So anyways we arrived in Longyan at 4:15am (which made Hobbes a very grumpy boy) and (as we had promised Aimes' Chinese relos) stayed within the station until the sun came up. Unfortunately they don't seem to heat rural stations and we almost froze solid in the process.
Roundhouses
What we hadn't counted on was how soft we had become in the comfortable, polite, modern environs of Hong Kong and Macau and with the hospitality of Aimes' family in Guangdong. It came as a little bit of a shock to have to try and explain ourselves in very poor Mandarin, order meals by pointing and to have people staring at us again. This was particularly evident when it came to buying our onward train tickets, as it became apparent that our preferred route wasn't available and had to sort out an alternative in our broken Chinese.
We decided that the bus station was the most likely place to find a hotel, so we managed to find the right bus and sure enough after some pointing at the phrase book we had a room - the most expensive one we have stayed in throughout China surprisingly.
From the outside looking in
The next challenge was changing money, the bank we found obviously doesn't handle too many foreign currency transactions as when we presented our Hong Kong dollars many nervous looks and giggles were returned by the staff. However, after more giggling, several phonecalls, photocopies of our passports, more phonecalls and looking up several books we finally received our RMB. The Hong Kong notes were even passed amongst all the staff who didn't seem to have seen them before. We felt like telling them that it was currency from land which is supposedly part of China, but of course our Chinese doesn't stretch quite that far. At least we had an official security escort throughout the process as the bank's guard was very interested in the proceedings and had his head stuck between ours the whole time watching what was happening (he seemed like a really nice guy, based on our smiles and gestures anyways).
Inside a Roundhouse
So it was now just down to locating the houses. After not seeing much action on the driver front in Longyan, we decided to head down to Yongding where our friend Patrick (the pom) had drivers find him wanting to take him out to see the houses. The bus trip down was yet another extended trip with 1 hour being stretched out to 2, as yet another road was reduced to one lane for both directions with trucks and buses chronically jammed for several kilometres.
Arriving in Yongding we were greeted by several people eager to drive us out to the houses ('tulou, tulou') and they even had maps with some English so we could work out which ones we wanted to see. After some negotiation and promises that it would take half an hour to get there we were off. One and a half hours later we made it to the houses...
Roundhouse living
Arriving made the hassles getting to the roundhouses worthwhile, the incredibly perfect circular shape and scale really becomes evident when you enter the houses and feel the walls wrapping around you. While not the biggest of the roundhouses, those which we saw were still massive standing 4 stories and housing 600 people (the biggest ones house over 1000 people). The oldest of the group was 600 years old and still going strong!
The search is over...
The houses were built as protection against bandits and wild animals and are as a result quite plain from the outside, but inside there is a plethora of activity with people going about their daily activities and livestock being raised within each of the mini-communities. Two of the houses we saw were still lived in and it was amazing to see people living as they had done for hundreds of years, with ducks, chickens and H1N5 germs flitting about everywhere.
A cold morning train trip
After spending too short a time looking around the houses (as always seems to be the case), we managed to retrace our steps back to Longyan before too long and before it became too cold! Longyan somehow seemed to be transformed by night as a very plain, standard Chinese rural town came alive with street markets and people everywhere. We even found the most luxurious internet cafe ever, very large with every computer having a big soft lounge (pity the connection wasn't the best).
Unfortunately an all too common sight!
Next morning it was back on a train, nice and early at 6am, headed for Xiamen where we change trains and head straight to Shanghai. So you could consider Xiamen our second and final stop in Fujian province, if only for a grand total of 3 hours. The most notable thing about Xiamen was very clear blue skies, something which is a bit of a novelty after so long in China!
Next stop Shanghai, our last destination in China - where have 3 months gone?
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