I’m sorry that the last blog fell short of expectations, but this trip that I was rushed to make was more than exciting. So the trip began with the wake up call at 5am and we rushed to the bus station to catch our bus at 6am. We expected a 10 hour bus ride and to arrive in the small town of Dunba around 4pm. Instead of what we expected our bus ride took instead of 10 hours a total of 16 as we arrived in the village around 10pm. The trip itself was the exciting part and although the bus ride took forever, there was never a dull moment. From the instant we got to the bus station the excitement began. Now we have all been eating the Chinese food for every meal and our stomachs have all be great, except for Georges bladder, until we knew we were about to get on a 10 hour bus ride. So of course when we wake up this morning both Gordon and my stomachs are in knots and once we leave the hotel there is no bathroom to be found. The bus was leaving in 15 minutes and if I didn’t get a chance to go before the bus ride I was going on the bus ride. So we took off to find a bathroom and it was down the road at the only place open, a dirty little restaurant with bathrooms like the worst truck stop you could imagine. So I go in holding the little bit of toilet paper Max’s dad carries with him because, oh yeah, in China you are supposed to bring your own TP. Now this was my first real experience in a public bathroom because there is a huge difference in public bathrooms and private house bathrooms. For instance the toilet, in a home bathroom there is a toilet, and in a public restroom there is a hole like you would dig for yourself in the woods. Now I have actually never been real camping so I am not advanced at the squat and poop technique, but it was game time and it was now or never for me to learn. So I manned up and made the bus with my stomach feeling much better. When we got on the bus it was as serious as a plane because your bus ticket had your seat number on it and they packed everyone in so there were no open seats. Because the bus is much cheaper than flying or anything else and because we were going to the most undeveloped parts of China, there were man peasants on the bus and some people were even carrying giant bags of rice as their luggage. Some of the families with smaller children would not get a seat for their kid, but just make him sit on the floor in front of them, even though the kid was probably 8 years old. Now that we were crammed on the bus and already not looking forward to the 10 hour bus ride with our stomachs just starting to feel better, we took off down the road, only to get a real glimpse of what the ride was going to be like about 10 minutes in, when we left the city. The seats on the bus were hard. It was like a slightly upgraded school bus. Now picture that school bus going off roading along the edge of mountains and continuing to pass other busses and construction trucks on a two lane road, that was really 1 and ½ lanes. Now I was fine with the ride, but Gordon who is afraid of heights, was a little uneasy for most of the ride. Overall it was fine and we all would have been fine, but throughout the trip we made two major stops. The reasons for the first stop was because the road we took to get here, and I call it a road because it was so small, but according to Max it was the biggest highway to get out here to the Tibetan mountains. So the road we took was along the edge of where most of the destruction from the earthquake in 2008 hit. There were a lot of military trucks driving up and down the roads still aiding earthquake victims, as well as being in position in case of a Tibetan uprising, but they caused a lot of traffic and there was one part of the road that a rockslide slowed down to one lane that had been backed up since the night before. So at this stop we had to wait about 3 hours for a huge construction truck that had to go very slowly around each turn, until it finally stopped to let us pass. The next big stop was when we were at the bottom of the mountains along the river. We were driving along and all of a sudden another huge traffic jam. When we got to these stops the driver would let us out to strectch and check out what was going on. So we walked about a quarter mile through the traffic up to the front of the stop and there was a huge crane and hundreds of people looking over the cliff. Apparently according to one of the people watching there was an accident where some people were trapped in a machine that fell into the river. The river itself was extremely rough and commonly used for extremely bold white water rafting, but even the best swimmer would have been sucked down by the current. By the time we had gotten to the front it was not likely that the one person still stuck underneath would still be alive, but they still tried to get the machine and the person’s body for another hour. Some of the people watching lit inscents to honor the person’s death and after the crane moved there was barely enough room for the busses to get around. After those two major delays we were on our way and for a school bus off roading through the mountains on unpaved