Monday, September 8, 2014

In Search of Old Caves




We never head out early enough for me.  Half the day’s gone by the time we’re about to leave and someone says they’re hungry so we may as well have lunch first.  But today, as noted yesterday was going to be the day we visited the “Tang Dynasty Caves, near Yong Ning.”  Loaded with lunch, coffees, ATMs, gas we headed off on the wrong highway, and wound up over at the airport bonded customs area.   I stared up from my computer and stated that this was completely wrong.  Soon we were speeding past our neighborhood again and many voices were raised to simply call it a day. 

Across the sixth ring road, up and out the Ba Da Ling highway passed the most touristed section of the Great Wall.  The air was heavy with moisture and let’s-not-consider what else as we drove up into the foothills and tried to make out the more dramatic mountains in the distance.  Getting off the highway we followed the road north to Yanqing, which surprised us all by being a reasonably clean town, with a nice waterfront on to an aqueduct.  They had a bank, which I needed, once again, and, interestingly a prominent church, right by the roadside. 

But the town that the article said I wanted was till seventeen kilometers away in Yongning.  Traveling there the road slowed down to a two-lane affair, where people use the road as their workshop, and their back porch, their playground.  Considering this, I put my computer away and then, with pause for dramatic affect began to berate everyone else that screen time was over.  We slowed waited for the oncoming lane to free up so we could swerve around the maw of a spinning gravel making machine that women and men were shoveling loose stones into.  Behind them a roadside house was stripped down to its dark wooden skeleton.  Speeding away, beneath the roadside poplar trees, the rain finally began to fall.

“You can tell it’s going to pass soon.” I offered, optimistically. Visions of the family at the base of a trail up to caves, huddling beneath one umbrella presented themselves, uninvited.  “So where are these caves?” My wife asked intelligently.  “The article (written in English) suggests its near Yong Ning town.  “OK, well here we are.”  Up ahead was a sign for the “Old City” and the universal sign for tourist information a lower case “i” in a circle.  “Fine then, let’s head up to the right.”

Now, I’m a post-modern fellow, and my wife’s a post-modern gal.  She’s a perfectly fine driver.  But heading up the medieval main street of Yong Ning in the rain, considering the medieval drainage system of old Yong Ning, my wife repeatedly stopped, and meditated upon the rush of water, or the depth of a puddle.  天雨路滑[1].  Off to the sides, the storefronts were evocative and one could imagine riding through on a horse during the Qing Dynasty.  I tried to imagine.  Really I did.  But then someone beeped their horn, and someone else cut around us and I could help but yell  “Go, already!”  This was not well received. 



Up at the faux pagoda at the top of the road, that was probably rebuilt after the original was torn down in a revolutionary fever, we paused again and considered the four roads before us.  My wife stopped again, in front of a couple who were taking a photo.  We paused for what felt like a while.  I barked again.  I was admonished again.  We parked.  It was not the best launch pad from which to begin asking the locals where the “Tang Dynasty Caves” were.   Everyone’s Chinese is native except mine.  “Well, go find it.”

Fortunately the rain had stopped.  My stepson took a quick trot outside and returned to say that there were no “Tang Dynasty Caves” near here.  Lovely.  My wife announced that she was off to buy fresh tofu, which was a town specialty.  I considered the population for who was the best bet for directions to local sites of interest. Most of the stores were mercifully still serving the needs of the local community, rather than bric-a-brac for day-trippers like us, but this also meant that they were devoid of anything but cheap plastic goods.   I considered the man in the wheel chair with the large Buddhist-bead bracelet yelling in triumph as he slapped down a chess piece and decided to go in to the empty restaurant behind him and the fellas instead. 

Hopeful, I approached what appeared to be a reasonably intelligent woman and asked her for the Tang Dynasty Caves near here.  “You know, the Tang Dynasty Caves. . . “ Absorbing her vacant stare, her frown and then her smirk in quick succession, she stated with implausible confidence that they didn’t exist.  Fortunately the man beside her, whom I’d initially disregarded as an extra piped up, “you mean GuYaJu?”  “Sure, yeah, caves?”  “Well, you go back down, left and then you head up right.”  “Cool.  How did you say that again? GuYaJu?”  “GuYaJu.” “GuYaJu.  Thanks.”

