Welcome to Wulingyuan National Park

OK -- since this'll be the first shot, sequentially, that anyone will see from the time Steve and I were together (even though it's the last of very many shots that I've been posting gradually for more than a week now), I'll do a bit of introducing. My wonderful older brother Steve came and spent nearly three weeks visiting me here in China. For two of them, I had to work so he stayed in Beijing and did the usual tourist things during the day: Forbidden City, Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, Temple of Earth, etc. He found Beijing endlessly fascinating and was, I think, really quite blown away by the Forbidden City. (Ming Emperor Yongle, whose idea I believe it was, would probably be quite pleased to know it can still impress, 600 years later.)

During his middle week, I was able to get free from work, so we did some traveling in China. The many shots that follow are the highlights of our travels: first Wulingyuan National Park in Northwest Hunan, where we ended our trip; after that shots of our wonderful cruise through the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, which took up the middle of our trip; and after that shots of Chongqing city and of the ancient Buddhist cave art at Dazu, a day trip outside Chongqing (formerly known as Chunking).

Wulingyuan blew my mind, and I think Steve's -- once you find trails that are away from the hordes of tourists (it's very popular with Chinese tourists, and also attracts lots and lots of Korean group tours), you can walk for hours through absolutely blessed landscapes of mountains, rocks, trees and magnificent vistas. Our first day was on the main trails, so though we saw the beauty we were distracted by the crowds. Our second day, as you'll see, we found remarkable beauty and the peace and quiet to really enjoy some nice long chats and enjoy each other's company. Thanks for visiting, Steve!

Second Day Trail

These two shots show the beginning and the end of the trail we spent our second morning on. The large gate is the entrance to a long, winding trail that ascends gradually through thickly-wooded hillsides. There are no spectacular views for the first few miles on this trail, so it seems to attract fewer people: the payoff comes later. The other shot, with small wooden houses at the top of a hill by a stream, represents the end of an extremely steep descent on the other side of the rise. We saw no one on this whole train, and we both felt it was as beautiful and peaceful as we imagine the descent into Rivendell should be. :-) Resting by the pool at the bottom of that trail, I felt I was in one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.

Views of Wulingyuan

The shot of what looks like a building over a ravine is in fact a shot of a covered bridge. Pretty cool covered bridge, huh? Steve and I are at the top of the highest point during our day one hike, with a really amazing backdrop...

Wulingyuan - Day Two Trails

More of the beautiful scenery from our day two hikes.

Wulingyuan - Day Two Trails

Since we got a real early start, and it was a very clear day, we had really beautiful effects of sun slanting through the trees and past the peaks into the valleys. For the whole morning of this hike, we saw virtually no one -- a needed anodyne to the huge crowds on the more popular tourist paths of day one.

Wulingyuan - Day Two Trails

With one of day one: Steve looking up in awe from the bottom, at the end of our day one trip.

Autumn Color at Wulingyuan

It's mostly evergreens at Wulingyuan, but we did have the occasional patch of bright fall color. Days, when we were in the sun, were warm and beautiful; evenings and nights it really cooled off a LOT, and we were darn cold since there was no heat in the room. Thanks goodness for lots of blankets, and long johns. :-)

Views of Wulingyuan

More views from our hikes. Fourth time I'm trying to post this batch...this does get tiresome on occasion, when I post them then lose them... :-)

Wulingyuan - Day One Trails

The porter carrying things seemed to be lugging trash down to a depot halfway down the mountain. We saw an awful lot of guys lugging extremely heavy-looking loads up and down the moutain. And seriously, these are steeeeeeeep and hard trails. It was kind of amazing.

Views of Wulingyuan - Day One Trails

The day one/day two identifications are mostly for Steve and me -- as I said, I'll be cherishing the memories of this beautiful place for a while. :-)

Steve at Wulingyuan

No, I'm not going crazy with shots of Steve: each of these captures an aspect of the park that I didn't get elsewhere, since I was going gaga over the scenery. One shows Steve reclining, on our way down from the day one hike, in one of the palanquins that were used to carry folks around the park. Naturally, we never used one of them - this one was sitting by the side of the trail -- but we did see lots of folks being hustled up and down the extremely steep trails in these. On day two we even saw a guy being carried along a perfectly flat trail by the stream bed in the valley -- we figure he was making the point that he could afford to be carried. Ah well, to each his own.

The close-up of Steve's face is really all about the monkey in the background. Steve was concerned I wouldn't see any monkeys, since he'd seen a big group hanging out on day one, when I was ahead of him on the trail. I wasn't too worried since -- having seen how they behaved at the park outside Nanning -- I knew they were likely to congregate near potential easy food sources. Sure enough, coming in from our day two hike there were several hanging near the trail trying to wangle food out of passersby. The guy had been looking directly at us, until my flash scared him off a bit.