roads we made pretty good timing. The rest of the trip went pretty smoothly stopping to get gas and cool the brakes of the bus we made it to a tiny little town on the edge of Tibet. At this point hardly any of the people of this town had ever seen white people, so now more than ever we were getting some pretty crazy looks. Our driver met us in the little town and he actually had a van. So we drove probably another 20 minutes up the mountain into a Tibetan village, which no Americans other than documentary people with rare cases are able to visit. The house we are staying at is extremely cool and reminds me of the dream clubhouse of any kids dream. It feels like I’m in a dream Boone because the mountains are enormous the weather is amazing and the house is incredible. When we got to the house our host made us a delicious meal with some Tibetan style corn bread that Max loved and made sure to request for the rest of our meals there. At this point it was pretty late, it was dark, and we were all really tired from such a long day in the car, so we decided to crash and get ready for a big day on the mountains. The beds we slept on were like 6 ft coffee tables with a rug on top. There were two identical rooms that this family housed guests and there were probably 8 beds in each room. The house had electricity, but all they had were lights. They had no appliances and no running water. The sink and shower they had were just hoses connected to the spring up the mountain. Their bathroom, as you probably have already figured out the theme, was a hole in the floor, except this family actually covered the poop with seeds and used it later as fertilizer for their fields. The next day we slept in until about 9:30am and Gordon was actually woken up by Max having a conversation with a cow outside Gordon’s window. When we all were awake we had a nice breakfast and our host took us to a cool spot on the way up the mountain to take pictures. He dropped us off and we decided to hike to a spot that Max’s dad new about. Mr Zhang had been to this person’s house a couple years ago and had hiked in these mountains before. There was a castle looking tower in the distance so we decided to hike to that and see if we could climb the tower. The trip itself was a fun hike with cows goats and pigs along the road. Every so often along our hike through the woods we would come across one of the villager’s houses and if they were home they would usually let us come in a rest a little. Every house we came across had guard dogs usually chained up on the roof. Most of the houses had pigs, chickens, goats, cows, dogs, cats, and were painted with really bright red, yellow, and green colors. Along the path we were also able to refill our water bottle with spring water. This water was cleaner and tasted better than I’ve ever had from Dasani or Deer park. When we made it to the tower, the door was locked and there was no way to climb up although we could climb up into a window the room with the window was completely sealed off. When we were resting by the tower the weirdest thing happened. Out of nowhere a monkey comes climbing down a tree nearby. We had no idea that monkeys were even indigenous to this area, but I took a video so you could check it out (Monkey Video Link). After our weird encounter with the monkey we kept heading up the mountain to a spot on a cliff that Mr Zhang knew about from his previous visit. From sitting on the cliff we had 360 degrees of post card views. It was really something that you can only see in pictures because the mountains were so beautiful with the peaks in the clouds. On the very top of one of the mountains it looked like there was either a house or a monastery but it would have been a multiple day hike just to get there. The Sichuan province itself has the nickname of “heavens garden” and these mountains although further west seemed like they reached right up into heaven. Standing on those cliffs was so peaceful and worry free it made you feel like you really were on top of the world. Instead of now turning back to go to the house, we decided to go further on to see some of the local government buildings. We walked down to the town center and met some of the villagers. The little town looked like an old western town from the movies. When we got there we sat and rested for a bit and some of the locals asked us to play basketball with them. It was really funny because some of them were actually pretty good, but the court they were playing on was really ghetto. The court and goals they had made street ball courts look like NBA stadiums. The court was part of the play ground at the village elementary school. We decided not to play because we were already exhausted and had a long hike ahead of us to get back to the house. That at least was our excuse to maintain our pride in the strange case that we would have gotten beat on the court. So we headed back to the house, this time following the roads, but the sun was blazing and burning us all the whole time. Our now sun burnt sweaty selves were tired and ready to just sit down and rest. When we made it back to the house we all lazed around until