China - Nine-Stockade Gully

Songpan & Chengdu


People around here don't seem to have heard of 9-hour sleeps. I'd cycled for 10 hours the previous day, and really needed to sleep more than I did. I couldn't blame the locals for being early risers, so my knackered rage was left without a target.

There was a big thwack on the outside of the tent, and some of the night's snow slid off. My host called out, but no reply. In came a pretty, gorgeously enrobed girl of about 15; after clocking the dirty foreigner, she began to sort out the mess of the night before.

Pretty Zangzu girl in gorgeous robes. The tent behind her head is woven from yakhair.

On Voice of America radio, a military historian talked of how Hitler had had fifty thousand deserters shot in the last days of the Second World War. Apparently even the families of deserters were punished; Hitler was desperate, because he knew that if he lost the war, it'd be curtains for him and his estimable buddies. The Voice of America generally isn't too bad, but it can have an excessively Yankee slant. Every day, they announce "The Voice of America represents the opinions of a wide range of people and organisations. Here is the view of the United States government on . . . ".

Just before I left, it emerged that the two floorsleepers had made off with my walkman. The tent's owner was mortified, and kept asking me how much it cost, so that he could pay me back. I refused to tell him - it was a cheap piece of machinery, but it'd probably put a huge dent in his finances. I said to tell his friends to leave it in the Yellow Dragon hotel in Songpan, where I'd be staying in a few days' time.

I set off into the drizzle, my wheels splashing filthy roadslop all over me. Man, did I need mudguards! I found out later that I'd reached Sichuan province at the start of the rainy season - I looked like the Swamp Thing after a few hours on those dirt roads. For many of the locals, the road seemed an irrelevance; as often as not, their tents were pitched on the opposite side of the river.

Just after midday, I reached tarmacked road and a hotel. I had a minor stomach bug, and everything I owned was drowning in muck and grime; so I decided to take a half-day to sort myself out. The hotel was so new there were splinters in the doorframe and cement on the bathroom tiles. I had a couple of hours' kip, and woke up drowsy and lazy. I spent a lot of that evening sitting in bed, decorating my dogstick with runes and swirls. The stick made me feel safe, so I'd grown quite fond of it. Relating to inanimate objects - weird stuff.

I got up and went to a restaurant to stuff myself with greens; uncharacteristic I know, but I needed an antidote to my dull camping fare of biscuits, packaged spicy vegetables, and long-life chicken sausages. Besides, I was putting my body through quite a lot, so I needed to take good care of it.

Leaving next morning, I saw ten snow leopard skins on sale in the small town where I'd been staying.

One of many snow leopard pelts being sold in this touristy area

Ten. Small town. Without even looking. That's serious stuff - snow leopards are not only very beautiful, but also extremely rare. Because of their unusual habitat, their lifestyle is unique among felines.

Over the next few days, I passed through two more tourist towns (Jiu Zhai Gou and Songpan), where I saw about another 25 pelts. I asked a few of the stallholders how much a snow leopard pelt cost - I got prices ranging from 8,000 kuai (about US$1,000) to 3,500 kuai. I asked one trader whether it was legal to sell the skins, and he said yes (there was some amusement when he told his friends what I'd asked). I asked him if he knew the animals were very rare; he said yes, but was obviously unconcerned by the fact. To him, the animals were a resource.

Clearly, the Chinese government is doing little or nothing to crack down on this trade. Unless action is taken, all that's left of the snow leopard will be fireside rugs in the living rooms of pampered urbanites. This merits some serious campaigning by us in the West.

A robust, cheerful character up near the pass over into Jiu Zhai Gou valley

After a few hours' gradual uphill cycle, I reached a pass at about 3500 metres. The next 55km was all downhill. I was nearing Jiu Zhai Gou, an exceptionally beautiful, heavily touristed area. There was some jaw-dropping scenery as I cycled down - the valley got deeper and deeper, and the flanking snowpeaks towered further and further above it.

The road descended about 1700 metres, down to bright green terraces and warm air thick with the smell of vegetation. Towards evening, I had to don my sunglasses to stop the insects from thwacking into my eyes.

