A Weekend in Longnan: Part One

            I woke up in a bed not my own; one that stretched beyond the reach of both my arms and legs. After rolling left to right to stretch my tense and aching IT bands, I made the journey to the edge of the bed and finally to my day’s clothes. I slipped on a lightweight, breathable, gray Patagonia shirt and a pair of zip-off khaki pants. The scent of yesterday’s sweat kissed my nose. I pulled the belt firmly and folded the waistline beneath it. I stepped on his scale, waited for the reading, and stepped off again. 55 kg (121 lbs). I’ve lost almost 10 pounds since coming to China.

            The bed, the room, and the scale all belonged to Matt, another Peace Corps Volunteer serving in one of the smallest PC China sites: Longnan (陇南) in southern Gansu. With a population of 2.5 million and a sparse 250 people per square mile, it’s hidden in a mountain valley and inaccessible by both plane and train. The bus ride was a constant uphill journey. Despite being a two-lane road with frequent blind turns, the long bus never hesitated to blast the horn and swerve past a slow moving tractor or an overloaded truck.

            Seated comfortably in the back of the bus with my 65-liter Gregory backpack squishing my toes, I watched as the skyline slowly vanished beyond growing mountain peaks. I traced their long legs that reached out only to be blasted clear for a modern road. Their smoothed out backs sat like stairs as a hardened workforce dug deep for every inch of arable land. Corn and wheat filled most plots. The corn stalks were still short while the wheat had turned golden. A close eye found partly harvested patches of wheat and hunch-backed women swinging long rods with a plank of some sort, perhaps leather or bamboo. It swung from the end of the rod-like on a swivel, bobbing with an odd rhythm and coming down with youthful force, separating the chaff from the grain.

            Walking into the living room, I could see these mountain tops in the distance, the shadows already grown long. Matt laid curled up on his couch without enough room to stretch his knees beyond his navel. He insisted that was how he always slept. I still doubt this and appreciate his generosity. His bed was the most comfortable I have slept in in a long time.

            I walked past him to the bathroom for my morning routine and came back out to find him sitting up and getting ready for our next adventure. We had planned a two day, one night backpacking trip through the woods of the region’s tallest mountain. We sat together while I drank his Tieguanyin tea (铁观音茶) and he drank his instant Nescafe´ coffee.

            By 3:00 PM we were packed and saddled, with full bellies and legs still sore from yesterday’s mountain trek. His feet were still bloody and scared from the marathon he ran across the Great Wall of China two weeks prior. It was like this that we set off to the wrong bus station. And like this that we got to the right bus station. And like this that a small child spent a dozen minutes staring, eyes wide, at Matt’s foreignness. But after a dozen and one minutes of smiles, faces, and accented “nǐ hǎo”’s from Matt, the little boy graciously licked his peach and handed it over to Matt. The kid’s mom and the audience of passengers all laughed from deep within their gut. It was the sort of laugh that manners say we should hold back but a child’s innocent sincerity can draw out nonetheless. The boy’s mom had been laughing like this for the past dozen and one minutes. Matt slid the peach into his bag and said thank you with the slow annunciation any language teacher must perfect.

            40 minutes later we got off the bus and headed off for the trailhead. Matt’s students told us the entrance fee was 10 yuan, so we were quite angry when the ticket seller demanded 50, per person. He sat in a small room off to the side of the gate. Dressed casually in a T-shirt and shorts, nothing looked official about him. A young man, whom I assume was his son, jumped up at the sight of two foreigners, and we were only made stranger by the 65 liter Gregory backpack I was wearing and the two black poles I was carrying. A sight quite different than the standard businessmen who hike in formal wear and the young women in one-inch platform shoes. I asked again if he said 50 yuan. He did. I asserted we knew the ticket price was 10 yuan. He smiled a smile I’ve too often encountered. I looked at Matt, “I think were getting scammed. This must be the foreigner price.” So we just walked away and went right on through the gate. They stared from behind us and said nothing.

            Beyond the gate, we walked along the road a short while before coming upon dirt-path switchbacks. Ecstatic, I kept telling Matt how happy I was to finally be in nature. With two hands on my poles, I had to use my breath to blow the mosquitoes off my face. But the pine trees that shot up like pyramids and the forest of toothpick-like bamboo around them kept the sun off our face and rattled like chimes as the cool mountain breeze swept past us. The sky above us was a vast sky-blue, with clouds as puffy as clouds. It was all idyllic.

            A short 20 minutes in we took a break at the first arch we passed. All that remained of a bench were concrete legs with rusted rebar as bones. We sat down on the dirt and I took out my bag of Soylent—a complete meal in powdered form that my Mom had shipped to me from the States just a couple weeks prior (along with See’s chocolate, a new pair of shoes, American flag stickers, and other goodies). I particularly enjoyed Matt’s first experience with soylent. He took a few sips of it and looked up at me, “tastes like earth.”

A view of the Courtyard. No photos of the altars allowed.

            Shortly after our break, the path switched from dirt road to concrete stairs. We passed through one Buddhist temple after the next and skipped the ones that were detours off to our flanks. Each temple was a series of rooms, side by side. Each room had one door facing the courtyard. Inside each room was a series of Buddhist statues, exquisitely painted and surrounding with walls, all painted with Chinese Buddhist imagery in simple pastel colors; deities floated by on clouds, Monks sat surrounded with attentive students, and dragon tails twisted about in the margins.

            In one of my favorite rooms, two dragon’s heads, carved in wood, one red and one blue dominated the room. These two wheelbarrow sized heads breathed their grimace on any visitor’s face the moment they crossed the door’s threshold. They sat in stark contrast to the calm face of Shakyamuni Buddha in the background, that only appeared from the shadows after I took a couple of steps into the room. The dragon’s eyes were glass bulbs, painted brown with dust. Their necks and tails whipped back, wrapped around the roof’s support beams, and disappeared from sight behind the other statues. I smiled.

Photo Credit: Matt Christenson

            Turning around and exiting through the same threshold, I stepped over the foot-tall beam, right foot first as I had been instructed by a student back at site. Back on the path that was now mostly stone and stairs, Matt and I walked in line. At every other turn, we passed another group of curious locals or fellow tourists. Some asked for pictures, most asked where we were from, and everyone smiled. As a sign of friendship, most of the men offered cigarettes. While we both just turned them down with a polite “I don’t smoke”, one man who was tending to an altar was particularly insistent. Eventually, Matt accepted his offer but we turned down his invite to sit down for tea.

            The remaining trail kept the peak in the foreground. At every bend and curve, we could make out with increasing clarity the monastery sitting on the cliff’s edge, a sheer drop on three sides. Coming around the bend before the last we sat down to enjoy its immensity. Hard to capture in a picture, it dominated the expansive view below it.

   

1: The final bend before the Monastery. 2: View of the uppermost Monastery. Photo credit: Matt Christenson 3: Back view of the uppermost monastery. Photo credit: Matt Christenson

      

1: The eaves on the monastery were particularly elegant. 2: Some tools and materials rest against the rear wall. 3: View down the mountain from the top. Photo credit: Matt Christenson