dinner time. For dinner the owner of the house treated us to a chicken soup, where they actually killed the chicken and cooked it that day. The dinner was very good and we celebrated a long journey with some of the local liquor. The owner of the house actually makes the liquor himself and all of the ingredients in it are also home grown. It was pretty tasty but also pretty strong for something that was about the equivalent to vodka. After dinner the owner of the house and his daughter came out with some traditional Tibetan clothing for us to see and even try on. Also the little 7 year old grand daughter of the house showed us a dance she had learned at school. As we were sitting down eating the local school got out and some of the kids were walking home. One of the kids who was probably 10 stopped by the house and brought us some apples he picked on the way home that were really good. We ended up teaching him how to give dap, which for you old people who don’t know what dap is, it’s a hand shake that all people under 30 do. So hopefully that little guy will now go back to school and be the badass on the playground teaching all his friends how to give dap. When it got dark out we all were just chilling outside talking and hanging out so Gordon got out his computer and we actually had a little dance party with our host and his granddaughter. It was so funny because Mr Zhang is just as goofy as Max, so when he was dancing it was hilarious. Then Gordon put on tick tock, by Ke$ha and the little granddaughter knew the words in Chinese. A few hours and a few drinks of the “chinka zhou” later we went to bed. A long day behind us we got some much needed sleep before our 6:30 am bus ride in the morning back to Chengdu. This bus ride back to Chengdu was much less eventful than the ride there. Our driver was much smoother and this ride had no long stops. So we got back to Chengdu to check into our hotel around 5pm. Tonight we all were craving some real American food so we went to KFC for dinner. The good old southern fried chicken really hit the spot. We all were really tired from being on the bus all day and the past couple really long days so tonight we are just taking it easy and going to bed early. Tomorrow we fly back to Nanjing and get ready to go to Beijing and Shanghai before we head back to the states. The end of our trip seems like the near future as we’ve been counting down the days and planning out everything we still want to do. I’m sorry about not being able to post while in Tibet, but internet wasn’t really an option. I hope you do enjoy this blog though and I should be keeping the regular schedule from here on out. Well once again its time for bed so I will let you know how tomorrow goes. We miss you BK, Anna, Lauren, Kelsey, all the parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends, and anyone who is reading this. Be sure to check out my flickr account for more pics from the triphttp://www.flickr.com/photos/martyprevitte/ We miss you all and will see you soon. Marty
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
My First Experience with the Village People!
I’m sorry that the last blog fell short of expectations, but this trip that I was rushed to make was more than exciting. So the trip began with the wake up call at 5am and we rushed to the bus station to catch our bus at 6am. We expected a 10 hour bus ride and to arrive in the small town of Dunba around 4pm. Instead of what we expected our bus ride took instead of 10 hours a total of 16 as we arrived in the village around 10pm. The trip itself was the exciting part and although the bus ride took forever, there was never a dull moment. From the instant we got to the bus station the excitement began. Now we have all been eating the Chinese food for every meal and our stomachs have all be great, except for Georges bladder, until we knew we were about to get on a 10 hour bus ride. So of course when we wake up this morning both Gordon and my stomachs are in knots and once we leave the hotel there is no bathroom to be found. The bus was leaving in 15 minutes and if I didn’t get a chance to go before the bus ride I was going on the bus ride. So we took off to find a bathroom and it was down the road at the only place open, a dirty little restaurant with bathrooms like the worst truck stop you could imagine. So I go in holding the little bit of toilet paper Max’s dad carries with him because, oh yeah, in China you are supposed to bring your own TP. Now this was my first real experience in a public bathroom because there is a huge difference in public bathrooms and private house bathrooms. For instance the toilet, in a home bathroom there is a toilet, and in a public restroom there is a hole like you would dig for yourself in the woods. Now I have actually never been real camping so I am not advanced at the squat and poop technique, but it was game time and it was now or never for me to learn. So I manned up and made the bus with my stomach feeling much better. When we got on the bus it was as serious as a plane because your bus ticket had your seat number on it and they packed everyone in so there were no open