Lost in the misty lovely Lushan

My lapse is correspondance, oh faithful and complaining readers, can be attributed to me having a good, busy time here in China. Classes, eating, gym, mahjong, excursions, friends, long distance boyfriend :), did I say eating..., seem to take up so much of my time. It has been 3 weeks since I spent a weekend in Jinan!

I feel I should blog in chronological order, but so many things have gone by now that I'll never get it in order! So I will start from today :).

At the moment I am on a bit of an adventure in "the South". Finding myself with a week (practically- if I skipped two days of class) free o travel, I arranged with Portia and Olivia to travel around Jiangxi for a bit. It's day 5 of a 9 day trip, and we are now down to two people. We got to know Nanchang, the capital of Jianxi and our port of arrival, better than expected, especially the Number One People's Hospital, as poor Olivia was really sick, in the end she was diagnosed with pneumonia and flew to Beijing (being unable to get train or plane tickets back to Jinan) to get treated. From what we're hearing, she's in a practically luxurious hospital where all the nurses speak english, and hopefully getting better- I think it's much better for her there than traipsing round the wet province of Jiangxi.

Ironically, our plan was to come south and get some warmth, but it's colder here than in Jinan- mostly due to the wetness I think.
There were alot of (medical, culinary, wierd Nationalistic frenzy...) adventures in Nanchang, but first today... When we finally left Nanchang (yesterday), we arrived in Lushan, a mountainous national park area, which is certainly an escape from the usual China. I can breathe again!!!!

We found a lovely sweet homestead- a restaurant with some rooms up top to stay in, which didn't break the budget. We went in there when it was pouring with rain, and they were a but wary to take us in, as they weren't authorised to take foreigners, but we put our poor student faces on and they let us stay. If anyone asks we are eating in the restaurant :). We went out walking in the afternoon, it wa so good to be in nature again! There are lots of pine, bamboo, sort of forests around here. The town itself has an English quaintness and was built in the colonial era as a summer retreat from the heat. It's all cobbley, and higgledy piggledy stone houses with forest and clear running streams.

We went walking up a random path into the woods and ran into a village woman, who was amazed and delighted that we could speak chinese. She asked if we were married (no), then how old are you (21-portia), that's still young, (24- me), then you can get married!, How many children can you have in your country ("Suibian sheng"= whatever/ as you like), that's great, you should get married quickly then and have babies! We were in hysterics at this- she had such a straight forward pushy mannor to her, her first words to us were something along the lines of "What the hell are you doing walking up here- there's nothing to see!"

Last night we went to see "Love in Lushan", a Chinese classic of 1980- although the graphics looked more 1950's to us! It had the guniness world record for screening the continuously since it was released in one cinema- the cute one here in the town. We took a bottle of red wine and had night out at the movies. Ahhh, warning: the next paragraph is a semi-literary analysis for you, :)...it was quite enjoyable and interesting actually(if you take a poltical perspective). I could understand mos tof the chinese! It was about a chinese american woman, whose parents were in Nationalist army and fled China, who returns to Lushan, their home, and falls in love with a good simple local boy, whose mother lives on the mountain, and father is a general. The modern American woman is the pursuer, the Chinese man is the innocent, oblivious one. She teaches him how to pronounce, in english, "I love my Motherland, I love the morning of my motherland", and she falls in love with the motherland too. In the end it turns out their fathers were friends that fought eachother as they joined separate parties. Very 1980's politics about all Chinese being welcome in the motherland now, and China developing- in one scene the man had drawn a sketch of the scenery, and inserted a town where there was none, imagining the development of the future- this part of the film had us in hysterics.

Today was another big adventure in the woods, we decided to walk to this waterfall "San Die Quan". Our guesthouse owners said it was impossible, and not "fun", but since we got here- in the drizzly weather everyone kept saying going into the woods was "not fun". We have raincoats, waterproof shoes, and so far it had all been fun! We started walking, and stopped in the village to ask directions for the start of the path, "no no no, you can't walk to there, you won't be able to find the way, take a taxi...", and another time with the same result....but on the map there was a path so we started following a path into the forest which seemed to fit with the map.

Gosh it seemed no one wanted us to go for a walk!

We walked for quite a while and ended up on this path going along a ridge. We had very little visability, being stuck in a bit of a cloud. The further we walked the worse the paths became, blocked by trees, bushes, all the bushes were wet from the cloud condensing around us, and pretty soon we were heaps wet too from pushing past them, climbing thrugh them, basically bush bashing, although we sort of thought we were still on a path to the waterfall.
The further we walked (and wetter we became), the less convinced we were that we were on a path, and more that we were imagining gaps in the trees and bushes etc. I thought it would be impossible to get lost in the wilderness in China, but I think today, if at one point we didn't admit defeat and turn back, we could have. Later we saw the ridge the direction we were walking in and laughed, we were just bashing about in the middle of nowhere!
Turning back we found a path we thought went to "another place".... by this stage I had managed to loose both the map and an expensive jumper :( still up there somewhere on that rige with no path...when I realised it was missing we were already heading back, and a bit worried about being lost, (cold and wet) and the time...Breathed some Zen breaths and concentrated on finding civilisation.
We decided the path to this "other place" seemed to actually be a path and would be more interesting than walking back the way we'd came. Eventually we did find civilisation- a paved path that was going to the waterfall!! (and not the other place afterall!). We entered the "waterfall scenic spot" and started walking, down down down, we descended several hundred meters of steps before we reached the waterfall... (by the way all this was beautiful, as were the cliffs we could have fallen off if we'd tried to descend from the ridge with no path!)...we could see the steps kept going after the waterfall, and so we decided to keep going down, as we heard there wa a carpark at the bottom too. A few people told us not to go that way, go back up, but, we thought, they just didn't want us to have fun, afterall they were going down, why shouldn't we... down down down we went...there was certainly no going back up now...down down down...my knees were trembling, I reckon we went down 1000m in total.
These locals who worked in the scenic area started to scare us- you have to go back up, there's no way back to Guling from the bottom, we're at the bottom of the mountain and if you take a car back it's 200Y, and you'll have to buy a 180 entrance ticket.... ai ai ai
We had walked so far down these stairs in a crevice in the mountain that we'd walked completely to the bottom of the mountain. There was civilisation at the bottom, but no where near the town where our luggage was! Indeed the drive back to the top took over an hour and was 40km as we had to go to the non steep side to get back up. Luckily some lovely people helped us, making some side earnings for the day themselves of course, and we finally made it back to Guling for dinner (mmm yummy homey noodle soup)!
We reported to our guesthouse owners that we did indeed make it too the waterfall on foot, the path was indeed hard to follow, and by the end of the day we had 'walked off' the mountains- which only took an hour to do but would probably take a night to undo!

Lesson 1 of the day: Listen to Chinese people!
Lesson 2 of the day: If we had listened none of this would have happened...and life would have been much more boring :).