The light at the end of the tunnel

With only a few more classes to teach and some exams to mark... the end of our first semester of teaching in China is nearly over. It's been a strenuous journey, and appropriately we found ourselves on a strenuous journey of another kind this weekend. 

Wexing Lake runs alongside Cucumber Hill, which has been a good spot for previous bike ride and hikes. At one end of the lake there's a campus of the local university, but we have been curious about what could be at the other end. Google Earth showed a dirt road running all the way along the lake shore, then ending strangely in the middle of nowhere. Yesterday we set out on our bikes to find what really happened on the ground. 

Unsurprisingly we passed by back-to-back farms and the stares of confused locals and their chickens. However, a surprise waited for us at the end of the rutted and muddy road. A temple and local's fishing spot turned out to be the destination.

Wexing Lake's local Buddha

The temple at the end of the road

Saturday afternoon fishing.

Optimistic that we might be able to complete a loop around the lake, we pushed on (sometimes literally) through the mud and made it to a steep switchback climb. The locals were gathered at a restaurant at the start of the climb and enjoyed watching us winch our way up the slippery hill. The ride was turning out to be pretty tough and the damp, chilly weather was not helping our spirits too much. After some perseverance on the intermittently cobbled and then muddy bog of a road we made it back to the top of the ridge and were lucky to catch the end of the "lunchtime rush" at a little eating place we'd been to before. We were grateful that the owner not only recognized who we were (not hard around here) so we didn't have to fumble through explaining we didn't want any fried intestines to eat, but cooked us some tasty lunch before closing up shop.

Our regular eatery on Cucumber Hill

Back at home we've been getting our preparations done for five weeks of travelling in southern China, Vietnam, and Thailand. We leave on the night-train to Kunming on Saturday night and will getting a much needed break from teaching life. Hopefully we'll be able to post a few updates from the road!

Not Chinese New Year in China

After a lengthy stretch of lots of work and not much play combined with fairly nasty weather and general lack of joy here in Yongchuan, we received the remedy. The format of this was the classic 3-day weekend enhanced by incinerating a few prehistoric crustacean's remains. The lengths we'll go to for some sunshine and mountains eh?


Tiger Leaping Gorge - New Year 2011/2012 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Christmas day pictures of mist

I've been slack in putting anything on here lately, but it's Christmas day... so my gift to the internet is a few photos of some of our local activities over the last few weeks.

A muddy run up Tea Mountain in the mist may be cold, but it's one option we have to escape town

 The sun appeared, last Sunday (appropriately) so we rode up "Cucumber Hill" and went for a hike. These are some of the locals we met.

 We found this nice spot in the forest on Cucumber Hill

 ...more from Cucumber Hill

 On our way home we visited what we thought was a temple just outside of town. It turned out to be a grave yard rather than a temple, and there were these nice old trees.

Yesterday we rode out to Da An, a small town just outside Yonngchuan. We found some nice country roads, ate some noodles, and confused the locals.

Yongchuan's reliable weather. You want mist? We've got it.

 I don't know what this place used to be, but we rode past it.

Buddha's Grotto

Fortunately this isn't where Chinese children go to sit on Buddha's knee at the local shopping mall and receive seasonal presents... though perhaps there's money to be made with such a scheme. The Beishan rock carvings near the town of Dazu are an example of Grotto Art which received UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1999 and now have the appropriate tour buses, gift shops, and overpriced noodles fitting of their significance. Not wanting to fit the mold of tourists too well we decided to ride to Dazu from Yongchuan for the weekend and camp in a field.

The ride over on Saturday was very pleasant, and we found some bemused noodle-house owners in sleepy Dazu to sell us lunch before heading up the hill to the carvings. We paid our entrance fees, dodged some hawkers, found a nice lady who let us leave our bike panniers under the desk in the guide's office, and off we went. The carvings were really impressive, I thought, and most of the preservation was more sympathetic than we're used to seeing. There we no LED lights or musical tree stumps to be seen anywhere. The main significance of the carvings is Buddhist, which I find a constant struggle to understand with the enormous number of significant figures and names. Aside from the numerous Buddhas of all sizes there were some scenes I hadn't seen in temples before which I really liked.

A happy-looking Ox from a rural scene

Bemused by Buddhas

The wheel of life, but who's driving?

