A Weekend in Longnan: Part Two

Down and In

            After hiking up to the peak and enjoying the view from the monastery, we wanted to head back down the mountain part way for the path to our campground. The walk down was quick, and once again we skipped the monasteries off to the side in hope of getting to the campground before sunset.

            Back at the trailhead, we could see a long bus in the distance, and we ran. Matt feared it might be the last one down. Walking would take hours. To our luck, someone on the bus noticed the two foreigners running and the bus stopped a dozen meters further down the road. We got on and went to the few remaining seats in the back of the bus, sat down, and the bus headed out. Three minutes later, it stopped.

            We didn’t know the cause of it, but a long stretch of cars stretched out beyond our gaze. Down the road, we could see a group of spectators forming, but we couldn’t see what they were forming around. All the signs of disaster up ahead. My head immediately jumped into plan A, B, and C scenarios. Our plan A was to take this bus down to the next trailhead and camp out at our original spot. Matt humored me and we discuss some alternatives depending on how long we were stuck here.

If the bus was stuck for more than a couple hours, he felt it would be too difficult to follow the unfamiliar and poorly marked trail in the dark. If that was the case, we would go back to the mountain we hiked the day before and camp out on its peak. The trail was clear and we could do it in the dark with headlamps. Alternatively, if we were stuck here indefinitely, we’d get off the bus and head back up to the monastery and hope they would let us camp out in the courtyard.

            Once agreeing on are options we set it aside and enjoyed some R&R with our new friends. Most of the other passengers were middle-aged women. Playfully, they kept calling us “the two handsome young men” and a few nudged one woman to eventually sit down between us. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello.”

“Where are you from?”

“America.”

“Oh.”

She leaned forward and resumed chatting with her friends. The standard first question is usually followed with some sort of compliment that I can speak Chinese (based on the two basic sentences I have said so far) and then asking if I’m a student or a teacher. Her curiosity didn’t even make it this far.

            Not much later the traffic and then the bus started moving again, rolling down the hills and rocking around the corners. At every other switchback, I was overlooking the mountain forests, checkered farmlands, and the pale city that reached out to a row of distant peaks that framed the shifting clouds and sky.

Matt was watching closely outside the bus looking for the trailhead. Coming around the corner he saw it and yelled out “tíng chē” (停车), or stop the car. All the faces in front of us turned in unison; pure befuddlement. We wanted to get off where? But, the bus stopped and we jumped off. Alone, we watched the bus disappear around another switchback and we started down the trail.

            As we set off we quickly reached an agreement to immediately start looking for places

that we could set up camp, and it didn’t take long. After a steep hike up a narrow path, we came out onto a wide rocky ledge with an open view down the mountain, the city, and the setting sun.

            Evaluating the land, we picked a spot that was less flat but more even, free from jagged rocks and thorny plants. A few minutes later, the tent was set up freestanding-style. We used my poles to support the base and pull the corners taught and then threw our bags in to prevent it from sliding around. It was about then that the sun started kissing the distant peaks. Rather quickly, as sunsets so often seem to go, the peaks formed silhouettes in front of the falling sun, and the long streaking clouds took on a glowing hue like balloons full of dim LEDs. To watch the sunset, Matt and I moved to an outcropping made from a large boulder that likely fell during the 2008 earthquake.

           Once the sun set beyond the mountains, we used the little remaining light to gather as many twigs, sticks, and branches. Matt cleared the surface of a ground, which was more of an enormous rock, and made a closed circle of head-size rocks. I gathered another collection of rocks to pile into semi-comfortable seats. We gathered some dried leaves and mounded them in the middle with thin sticks forming a pyramid above them. What really helped, though, was the large piece of cardboard left by a previous traveler that Matt found. A small spark and the fire was going.

              

           Shortly after the fire was set, we heard a loud noise coming from the woods that caught both of our full attention. Slowly the loud noise shifted into the familiar noise of a human. Slowly still, the human emerged from the woods, an old lady with deeply wrinkled skin and a young smile. She looked at our tent and our fire and then at us. I initiated the conversation:

            “Hello, where are you going?”

            “Up the mountain to the monastery.” I furrowed my brows and turned my ears slightly toward her trying to pull meaning from her deep accent.

            “Oh, do you live there?” The monastery she was going to was our destination for the next morning.

            “Yes. Are you going to stay out here? It will be too cold at night!”

            “Oh, no, it’s okay. We can sleep in our tent.”

            “But it gets really cold at night. Come sleep at the monastery. We have a kang you can sleep on.” A kāng (炕) is a bed that you can put hot coals under to keep you warm through the night.

            “Oh, thank you so much. We have a fire here; it can keep us warm.”

            “No, it is too cold at night, please come.

            I changed the topic, “have you eaten?”

            “Yes. And you?”

            “We are just about to eat. Tomorrow morning, we will go up to the monastery.”

            “Oh, great. It is too cold at night, please come to the monastery.”

            “Thank you.”

            “I’ll go now, then. Bye.”

            “Bye.”

Her insistence is a common feature of offers in China. It reminds me of the offer/decline-three-times rule in the mid-west. But, it is taken to another level in China with people vocally and playfully (though it may not look it to an outsider) fighting over the bill or a small gift.