Since I got onto the tarmacked road, the people have changed. These are still Zangzu people; and just as in the remote areas, some of them are nice, and some a pain in the butt. But there's none of the thoughtless generosity that I received before. I'm sure it's partly the tourism - as soon as I got into the tourist-saturated town of Jiu Zhai Gou, all kinds of ****** were trying to make a buck out of me. And if you live in a town, maybe you can't be hospitable towards every passerby. I don't know. Sichuan may have gained some things from modernisation; but it's also losing some very warm, human traditions.

In Jiu Zhai Gou town, I ate stewed eels in garlic; not bad, though even my Spanish uncle Toni would have balked at the amount of garlic - literally about a quarter of the meal. I'm eating a huge amount of food these days - if I'm in a restaurant, I always wolf down a couple of extra bowls of rice after I've finished the main meal. Managed to bargain my way into a fairly posh, half-empty hotel; had my first and only bath in China (there'd previously been several false dawns, in rooms with a bath but no plug). There was even bubblebath to foam up the tub. On the telly was 90 minutes of AC Milan versus Juventus, live. A 2-2 draw - Zidane played a blinder. Grade A home comforts - it was a good night.

Next day, I cycled into Jiu Zhai Gou National Park. This was obviously a place of rare beauty - lush forest half-obscured by drifting clouds; squirrels fleeing into roadbank holes; and a series of turquoise lakes probed by shadowy drowned trees.

Wide waterfall in Jiu Zhai Gou

But the weather killed it for me - it rained all day, the lakes were missing their usual sparkle, and I couldn't see beyond the wooded hillsides to the snowpeaks above. At lunch, I decided to pack it in.

I cycled back up the deep valley, back south towards Songpan. I passed a small boy, who sang to himself as he watched a tiny waterfall spill into his upturned umbrella.

Slept in a tent with a large, close, wrestling and slagging family. The mother was breastfeeding a two-year-old. Soon after relinquishing her breast, the toddler was given a lit cigarette by his father. An unusual overlap of sucking activities. The kid puffed away, lapping up the attention and laughter from the adults. A brother gave him another cigarette and a lighter, and the nipper scorched half the cigarette before succeeding, inhaling proudly and finishing the smoke. The father was a Philip Morris wet dream - after his ill-advised gift to the babby, he went on to ply all his 7-10-year-olds with smokes. His ignorance had real depth.

Next day, on and up. The mountaintops were long, stacked wedges of rock, twisted and half-buried in snow. Eagles cruised slowly at clifftops, gently buoyed by rising air.

I stopped in a town to have a smoke, and to recharge my batteries with some Coke. The Han (ethnic majority Chinese) shopkeeper invited me backstage for some tea. He gave me a weird egg, sort of crumbed outside the shell. I cracked it open. The white of the egg was still transparent, but somehow thick, like uncooked jelly. The yolk was still dark red and liquid, but gloopier than usual. Sounds (and looked) promising - but it tasted ok. I sat on a comfy leather chair, sipping my tea and listening to the click of the abacus from out front.

Cycling was getting easier; I didn't know it, but for the next few days, I was to follow a paved road all the way downriver to the big city of Chengdu. I reached Songpan that evening, and looked for the Yellow Dragon hotel, where those two guys might have left my walkman. I went to two Yellow Dragon hotels before finding the right one - anyway, the guys hadn't left my walkman in. So I'd been ripped off. I wasn't too bothered - if my crummy walkman was the only casualty of my two months in the Chinese outback, that was an acceptable return.

In Songpan that night, my room was invaded by loud muzak from the street below. Large speakers were playing sax versions of classics such as 'Moon River' and 'My Heart Will Go On' (Theme from 'Titanic'). You know, I still think Celine Dion's version is the definitive one. Definitive of Hell. My earplugs did the trick pretty well, so I slept ok.

Praise be - more goodly tourist tucker: for breakfast, I had eggs, fruit salad with honey, and 8 slices of toast. I can eat Chinese all day, but I'm ultra-conservative when it comes to breakfast - given a choice, I'll eat mushrooms eggs and toast every day of the week.

Cycling along the river the next day, I got a sense of what an old place the world is. This area has been the scene of many earthquakes - millions of small tremors, and a fair few colossal earth-ripplers. But how many of these earth movements must it have taken to produce the landscape of northern Sichuan? Mountain-sized chunks have been torn from their surroundings and rotated 90 degrees; fractured plains twist skywards. Frustratingly, the weather was too miserable for me to photograph the impressive, tree-flooded crags.

