-y- Disintegrating Landscapes
January 2008...Chongqing, Sichuan...Yangtze...Hubei...Hunan
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Click your teeth. Thats calcium. It dissolves ever so slowly, slightly acidic, when exposed to water. From your skull to your toebones, its the same stuff that seashells and chalk are from. Those ancient dead seashells and coral reefs are now China's major bedrock, forming some of the most spectacular terrain on Earth. The limestone lands that underly China are literally disintegrating as rainwater runs down it towards the ocean. The natural values of these places are, like so many other places, disintegrating as China develops its economy. Some of the world's absolutely iconic rock formations are in China, and what better goals for travels in China then to see the wondrous spires and needles and mountains? ... And what better time to go than in the absolute middle of winter...?
Cliches, certainly, and scarce perceptions, likely, fail when describing a country so vast and prominent. Suffice to say that while I had adequately planned my trip, I didn't have much of a mental image of what was in store.
My arrival in Chongqing was midnight and cold. I had an orange from Hong Kong, which was not allowed past the customs desk, so I stood well behind the line and munched it down. The two security guards laughed at me, the passport fellow stamped me in promptly, and that's how I entered China.
Chongqing Shi: It's a sprawling city, one of the world's largest, in Sichuan Province, somewhat in the middle of China. The air is bright white with smog and haze. Everywhere was cement, construction, and people. I had never been to a city so vast and incomprehensible, and while I recognized tourist zones and market alleys and pedestrian malls, I maintained a sense of disorientation. Like Taipei, it was stylistically familiar from Chinatown of San Francisco, but growing too fast too allow any rational conception of the place. I explored the place with Marie, a Quebecois, my guide and stabilizer in Chongqing. From the top of a market zone we could see over to the Yangzte, appearing slow and muddy past on its developed floodplain. Despite the disorientation and overstimulation, a plan began to form.
Rather than going westwards to the mountains deeper into Sichuan, I followed a ten year dream down the Yangtze River. Just downriver, above the recently flooded Three Gorges Dam, this superlative river slices through the dissolving rock just north of the plateau of Wulingyuan, or Zhangjiajie, where sandstones (river dirt) and quartz (tetrahedral silicon dioxide) and limestone (those calcium seashells) combine to form a fantasyland of spires and towers. Even more intriguing was the presence of a certain tree..the Metasequoia, or Dawn Redwood. Somewhere in this National Park was this most famous tree, and it would be a singular honour to see it in its native habitat.
The Metasequoia's story is well known to any fossil nerd. A few dozen million years ago, it covered the world; I have cracked open rocks in the Northwestern USA's Okanagan desert territory and seen the feathery leaves well preserved. But it is long gone from these regions, and though its cousins the Redwoods and Giant Sequoias live on in grand fashion in California...the Dawn Redwood was just a forgotten dream.... In 1948, though, it was found again, alive and well in a small area in China, and with great excitement was planted around the world as an ornamental tree. As a flagship species for relict plant species anywhere, the Dawn Redwood is an interesting tree worthy of any pilgrimage.
The fast boat down the Yangtze left before sunrise. Marie bundled me onto a bus, and somehow I managed to make it to the hydrofoil boat just before it left the docks. As we raced downstream towards Yichang city in Hubei Province, the sun rose and revealed the rock cliffs and sweeps of the Three Gorges. After years of reading about the construction of the world's largest dam, there we were zooming through the famous Gorges. Terraced farms crept to the waters edge between arrogant cliffs of limestone, and frequently strange eyes and spots on the walls attested to the caves riddling the landscape. Shipping traffic chugged upstream and made waves that splashed against the walls. For several hours I stood on a small side deck and watched the mist dance along the rocks. Somewhere underwater was the old streambed of the canyon. But despite the new lake, the rock will continue to dissolve for countless epochs, and the giant dam will dissolve, and the river will keep falling and keep carving.
Yichang was a lovely town, prosperous and shiny with its proximity to the dam and the pull of the Gorge's tourism. Amongst the department stores and cafes and clothing shops, a sense of optimism prevailed. The city spills down to the River and looks across to the steep hills. It was here I met Fan Zao Zao- "Morning morning", a Yichang native with dreams of foreign places, a deep love of China, and my much appreciated travel companion to Wulingyuan. At 28 years, she was to my eyes a clever young woman with years of adventures ahead. But she offered me an important cultural insight as she explained how, to her family and friends, she was actually an aging unmarried, eccentric woman. She described herself as 'thinking differently from all of her friends'... Living through China's dramatic cultural changes of the day, Zao Zao offers to me a clear reminder of how conducive my good fortune- gender and culture and family- has been to a non-traditional life path. She had traveled through China and was ready to scout around the world, a familiar sentiment. ZZ spoke English with, inexplicably, a Swedish accent, which she claims she learned from backpackers in hostels. My trip to Wulingyuan would have been inconceivably more difficult without her, and she offered countless insights into life for our generation in China.