Then there was a grotto showing what happens to you in various "hells". It was amazing... there were cauldrons of skulls being stirred by animal-headed beasts, someone tied upside down to a pole being sawed in half, and this painful looking procedure:

I think I would like to avoid hell if this is what's involved

 And of course there was the essential comedy sign:

Perhaps only funny if you're British

Then we had to find a place to sleep for the night. In China just about every square-inch of soil is used for growing something. When the city plants ornamental gardens, the locals squeeze a few vegetables between the flowers. If there's construction going on (which there always is), the mounds of excavated dirt quickly become someone's allotment. This is an excellent thing, but it does make it tricky to find a spot for sketchy camping. On our way up to the carvings we had passed by a small temple and I noticed some steps leading up to the top of the cliff above. I though it would be worth a look. Up above the road was... yes, someone's vegetable patch, but with enough space for our small tent.

Right above that cave, is where we slept

After a good long sleep we clambered back down the slippery steps, just in time to alarm a local farmer enjoying his first cigarette of the day. Unable to explain why we had just slept in the mud next to his cabbages, we probably left him with a very strange impression of "foreigners". Fair enough I suppose...

Things to make and do - Volume 2

This weekend I wanted to stay at "home" in Yongchuan and get some things done, so I did. It's been a satisfying couple of days. I spent some of yesterday wandering around the old town, getting lost, finding interesting things, buying a nice shirt, confusing the locals by asking the price of welding equipment and grinding wheels, and then finding myself again with the help of the GPS. Getting the street-maps to work on the GPS has been a great thing, maybe almost worth the endless hours of monkeying around that it took me to do it.

Something I finally got around to doing this week was finding a fee internet radio app for my iPod. I have been excited by the thought of using my iPod as a radio since I got the wireless to work in our apartment in another monkeying-around epic. That episode was resolved by installing an older version of the firmware on our router. Why does it happen that the new version of something doesn't work when the old one does? Anyway, I downloaded the TuneIn App which has been working really well. I can listen to my favorite BBC radio stations, CBC, plus hundreds of other stations... all for free... and working just fine here in China. Excellent.

That's me wearing my new shirt. Oh, and my iPod playing BBC Radio in China.

Another long-standing "thing to do" was to get some real High Dynamic Range photo software on my computer and figure out how to make my new camera take bracketed pictures and save the files in RAW format. My old camera could do this with some help from the CHDK software, but I never really got along with it. The new camera, which I am slowly learning to love, can do it all by itself... so I'm giving it another go. I've set one of the custom settings to give me what I need for HDR at the twist of a knob. So far, so good. I too this quick photo on my way home from teh supermarket (where I was buying supplies for today's making project). It's a bit wobbly as I was just resting the camera on a brick with no tripod or whatnot, but I think it shows there is potential for some fun stuff here. I used Luminance for this one, which is a bit of a weird piece of software... but free and has lots of options for playing with the images. I also have Photonaut which I I will have a go with when I have some more photos to play with. 

I think there is potential for some fun with this HDR business

 And finally, I needed a waterproof case for my camera. The G12 is more lumpy than my old G9 (which is a shame) and it won't fit in my old Pelican case. Pelican cases are not an easy thing to find here, so I came up with my own solution involving a lunchbox and some foam floor tiles. It appears that a Canon G12 is about the same size as a small lunch (perhaps macaroni cheese) as it fits very nicely in a box I found. With a couple of pieces of foam to stop it rattling around I have a pretty decent (and hopefully waterproof) case. What a great bodge, even if I do say so myself.

Pixels for lunch

Also, some exciting news. Our short film about our Yukon River SUP expedition will be shown at the Cumberland Mountain Film Festival on January 12, 2012. If you happen to be in Cumberland on that Thursday night, go and support the Cumberland Trails! 

Fun sandwich

Weekends away are a fun thing, but it's taken us a while to figure out how to make them happen here in China. The complications of living in an out-of-the-way place and relying on public transport in a country where we can't communicate very easily present a new level of complication. However, someone did once said that nothing worth having comes for free. I think it was me.