"How far to the next sleeping place?" I asked that evening. "3 kilometres", I was told. "This'll be easy", I thought. I cycled on another kilometre. "How far?" I asked. "7 kilometres". This was kind of annoying; but I already knew how vague the Chinese sense of distance often is. I cycled on another k. "How far?", I asked. "10 kilometres". This wasn't helping - I might as well make up my own distances. It was getting dark, and I was in one of those 100% land use zones. (Around here, even the verge of the road is cultivated; and some of the fields are so steep they must be tilled by geckoes). I dragged my bike up a village path, and found a thin patch of rocky streambank to pitch the tent on. It was fairly dark, so I made a pretty lame job of it. As luck would have it, Zeus decided to pull the plug on his bath that night. It rained nonstop, and the inside of the tent got quite leaky. But I still managed to sleep pretty well - the village posse didn't turn up until about 8:30.

It rained all day; my right shoe squelched as I walked up the restaurant steps for lunch. Inside, they gave me a basin of hot water; I just lay my hands in it, soaking up the warmth. On my left hand, the tip of my little finger was quite numb, and had been for some days. Maybe I'd done the nerves some damage on the cold ride downhill from some mountain pass. What Ronald McDonald would call 'regular frostbite' - there's no such thing as 'small' in McDonald's, is there.

This area is frequently prey to landslides - the land is broken up, there are plenty of heavy vehicles on the road, it rains a lot, and Sichuan drivers are pathological beepers. I'd be minding my business, cycling along at the edge of the road, and a passing truck would unleash a sonic atrocity. After some days, my left eardrum would ring like I was coming out of a disco. For this, the truckers surely deserved a landslide or two.

At about 7, I got to a restaurant owned by a man with a bow leg and a side-to-side lurch. The food was improving as I travelled south into the heart of Sichuan - I'd recently found out the word for 'sweet-and-sour', and was exploiting this knowledge to the full. I discovered that the notes for my entire trip had got wet; so I took the staples out of the notebooks and laid all the leaves out to dry. This was taking a while, since the air in the house was humid; so the owner said I could kip on his floor. On the telly were hordes of insufferable performing kids. It was International Children's Day tomorrow, the owner told me. 'Never heard of it', I said. "But it's International", he replied in surprise.

Being in China has made me realise that the Irish are pretty intolerant of children in public places; over here, people don't seem too bothered. You see kids in restaurants, and hear them singing squeakily on the radio. I suppose it's more like the continental approach. My head says that's the way to do it - but my heart says the brats should be locked in the basement until they're 18.


1st June.

Cycling along the mountainside, through the shifting clouds. In one direction, visibility would be 20 metres; in another, five kilometres. I passed a Buddhist grotto in the mountainside; a headless figure sat under a twisting, snakelike vein of rock. It was wrapped in colourful robes, and surrounded by empty beer bottles.

Towards lunchtime, I stopped in a karaoke restaurant for a bite to eat. The waitress sniggered at my minimal Chinese. I was worn out, and felt poisonous towards her and the tuneless local singers. I was sick of China's saccharine, Westernised pop - I resolved to listen to some brutal experimental techno when I got home. After lunch, a can of Pepsi gave me some twitchy energy, and I looked forward to reaching the big city of Chengdu the next day.

I'd been descending all the while, and the greenery was becoming semi-tropical. Ferns and moss clung to roadside cliffs; the air was humid, and water trickled off the bright fernleaves. For the first time, I heard the peaceful chirruping of crickets.

I found a hotel in a grimy industrial town that evening. Inside the adjacent restaurant, there were big glass jars on the counter, filled with red-tinted picklejuice. The jars held beans, tubers, pickled eels, and a snake.


2nd June.

Cycling in the rain, through filthy roadworks; I put on sunglasses to stop the muck splattering up into my eyes. A landslide had partially blocked the road; a tractor pushed rubble from the top of the landslide. Sodden dirt tumbled low and thick along the slope; big rocks bounced high and far, shattering into chunks when they hit the road. The tractor above us stopped; the cyclists started through with tiny dirtslides still falling. A tractor swept the rockstrewn road, impatient drivers hard on its heels.

I felt in great condition from my weeks of exercise - I was hardly breathing when I cycled. I reached Chengdu towards evening. As in a lot of Chinese cities, there were government notices written on many of the walls; but luckily for me, these ones were also in English. They said "Love Chengdu", "Cultivate Public Ethics and Abide by the Municipal Management Acts", and "A City Should be Clean Just as a Soul Should be Pure".