Our train journey onto the plateau was crowded, lowest class fare and a great opportunity to observe. The thing that struck me first- and continues to astound me- was that the passengers on this train had a vastly different relationship with the floor. Litter, trash, spit, junk, snot, earwax, rubbish- all of it went onto the train floor, and periodically a worker would come and sweep away the giant mass of it. Different but undesirable. Even more tragic, vile, and uncondonable was the littering out the window. No matter the attempts at cultural relativity, this defouling of the landscape is absolutely wrong. China, visible through the train window, appeared to me to be a trashed place.
We arrived in Hunan Province to a discover everything iced over. I thought of my lovely warm sleeping bag and coat hidden away in a backpack in a dorm room in Hong Kong. The scale of the park entrance hinted at the numbers of tourists that came in warmer weather; we slid our way across the icy ground and hopped on a bus which brought us into the heart of the pinnacles.
Inside China's first National Park...a magic place! Limestone, quartz, sandstone sandwiched togther in countless vertical shapes. Let me count the ways of describing vertical rocks: acme, apex, apogee, climax, cone, crest, crown, culmination, eminence, needle, obelisk, peak, pyramid, spire, steeple, summit, tower, zenith! All of these were there, iced over and slowly crumbling, with trees twisted to their flanks. We arrived to the lowest level, where the river floods and the forest is lush and subtropical. Wulingyuan, astonishingly biodiverse, has in the realm of 850 species of trees, and pleasantly many of them were labelled with wooden signs. It was here I saw Gingko biloba...and Pinus roxburghii...and the list goes on and on. But no Metasequoia! It was in another section of the park...we'd have to take a bus there.
We purchased snowshoes- woven grass shoes to tie to our boots- and trundled our way up steep staircases past the boarded up tea-stalls towards the plateau. Countless plants, planes of rock with swallow's nests, strange vistas of a forest of cliffs, my first sight of monkeys in the wild! As we went higher and higher, it became icier and icier- the guard rails and leaves covered in perfect casts of ice. The landscape was hung about with cold dark clouds, but the collection of strange mountains matched every dream I had of China's wonderful landscapes.
On the plateau, roads led off to a small village where we had arranged a stay at a small farmland hotel. After trudging for an hour we found the place, nestled in a chilly valley and utterly covered in snow. Inside, a friendly family hosted us for two nights and set us up with a guide-their teenage daughter- for exploring the overlooks at the plateau edge. There were precisely four activities available to me: Watching TV in Mandarin with the family and ZZ while sitting around a blanket-covered kerosene heater, eating the simple but nourishing food, huddling upstairs under three blankets, or watching the snow come down. All were limited in their entertainment value.
Exploring the overlooks, we saw a huge natural bridge, countless pinnacles that vaguely resembled faces or animals, and an interesting area where countless padlocks were secured to the rails. After a bit of inquiry, I learned that lovers came here and left the locks as symbols of their undying love....after securing the padlocks I suspect the key is thrown over the cliff. In fine fashion, of course, a little shop nearby sells padlocks.
As the day progressed and the snow came down, it came to pass that the buses stopped running, and that we would have to walk out of the park in a different direction. More devastatingly, there was no way to get to the Metasequoia, far on the other side of the park. Back at our lodgings, I huddled under the stack of blankets and tried desperately to scheme some sort of pathway to see these trees, but to no avail. My entire connection to the human world around me was through Zao Zao's translation, and my ability to manifest any ideas was pretty minimal. As we tried to keep from freezing solid, watching surprisingly engaging and colourful TV shows, it became apparent that the Metasequoia would not be seen on this trip to Wulingyuan. Despite the surreal disintegrating landscape, and ZZ's excellent company, I had to fight the feeling of failure. But it wouldn't have been worth tracking down if it was going to be easy....
Our walk out was cold but safe, and our bus rides back to the train lines uneventfully arduous. ZZ and I said our farewells at the train station, and I headed south towards Kunming and sunny Yunnan Province. I did not know then what this winter's snow held in store for China. It was the first wave of what turn out to being China's worst snowstorm in living history, and it precipated a transport crunch of unprecedented proportions.
And, it is worth mentioning: unlike most other coniferous trees, the Metasequoia is deciduous. For all that energy we would have spent to see this famous tree...we would have found it a wooden skeleton, with not a single green leaf upon it!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/spire
http://images.google.co.in/images?q=three+gorges
http://www.metasequoia.org/
http://www.china.org.cn/english/kuaixun/74936.htm
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/hunan/zhangjiajie/
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-132086131.html
-Katwaria Sarai, Delhi