After school on Friday we burst out and overloaded the school car with adventure-hungry teachers, followed by a taxi (to the displeasure of the drivers) and got to the Yongchuan bus station far too early for the bus to Chengdu. Better than being late (as we were to later find out). We got to the Traffic Inn Hostel in time to make it out for noodles, a pint, and a slightly strange encounter with a chap from Manchester who was partying his way around the world. I already liked Chengdu as it features a river that doesn't smell like poo... a rare commodity in China.

Hao, Mao.

Saturday was spent touristing (is that a word?) around town, visiting temples, eating pizza, and stumbling across a few fine things along the way. We enjoyed some overpriced beer in the "Revolutionary Box Bar", but felt the ambiance was worth it.  We met our teacher travelling companions in the evening for a poke around the Jinli shopping area. I failed to buy anything that wasn't edible, but got my ears cleaned and massaged in a traditional Chinese style... which was actually quite pleasant.

Fine goods for sale in Chengdu... apparently

Most important thing to us in Chengdu was to concoct a plan to meet the Chendu Pandas Hash House Harriers (CPH3) for their bi-weekly hash run. On Sunday morning we decided to squeeze in a trip to the Panda Breeding and Research Center, which I really enjoyed... and I don't usually like zoos. The pandas didn't seem in the least bothered by the hoards of tourists and generally lay around luxuriating and eating bamboo. One of them was trying to climb a tree bottom-first, which was either some kind of game, panda exercise routine, or perhaps a result of a confused mind due to captive panda inbreeding.... but he seemed to be enjoying it regardless. The baby pandas crawled around after their human surrogate mother wearing her blue apron and face mask, crowding around here feet to be fed. It's weird how pandas can recognize a giant Smurf as their mother... but I guess all that's important when you're that age is who's got the milk.

The hash run was tremendous. Despite having lived in places where I've seen the flour markings of a hash from time-to-time most of my life, I've never been on one. Unusually, the week we came the run was held quite far out of the city, among some farmer's fields. We ran through the bushes and along the dikes between the muddy ponds and quickly got the hand of yelling instructions and searching for the flour marks. During the post-run reverie we realized that there was very little chance of us using any of our planned ways to get home. All the direct buses were long-gone and our backup plan of getting the train to Chongqing would get us there too late to get the bus to Yongchuan. Some kindly fellow hashers gave us a ride to Chengdu East train station and we ran over to the ticket counter. No space on any trains to Chongqing. Whilst this solved the problem of arriving too late in Chongqing, it did leave us stuck in Chengdu with work the next morning. Some of our trademark note-passing, gesticulating, and three words of Chinese got us night-train tickets to Yongchuan... arriving at 4.30am on Monday. Not really what we intended, but we would at least make it to work for 8am.

 

Chengdu train station looked like the kind of place the space shuttle might launch from.... all white polished things and bright lights. And fake palm trees. When our train boarding was announced in the space-station, the fancy glass-encased escalator took us down to a rickety looking old train full of nocturnal budget Chinese travelers. We loaded up and got what sleep we could as the train creaked along. Thankfully, we made it back to the apartment at 5am, got a little sleep and made it to school on-time. We'll be back in Chengdu again I have no doubt.

Tea Mountainbiking

When we left Vancouver back in August, I left behind all three of my mountain bikes. Due to packing in as much mountain biking as possible before we left, all three bikes are now languishing in some state of disrepair at the back of a five-by-ten storage locker and buried under the accumulation of everything else Lina and I own. However, out of sight is not out of mind as far as bikes and my mind go. I have been spending some of my spare moments plotting my faithful bike's return-to-form when I unearth them and the tools to fix them. After thinking, rethinking, forgetting, and re-inventing my plan for fettling all three bikes into their most appropriate format I have ended up just about where I started with a plan to concoct a heavy bike, a light bike, and a bike that is somewhere in-between. Ground-breaking stuff, no? It keeps me amused anyway.

On the subject of bikes, we got out before the rain today to ride the trail we found on Tea Mountain a few weeks ago, and try some more bouncy bamboo slacklining. Both were very successful, though riding a bike with fairly slick tires on damp clay was quite alarming on the steeper parts. The dirt-road climb up to the ridge turns out to be all rideable... and pretty long and strenuous, so that should keep us honest.

Unusual mountain biking

Confused locals

A place we found along the way

Did someone used to live here?

Shoes-on slacklining due to spiky bamboo stumps - tricky