Slow Boat in China: Xing Ping

This morning after breakfast, we took a forty minute bus ride to Xing Ping. We were going to rent bicycles and take a two hour bike tour there, but once again the weather decided not to cooperate. It was rainy and cold, so we opted for the quicker and dryer jaunt instead. On the ride there, I sat next to a math teacher from Beijing. While I was reviewing flash cards, she made it her personal quest to help me improve my Chinese. Every time I would look at a card and hesitate, she would start giving me examples and sentences to jog my memory. I guess she didn’t realize that you can’t jog something loose that wasn’t there from the start or if my Chinese is not good enough to recognize the simple characters on the cards, then the complex sentences that she kept throwing at me were not likely going to help too much. Oh well, I will take help in any form it comes.
When we pulled into Xing Ping, a big group of locals came running up to the bus when they saw that there were foreigners on it. They thought that they had a group of easy marks to finagle out of some money. They were in for a big disappointment though, because the owners of the hotel we are staying at arranged our tour for us, and they included a guide to meet us at the bus stop. Our guides shooed them away, and we were off to the dock for our ride up the Li River.
The ad that we read about the Li River tour stated that we would tour the river on bamboo rafts. Instead of the bamboo that we were expecting, our raft’s pontoons were made of six inch PVC pipes. They strapped ten of them together, overlaid half inch plywood for a floor, made a roof of iron frame covered by plastic tarp, and finally attached a small lawn mower engine to a combination rudder/propeller to power the contraption. The passengers berth consisted of three bamboo benches (so there was actually some bamboo involved) placed upon the deck underneath the tarp. Talk about “do it yourself”. There is an old saying about taking a slow boat to China. Well, it seems that we had found it.
As we meandered slowly up river, we were treated to a magnificent view. In an earlier post, I said that these hills looked like the work of a giant sculpture. As we drifted along, seeing the various rock formations, my mind kept flashing back to a scene from the sci-fi classic movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A famous scene in that movie shows Richard Dryfuss sitting at the dinner table with his family. His wife puts mashed potatoes in front of him, and he is suddenly seized by an urgent desire to sculpt. He piles the entire bowl of potatoes onto his plate. Then, using his fork, knife, and spoon as his sculpting tools, he carves a monolith similar to the ones that we have been seeing. When he realizes that his entire family is watching him intently, he stops, looks ups, and says poignantly “This means something!” So as we floated along on the Li River, in the midst of beauty so striking that the Chinese people have taken to naming each formation with descriptive names like Dragons Creeping out of a Cave, Lotus Petal Suspended Upside Down, and Nine Horses Mural Hill, I kept thinking to myself “This means something!”
When we reached the midpoint of our river journey, we disembark our surprisingly sturdy raft at a small island populated with various vendors. Amanda decided to eat some tiny river crabs that had been deep fried. There was a fisherman with his trained cormorants. He uses these bird to catch fish. He first ties a string around their throat so that they cannot swallow, and then they dive beneath the surface and catch fish in their mouths. Since they cannot swallow, once they are back on the boat, they have to disgorge the captured fish into the fisherman’s live well. This may seem unfair, but the interesting thing is that the cormorants keep count. If they don’t get to eat after catching seven fish, they stop fishing. So it is not as much slavery as indentured servitude. – Frank

Roy Neary: [contemplating the lump shape] This means something. This is important.
PS – I will post more about this excursion later.