Weichang River
For the October week of holidays we left behind the partially deserted confines of Beijing to drive up to Weichang Scenic Area, about 450km north. A few observations along the way:
Bad News
After just a week of the intensive Mandarin course, my understanding of fragments of Chinese are improving, so I decided to practice by listening to the news on the radio as we sped along the highway. The hourly bulletin is filled with grisly warnings of numerous traffic accidents involving buses full of people ploughing into rivers and barriers. Decide to listen to some soothing music instead.
Bath Time
Eventually we stopped at a remote petrol station for a break. I get out of the car whilst wearing sunglasses and am blissfully ignored by all those around us. The phone rings and I need to remove my sunglasses to locate the Answer button in the bright sunlight. Having to speak loudly (in English) to make myself heard over the traffic, I look up to find myself now the centre of attention. Putting the sunglasses back on doesn’t stop this, so I head inside to use the facilities.
It’s dark inside, so I raise the sunglasses again. This being a small and poorly maintained service area, there are two types of Chinese toilets. The row of slots in the ground is on one side, a few occupied by squatting men with trousers round their ankles. There are no wall-mounted urinals, just a tin bath with a circle of men standing round. I pull the sunglasses back down, so it’s once again too dark to see, and carry on.
Hua Hua goes wang wang: Mandarin speaking dogs apparently say 'wang' instead of 'woof' (1)
Glowing
Our little party was four people and a puppy. There’s something quite soothing about having a small dog nestled on my lap for 6 hours, until it decided to lick my entire arm from fingertip to shoulder, then crawl inside my t-shirt.
The owner tells me this is probably because she loves salt, which I guess is an underhand way of being called sweaty.
Short Cut
Thanks to the long, straight roads, we can see a huge tailback ahead. After sitting in the traffic jam for a while a farmer’s family appears from a small road to the side, which we’re told could be used to circumvent the traffic jam. I’m wary as the road is little more than a dirt track, and there’s obviously not enough space for two cars to pass should we meet anyone. After the large 4×4 in front heads down there our driver peels off confidently, followed by a few other hopefuls.
We happily skirted along the edge of the traffic jam, until the road narrowed and we could see people coming from the other direction. The workers in the cornfields took a short break to watch the spectacle, as all the entitled city types in their huge 4x4s refuse to give way to each other. After a few minutes of them shouting and gesturing, I decamped and sat on a wall with the dog in my lap. In contrast to Beijing it’s a beautifully clear sky, and with the sun beating down I rapidly heat up until the dog starts licking me again.
The shortcut wasn't a complete success...
Weichang
We stopped for the first night in the small town of Weichang. There’s not much there today, but it does have two footnotes in history. The first is that the surrounding grasslands were the hunting grounds of Emperor Kangxi, during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and the second is that it was almost permanently billeted by soldiers, who would live and work with the local villagers.
This second fact came to light after we visited the best rated restaurant in town. Unlike say the Riverforest Café and its lush greenery, or Planet Hollywood and its movie memorabilia, the theme of this restaurant was an occupied village. Private dining rooms were decorated as village huts and staff wandered about in khaki military uniforms, which I supposed made us diners the peasants. The restaurant was packed and the food uniformly excellent with a song and dance show to round off the evening.
I’m glad they chose a relatively recent timeframe – being occupied by Genghis Khan’s Mongol forces would have been all fun and games until the after-dinner raping and pillaging started.
Breakfast
Our 100rmb a night hotel had a colourful selection of disco lights embedded in the ceiling, but didn’t include breakfast. Walking along the main street of the town there didn’t appear to be any small family-style bun shops, and my friends wanted more than a Jian Bing (the breakfast of champions), so we headed into a gaudy red and white chain restaurant for breakfast.
The place was packed and we soon became the centre of attention as a group of school children huddled behind a barrier, leaving the top of their heads poking over just far enough to peer at the lone foreigner eating. Noticeably they referred to me as wàiguórén (foreign person) rather than the potentially more pejorative lǎowài (outsider) that is more prevalent in Beijing.
The food was not great as most of the menu had sold out, and the portions very small, but we chatted happily with the kids. During one laughing session another foreign guy wandered in. He looked at the menu with a smile, then spotted us and a scowl crossed his face. I looked across at him with a grin still on my face and he came back with a classic Laowai death stare, which set the others off laughing again. He then ignored us and continued to pretend he was the only foreign person to discover the backwaters of China (whilst eating breakfast at a KFC of all places).
Full of fried chicken and fizzy orange (not the breakfast of champions) we set off for the remainder of the drive to Weichang Scenic Area.
(1) Barking in different languages all use different words. I’m intrigued as to how the Swedish came up with ‘bjäbb bjäbb’, or the Koreans with ‘meong meong’.
