Slow Days

Nanning

Nanning is not that big of a city to spend five days – but I had to stay there to get my visa for Vietnam – apparently, it takes four entire days to affix a sticker and a stamp to my passport.  It takes about two and a half days before I found that the most interesting place was the giant and strangely compelling Wal-Mart in the middle of the main thoroughfare.  There are only so many times I can eat during the course of the day, write, and watch old men play chess and old couples dance in the park.  Slow days had approached and were now staring at me resolutely.

During my days as a salaried employee, slow days consisted of net surfing, client calls and email inbox cleansing.  In Nanning, slow days were psychological sieges, where after prolonged exposure I wanted to pack my bags, head back to New York, and be entertained again.

I figured I should explore the Guanxi countryside.

Yangmei

Somewhere on the banks of the Zhuo River is the Rip van Winklish town of Yangmei. The perfectly preserved 17th century cobblestone streets and temples and homes lie in gentle decay, slowly easing itself down to the edge of the green murky waters.  On one of the slow days, I took the bus out to Yangmei and wandered the broken cobblestone streets among the clucking hens and crowing rust-green roosters – the town seems to be inhabited by (in this order of population): fowl, dogs, old women, oxen, farmers (men and women) and children.  Dogs, long-toothed grizzled gray-hairs and yippering puppies, scampered through wooden fences and stone walls and thatched roofs.  The oxen politely ignored me as I snapped photos of their lunchtimes. Old women cried out their wares – green bananas and fried fish and sad plastic toys. 

From morning until early afternoon, I walked past the dirt roads and into the bamboo forests, rounded stone bridges over bashful streams, up hills and down, eventually, to the edge of the waters, where the river has sustained Yangmei for hundreds of years.

The edge of the river is the heartbeat of the town – it is where farmers lead their oxen to gulp down their lunch before the afternoon's labor, where hunched women in their bright headdresses squat and scrub their laundry before flinging them on lines to dry, where cabbage and melons are cut and laid out on the bare rocks to dry and to be pickled, where children, after their school days are over, jump and skip and run down and round about in their games of tag, sometimes broken when one of them discovers a dragonfly or a bird to practice their slingshots' accuracy... Groups of women sit on the stone path winding its way down discussing their tales, and lone men smoke their cheap tobacco, staring at the fishing ships bobbing gently in the waters' flow.

Another slow day, another treasure.

Pandong

Far down the river, on one of the many moss covered mountains jutting out of the water, stands a particular limestone cliff wall where the ancient Zhang tribes some 2,400 years ago painted their stories in browns and orcre and blood.  The 'cave paintings' stretch hundreds of feet up-down the stone walls – images of men riding wolves and warriors brandishing spears and campfire dances and heroic figures create an alien mosaic in this bend of the river; under a gloomy greycast day, I stood on a river boat and thought 'how different this slow day is from my slow days a month ago!'

The easiest (although not shortest) way to reach Huat'ai Shan is from the small town of Pandong, about 26 kilometers up the river from Ningming, a city south of Nanning.  I reached Ningming by train in four hours, then, tired and not wanting to find my way around town, trusted an old lady to lead me from the station platform down to a dirt path underneath a highway bridge and onto her husband's river boat.   

Negotiating with Cantonese villagers in broken half English/Mandarin from a phrasebook/and scratchings on dirt is a must experience for any traveler through China.

The round river man, hands criss-crossed with lines and stained with grease and his face leathery and brown from a lifetime of exposure to the sun, lightened up considerably after I shared my dwindling supply of beef jerky and Pringles.  His boat was a wooden plank covered by fabric stretching across a curved roof made of interlocking bamboo strips.  It was no more than five feet wide and 30 feet long. If I moved quickly to one side, I feared it would have tipped over. We made our way up the Zhuo to Pandong in about two hours, gliding past villagers living at the edge of the waters and farmers in their toils, coaxing the hard land to produce worthy crops.  From Pandong, it was another hour by river to the Zhang stories painted into the cliff face.

As I stood on the boat and craned my neck up, I imagined some intrepid painters from ages past, hanging from crude ropes, scaling down the sheer vertical drop and dabing and swashing the primitive paint onto the impassive stony face.  What could have compelled them to do such a thing?

Slow days.

China departs amid the haze of slow days.  Onwards to Lang Son, the Vietnamese-Chinese border and my birthplace.

hey.. so i'm toying with the idea of maybe going to osaka in like march or something... if i do go, htink you'd be able to meet me up?

Posted by: jojo | January 17, 2006 at 08:25 PM

jojo - oh that's awesome. lemme check on the flights for around that time. if my buddy is in tokyo i think i can make it. later gator.

Posted by: j.fisher` | January 18, 2006 at 04:31 PM