seats. Because the bus is much cheaper than flying or anything else and because we were going to the most undeveloped parts of China, there were man peasants on the bus and some people were even carrying giant bags of rice as their luggage. Some of the families with smaller children would not get a seat for their kid, but just make him sit on the floor in front of them, even though the kid was probably 8 years old. Now that we were crammed on the bus and already not looking forward to the 10 hour bus ride with our stomachs just starting to feel better, we took off down the road, only to get a real glimpse of what the ride was going to be like about 10 minutes in, when we left the city. The seats on the bus were hard. It was like a slightly upgraded school bus. Now picture that school bus going off roading along the edge of mountains and continuing to pass other busses and construction trucks on a two lane road, that was really 1 and ½ lanes. Now I was fine with the ride, but Gordon who is afraid of heights, was a little uneasy for most of the ride. Overall it was fine and we all would have been fine, but throughout the trip we made two major stops. The reasons for the first stop was because the road we took to get here, and I call it a road because it was so small, but according to Max it was the biggest highway to get out here to the Tibetan mountains. So the road we took was along the edge of where most of the destruction from the earthquake in 2008 hit. There were a lot of military trucks driving up and down the roads still aiding earthquake victims, as well as being in position in case of a Tibetan uprising, but they caused a lot of traffic and there was one part of the road that a rockslide slowed down to one lane that had been backed up since the night before. So at this stop we had to wait about 3 hours for a huge construction truck that had to go very slowly around each turn, until it finally stopped to let us pass. The next big stop was when we were at the bottom of the mountains along the river. We were driving along and all of a sudden another huge traffic jam. When we got to these stops the driver would let us out to strectch and check out what was going on. So we walked about a quarter mile through the traffic up to the front of the stop and there was a huge crane and hundreds of people looking over the cliff. Apparently according to one of the people watching there was an accident where some people were trapped in a machine that fell into the river. The river itself was extremely rough and commonly used for extremely bold white water rafting, but even the best swimmer would have been sucked down by the current. By the time we had gotten to the front it was not likely that the one person still stuck underneath would still be alive, but they still tried to get the machine and the person’s body for another hour. Some of the people watching lit inscents to honor the person’s death and after the crane moved there was barely enough room for the busses to get around. After those two major delays we were on our way and for a school bus off roading through the mountains on unpaved roads we made pretty good timing. The rest of the trip went pretty smoothly stopping to get gas and cool the brakes of the bus we made it to a tiny little town on the edge of Tibet. At this point hardly any of the people of this town had ever seen white people, so now more than ever we were getting some pretty crazy looks. Our driver met us in the little town and he actually had a van. So we drove probably another 20 minutes up the mountain into a Tibetan village, which no Americans other than documentary people with rare cases are able to visit. The house we are staying at is extremely cool and reminds me of the dream clubhouse of any kids dream. It feels like I’m in a dream Boone because the mountains are enormous the weather is amazing and the house is incredible. When we got to the house our host made us a delicious meal with some Tibetan style corn bread that Max loved and made sure to request for the rest of our meals there. At this point it was pretty late, it was dark, and we were all really tired from such a long day in the car, so we decided to crash and get ready for a big day on the mountains. The beds we slept on were like 6 ft coffee tables with a rug on top. There were two identical rooms that this family housed guests and there were probably 8 beds in each room. The house had electricity, but all they had were lights. They had no appliances and no running water. The sink and shower they had were just hoses connected to the spring up the mountain. Their bathroom, as you probably have already figured out the theme, was a hole in the floor, except this family actually covered the poop with seeds and used it later as fertilizer for their fields. The next day we slept in until about 9:30am and Gordon was actually woken up by Max having a conversation with a cow outside Gordon’s window. When we all were awake we had a nice breakfast and our host took us to a cool spot on the way up the mountain to take pictures. He dropped us off and we decided to hike to a spot that Max’s dad new about. Mr Zhang had