We can cross "road trip" off our Southwest China must-do list.
As well as: "Decide against using gravel road with no guardrails to descend mountain."
And: "Rely on gas station good samaritan to lead us to impossible-to-find highway."
Our caravan left Chengdu on Saturday morning and went 200+ miles to the Southern Sichuan Bamboo Sea in a not entirely direct manner due to a quick pass through the city of Neijiang. My visiting parents and our infant son had all begged to see Neijiang (not really) and when we took a wrong turn on the way to Zigong their dreams came true.
We might have turned back onto the correct path sooner had several advertised rest stops not been blocked off due to not being constructed yet. Note: Perhaps it would be best not to put signs on the highway announcing rest stops that don't exist. But then again I went on a Chinese road trip with neither a map nor a functioning GPS so maybe I'm not the best person to comment on travel management.
On our way to the forest we had lunch in Yibin with a table full of dishes that my parents really liked. And this brings us to the next item to cross off the list: Leave our own fork -- a fork that we had taken from our house that morning so my chopstick-impaired mother wouldn't starve -- at the restaurant. This meant that at subsequent dining locations we had the opportunity to mime the universal hand-sign for fork when the server didn't understand my Chinese. It's basically three fingers pointed downwards making a scooping-up or poking-at motion. Surprisingly the first reaction to this strange pantomime was rarely "bring customer a fork." Turns out I'm bad at both the Chinese language and charades.
When we finally got to the Bamboo Sea it was a rolling swath of dancing green. The name Bamboo Sea kind of gives you the idea but it still doesn't capture what it's like to have crawled slowly up a twisting mountain to look across the sky and see bamboo for miles. The road was a beautiful experience in and of itself. Ferns crawled the sheer walls and when the road wasn't clinging to the mountain it was running beneath an arched tunnel of lithe trunks that looked as if it they had always meant to connect in the middle.
The paths up the mountain were slender and twisted and dotted with rocks, stray dogs, parked cars, slow moving bamboo trucks, and children. Drivers not infrequently swerved across the yellow line. Sometimes there was oncoming traffic and sometimes there was not. Thankfully we saw no accidents but this was after driving several hours on the highway so we were a bit desensitized to the state of Chinese traffic in general. When you've seen one truck driving with two other trucks on top of it, you've seen them all.
Back at the hotel we had a clown car kind of dinner where room service brought so many dishes, carried by so many people, that my parents reported there wasn't enough space in their room for either. When I finally got there (the server had raised her hand high above her head to ask my parents where the tall person who had ordered the food was) there was a platter of ramen noodles balanced on top of two plates of dumplings on a small coffee table. On the other side of the room the desk was supporting a bitter bamboo dish along with a greens and mushroom dish and a grotesquely large platter of rice. There was also a fork, a successful result of our earlier game of charades.
The next morning there were giant horned beetles and stick insects in the parking lot. We walked over waterfalls and there were smoked ribs for sale along the wet hilly paths. There were rafts you rowed as a group using what can best be described as oversized croquet mallets. There was a man hiking the path with a small leather portfolio, orange loafers, and a fluffy dog. And there was the aforementioned gravel road which made my stomach sink as we left the park's east gate. All gravel. All steep. No guard rail.
We opted to perform a U-turn that required our car to drive to the edge but not over, and then all the way back through the park to the west gate where the road was slightly less rustic.
While lost in the outskirts of Yibin we experienced our first Chinese rail crossing sitting behind a manually-dropped gate as a long chain of rail cars slugged their way into view. Then they came to a stop. And sat there. And then faster than we could have imagined they reversed back from where they came and the gates went up.
At this point I should mention that on our side of the tracks the cars and scooters were lined up across the full width of the road. It looked like a one-way street. But it wasn't. And the other side looked exactly the same.
But when the gates went up it worked. I still don't know how, but everyone found their way forward. Traffic here is obscene and ludicrous and exceptionally dangerous but it flows and finds its way. And we found our way with it. (And managed not to lose the good samaritan scooter driver who had offered to lead us to the highway after we'd asked directions at the gas station where he was filling up.)
(Oh, and I had Xiao Guaiguai on my lap because we had incorrectly assumed there would be enough time to feed him as we waited for the world's slowest train. Wrong.)
Coming back to Chengdu was fairly soul crushing. It was like returning to a lunar landscape that was dead and barren and in absolute contrast to the green depths we had just explored. Back in the city it was hard to even remember what we had just seen.
Which reminds me of one last item to cross off the list. "Avoid being bitten by humungous mosquitos in bamboo forest and bamboo forest hotel room only to get bitten inside own home within ten minutes of returning."
Welcome back to Chengdu.
