A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Zhang Jia Jie, Hunan Province, China , continued

Just a couple more observations about my trip to Zhang Jia Jie today.

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During my night train to Zhang Jia Jie we (the red-hatted tour group) were located in the "hard seat" section, pretty much the lowest possible class of train carriage. Far less civilized than "hard sleeper", which I would normally take, and even that isn't all that civilized. On the wall of our hard seat car there were three signs, thoughtfully translated into English for me, the only foreigner on the train: No Smoking; No Spitting on the Floor; and Do not Throw Garbage out the Window. During the first ten minutes of our journey all three were violated just in my little six-man subsection of the car. Maybe those signs are just suggestions.

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One alarming aspect of walking around Zhang Jia Jie village was the popularity of live food. Apparently, when Chinese city dwellers go on vacation they like to choose their dinner on the hoof, or on the paw as it were. So each little restaurant features bowls, tanks and cages full of chickens, eels, snakes, river mussels, pheasants, huge frogs, fish, rabbits and some animal that looks like a very large guinea pig. I considered a midnight liberation raid, but was too tired and warm to get up. Several bunnies will meet their maker due to my laziness and lack of adventure.

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One of the walks that Shao Ying (my guide) and I did at ZJJ was called the Golden Whip Brook Fit Tourism Line. The entrance to the 1 1/2 hour long valley path features the following introduction:

Breathing the Oxygen purifies the lung.
Rubbing feet makes you fit.
The bridge offers greatest delight.
Walking on the stone stakes improves health.
Deep valley provides peculiarities.

They later recommend that you take 15 breaths. Why 15? No idea. The "rubbing feet" is a section in which they recommend you take off your shoes adn walk on a 100 yard stretch of the path which was rounded roks embedded into concrete. It didn't actually look that comfortable. Besides, it was cold out.

The delightful bridge was one of those hanging wood and chain contraptions that sways as you walk on it. There are big signs in Chinese that warn you not to try to shake the bridge. Naturally, when we went by we saw two groups of seven or so people facing eachoether tug-of-war style and attempting to swing the others off the bridge. I therefore took the low road, made of solid stone, and thus cannot attest to its general level of delightfulness.

The "stone stakes" were really concrete stakes, maybe 4 inches wide and a foot high and placed all over the path so you could walk from stake to stake. Shao Ying tells me that it's good training for martial arts, and it did look fun as he did it. To me, however, it looked like a surefire recipe for a broken ankle.

As for the peculiarities, I'm not quite sure what they were getting at there. Possibly they are referring to the rock formations to which they have attached fanciful names, like "Scholar reading ancient book" or "Splitting a mountain to save mother". Surely they couldn't mean herds of Chinese tour groups, since there's nothing peculiar about them in this neck of the woods. Regardless of their intention, I plan to embrace the concept of peculiarity as a giver of good health and fitness. It will be much more manageable for me than exercise and eating right.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 10:25 PM