In my hotel room was a Nepalese businessman. Perhaps he wasn't a very good one, since the room cost four quid a night. Most of Nepal's royal family had just been massacred - so in keeping with Nepalese tradition, he hadn't eaten outside his room that day. The official explanation for the carnage was that the Crown Prince brought a machine gun into the palace, killed his family, and then blew his brains out. This was allegedly because his parents didn't approve of his choice of bride. However, the Nepalese public was already justly sceptical about this version of events.

My roommate asked me if I had small scissors; I said yes, and took them out of my little sewing box. "I want to clip my nostril hairs", he said, and brought my scissors off to the bathroom. Which was no problem - but it wasn't exactly in keeping with Irish etiquette. This wasn't the first monstrous faux-pas I'd experienced in China. On the day I arrived (in Beijing), I was startled to see a smart professional lady hawk and spit on the road. Chinese people also use the floor as an ashtray, and push chewed bones off their plate onto the table. Next thing you know, they'll be farting audibly! Distressing stuff.

There was also a Canadian guy staying in the room - I'll call him David. At first, I thought he was a common-or-garden nerd: he was tall and gangly, with sensible clothes and a politician's side-parting. He looked like a callow stockbroker fresh out of Yale. He talked about buying a bike, and asked about cycling out in the countryside. I told him as much as I could, but wasn't sure how he'd cope in very out-of-the-way places.


3rd June.

In the morning, David lay in bed reading. I asked him what the book was. The Bible, he told me. I talked to him a little about it. "I believe it's all true", he said happily. He'd been travelling around Southeast Asia for the past two-and-a-half months. When he left the room, the Nepalese guy said it was the first time David had been out in the past few days - most of the time, he just lay in bed reading the Bible.

That afternoon, the three of us went to an internet cafe for a couple of hours. I sneaked a look over David's shoulder; he was writing to his parents, arguing that in his opinion, unbelievers went to hell after they died.

Myself and David went to get supper. I was curious to find out what kind of guy he was, so I tried to engage him in conversation. It was difficult. I tried sport, politics, Chinese society, films, music and television - but on all those subjects, he was strangely unresponsive. He said he wasn't very interested in the news. I asked him if he watched TV much, or listened to the radio; he said only rarely. I asked did he read books, and he said yes. What kind of books? Mostly Christian books. Some novels with good values.

I started talking to him about religion. At last he became animated. He was an evangelical Christian I think, from Calgary in western Canada. I made it clear that I was an atheist, but he made no attempt to convert me; he was quite happy for me to probe him on his world view. "God created us all to worship Him", he explained - "praising Him is the greatest pleasure of all". His eyes lit up and he started gesturing. He said communal worship was fantastic - he used the analogy of being in the crowd at a football match.

I asked him about Mormons. With a look of distaste, he said that Mormonism was a corrupt faith. Mormons believe Jesus and Satan to have been brothers. They think that believers become gods when they die, and create their own planets. I remarked that if every Mormon planet spawns so many planet-making deities, there must be rather a lot of these worlds in existence. We talked for a while more - I asked him about missionaries, heaven and hell, God, and the role of angels.

I think my initial impression of David was wrong. He actually didn't seem very insecure: he felt he had perspective on life, and could distinguish the important from the trivial. But in reality, he had a curiously arid personality - because of his obsession with religion, he'd closed himself off to all the richness of the world.

Earlier that day, I'd had an altogether more normal conversation with an English-speaking waitress at the hotel. She was excited when I told her I was Irish - she didn't know much about Ireland, and was surprisingly eager to find out about my little country. She gave me a pen and paper, and asked me if I could write a little about Ireland. I wrote a bit about St. Patrick, the famine, Ireland's writers, immigration, the Celtic Tiger, and travellers. I talked over all this with her. She obviously had a voracious appetite for knowledge, and was very thankful for everything I told her. She quietly agreed that the Chinese government is too repressive; she mentioned '1989' without saying 'Tiananmen' (the main square of Beijing, where the army massacred protestors). She said that China's rulers were in love with power, and saw themselves as different from the common people. When I was leaving the hotel, she saw me off - "If you ever come to my town, I will be your little guide". She stood watching and waving as the taxi drove me off towards the train station.