Repeating this precious phrase over and over I went to where my wife and stepson were, buying tufu from a cart in the street.  I said “GuYaJu” and they laughed at me.  “Which “ya?”  “Which “ju?”  “I have no idea.”  My mind reached for possibilities like “old goose hut.”  My stepson stated needlessly that he had no way of looking up Romanized utterances.  Fortunately though, my repeated insistence of the phrase had drawn the attention of the neighboring tofu shoppers.  Slowly at first, and then, like frogs in a spring pond, everyone began saying “guyaju” over and over.  I looked smug and said “exactly.”

Having determined that we were looking for the famous 古崖居Gǔ yá jū, http://baike.baidu.com/view/38012.htm we could aim ourselves and march off to see these caves.  “Remember girls, there are no extant Tang Dynasty buildings in China, this is a cool chance to see . . .  What?”  “It’s about an hour’s drive from here, back the way we came from.

This blow would need to be handled carefully.  It could easily prove fatal.  “The lady said we wouldn’t make it.”  “The tofu lady.”  “It’s getting dark,” offered my son.  I scowled.  “OK, I have it mapped out now on Baidu maps.  It’s forty kilometers.”  “Good.  Let’s go.” 

The car smelt strongly of tofu.  In the back apparently it was much worse.  GPS helped considerably and before long we were driving along w dramatic cliff face, (as the "ya" might suggest) and found ourselves at GuYaJu parking lot.  “It’s five kuai to park.” “What time to you close” “what “close?””, I offered in a bit too spirited a local brogue.  Notably unappreciated.  “How long does it take to get up there?” “We’ll be fine.  One hundred and fifty kaui later on entrance fees we were all a bit hesitant, perhaps as we trod up the path, (billed as a “level 1” - wherein “1” was the easiest on a scale of 1-5, sort of hike,) we made our way off in the sun-behind-mountain twilight of the day, finally cleared, the mid-autumn moon finally out we made our way up passed wild flowers and wild crab trees to the remarkable Tang Dynasty cliff face dwellings that must have comprised a town at one time.  Standing on the bluff before the second of these complex with the sun going further down we photographed ourselves a few dozen times.  We were all together and we were very happy to be there. 



Down below, there was something disconcerting.  The valley led down to a broad plane.  At the base, before us was an odd Potemkin Village of some sort, complete with, what I discerned must be a fake, church.  Every house was the same, as complex look flying down into LA from the sky, neat rows of homogenous dwellings.  What is that?

It turns out to be the Zhang Shang Ying Camp, which had an Romanized name like Keystone or Telluride or something similarly improbable.  In search of dining, we made it past the strict security suggesting we were heading in for dinner.   The camp, was a series of private villas with a sub-Disney-esque lodge house in the center sporting two concrete moustachioed gents looking to all the world like Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling galloping off into the parking lot.  In the center of ‘town’ there were concrete cowboys, playing concrete guitars and saxophones behind a live woman, singing karaoke. http://baike.baidu.com/view/477515.htm

We were all confused.  Apparently this was a prelaunch, before the big launch.  I don’t think I’ll go back.  Down the road was a new Hilton.  It made us all wonder if this was near the location Beijing was betting on for the two-thousand-whatever winter Olympics.  We found our way back to YanQing, had reasonable local family-style fare and later that evening found our way under pass and over highway, back home. 

This morning I have been enjoying our old friend Gilberto Gil.  I have never met the Brazilian Minister of Culture but I’ve been a fan for years.  Indeed I saw him perform here in Beijing in 1999 or so, over in Ritan Park, which was memorable.  I’ve got him on now from his 1971 album “Nega.”  The song that happens to be on just now is the Blind Faith song “Somebody Must Change” which he as characteristically inhabited completely, convincingly.  I’ve listened to four of five albums of his from the period and he sounds like someone I know.
In a few hours a few family guests will begin to arrive for a Mid-Autumn Festival jiaozi-bao-ing. It is absolutely lovely outside.





[1] tiānyùlùhuá: roads are slippery due to rain (idiom)

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