to our restaurant for dinner. It was raining when we left and we hurried back to hotel, arriving in time to watch the rain turn into a proper downpour.


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