Shortly after the kodak moment of Steve surrounded by kids near the top of our day one trail, the kids started hitting us up for money. I was rather disappointed, since my experiences so far in China have been with kids who are usually happy and eager to interact with white folks without remuneration, just for the interest and the experience. Guess the market economy is coming to Wulingyuan!

Views of the Town, Cable Cars

There are cable cars in a few places around this big park; these cars are ferrying folks up to the highest peak in the park. We didn't take the car, partly because we wanted to enjoy the walk and partly because we weren't sure how l ong our cash would hold up. (ATMs in town weren't working for either of us...)

The other two shots involve the town we stayed in: one is shot from the town at sunset, when the sun still illuminated the high peaks but the town was in shadow already. The other is shot from high up on the mountain, looking down at the road into the park, with the town behind.

Steve on the Train, Minority Dress @ Wulingyuan

The shot of Steve snuggled into his hard-sleeper berth on the train wasn't going to go on the blog. I was going to just send it to him. But since his time in the train station after we debarked from the boat, and his time on the train itself, was almost Steve's only interaction with what I've come to think of the real China that I've come to know and love (loud, crowded, smelly, friendly, nosy, obnoxious, generous, efficient and many other adjectives all at once), I thought I'd put this up as a commemoration. The differences in how he and I reacted, for example, to the crowded train station told me a lot about how far removed I have become from the easy, "pre-packaged" life of America. Where Steve saw stress and horribleness, I just chalked up another experience and enjoyed chatting with all the folks crowding into our personal space...

The minority dress is Wulingyuan's tackiness. Up at the highest point in the park, people crowd around to get pictures taken with these girls in "traditional minority" outfits. As the Chinese are always happy to point out, China has about 130 million residents who are not of the Han ethnicity; they are divided among dozens of not more than a hundred officially recognized ethnic minorities. Some of the biggest get their own autonomous region, such as the Zhuang, of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and the Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongols and Hui of Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia respectively. The smaller groups often get autonomous counties within a province, or such things. It seems to me that more and more, "traditional minority culture" is becoming in the mainland much as it was in Taiwan when I was there -- a tourist curiosity, rather as Native American dress and culture became for White Americans during the 50s and 60s and on. These girls were chewing gum and chatting away with each other between shots with various tourists. Note the different shoes, and the haute traditional blue jeans beneath the dress of one of the ladies.

Cruising the Three Gorges

Cruising the Three Gorges
Originally uploaded by paulbrockmann.

Cruising the Three Gorges

Cruising the Three Gorges
Originally uploaded by paulbrockmann.

Cruising the Three Gorges

Cruising the Three Gorges
Originally uploaded by paulbrockmann.

Cruising the Three Gorges

The highlight of Steve's trip -- at least for me -- was the week we spent traveling together in central China. This trip was built around a cruise on the Yangtze, through the Three Gorges. Like many, I had this idea that the new dam being built will completely inundate the gorges, as I believe the Glen Canyon dam more or less did to Glen Canyon...which many say was once as beautiful as the Grand Canyon, and which will be again quite soon, geolgically speaking. :-) In any case, as you can tell from my narrative about the Wulingyuan photos (that will appear ahead of this posting, just as soon as I get around to posting them...), in the end Wulingyuan was for me even more beautiful and enjoyable than the gorges.

But that in no way means the gorges were a disappointment. The cruise was fun and relaxing, and the Gorges are beautiful. The damn, by the time water has risen to its final level, will have deprvied the massive cliffs of roughly 125 meters or so of their original height. But as you'll see, this still leaves mighty impressive cliffs. The water has risen about 70% of the way to its final height, and I think you'll have to agree these are very beautiful gorges all the same. I hope you'll enjoy the shots, and Steve, I hope you feel I've represented the trip fairly! I just wish I'd thought to get e-mail addresses from some of our Australian friends, or from that lovely English police woman. Oh well. Maybe they'll read the blog. :-)

Cruising the Three Gorges

Cruising the Three Gorges
Originally uploaded by paulbrockmann.

Cruising the Three Gorges

Cruising the Three Gorges
Originally uploaded by paulbrockmann.

Cruising the Three Gorges

Cruising the Three Gorges
Originally uploaded by paulbrockmann.

Cruising the Three Gorges

No, these are actually not the same shot twice. Believe it or not, I've pared down the many photos I shot to about 10% to post on here, but I want to post enough to give you sense of the almost otherworldly beauty of these gorges, especially shrouded in fog and mist as they were when we saw them. As our tour book said, you get an idea where many of the inspirations for Chinese paintings come from. :-)