been to this person’s house a couple years ago and had hiked in these mountains before. There was a castle looking tower in the distance so we decided to hike to that and see if we could climb the tower. The trip itself was a fun hike with cows goats and pigs along the road. Every so often along our hike through the woods we would come across one of the villager’s houses and if they were home they would usually let us come in a rest a little. Every house we came across had guard dogs usually chained up on the roof. Most of the houses had pigs, chickens, goats, cows, dogs, cats, and were painted with really bright red, yellow, and green colors. Along the path we were also able to refill our water bottle with spring water. This water was cleaner and tasted better than I’ve ever had from Dasani or Deer park. When we made it to the tower, the door was locked and there was no way to climb up although we could climb up into a window the room with the window was completely sealed off. When we were resting by the tower the weirdest thing happened. Out of nowhere a monkey comes climbing down a tree nearby. We had no idea that monkeys were even indigenous to this area, but I took a video so you could check it out (Monkey Video Link). After our weird encounter with the monkey we kept heading up the mountain to a spot on a cliff that Mr Zhang knew about from his previous visit. From sitting on the cliff we had 360 degrees of post card views. It was really something that you can only see in pictures because the mountains were so beautiful with the peaks in the clouds. On the very top of one of the mountains it looked like there was either a house or a monastery but it would have been a multiple day hike just to get there. The Sichuan province itself has the nickname of “heavens garden” and these mountains although further west seemed like they reached right up into heaven. Standing on those cliffs was so peaceful and worry free it made you feel like you really were on top of the world. Instead of now turning back to go to the house, we decided to go further on to see some of the local government buildings. We walked down to the town center and met some of the villagers. The little town looked like an old western town from the movies. When we got there we sat and rested for a bit and some of the locals asked us to play basketball with them. It was really funny because some of them were actually pretty good, but the court they were playing on was really ghetto. The court and goals they had made street ball courts look like NBA stadiums. The court was part of the play ground at the village elementary school. We decided not to play because we were already exhausted and had a long hike ahead of us to get back to the house. That at least was our excuse to maintain our pride in the strange case that we would have gotten beat on the court. So we headed back to the house, this time following the roads, but the sun was blazing and burning us all the whole time. Our now sun burnt sweaty selves were tired and ready to just sit down and rest. When we made it back to the house we all lazed around until dinner time. For dinner the owner of the house treated us to a chicken soup, where they actually killed the chicken and cooked it that day. The dinner was very good and we celebrated a long journey with some of the local liquor. The owner of the house actually makes the liquor himself and all of the ingredients in it are also home grown. It was pretty tasty but also pretty strong for something that was about the equivalent to vodka. After dinner the owner of the house and his daughter came out with some traditional Tibetan clothing for us to see and even try on. Also the little 7 year old grand daughter of the house showed us a dance she had learned at school. As we were sitting down eating the local school got out and some of the kids were walking home. One of the kids who was probably 10 stopped by the house and brought us some apples he picked on the way home that were really good. We ended up teaching him how to give dap, which for you old people who don’t know what dap is, it’s a hand shake that all people under 30 do. So hopefully that little guy will now go back to school and be the badass on the playground teaching all his friends how to give dap. When it got dark out we all were just chilling outside talking and hanging out so Gordon got out his computer and we actually had a little dance party with our host and his granddaughter. It was so funny because Mr Zhang is just as goofy as Max, so when he was dancing it was hilarious. Then Gordon put on tick tock, by Ke$ha and the little granddaughter knew the words in Chinese. A few hours and a few drinks of the “chinka zhou” later we went to bed. A long day behind us we got some much needed sleep before our 6:30 am bus ride in the morning back to Chengdu. This bus ride back to Chengdu was much less eventful than the ride there. Our driver was much smoother and this ride had no long stops. So we got back to Chengdu to check into our hotel around 5pm. Tonight we all were craving some real American food so we went to KFC for dinner. The good old southern fried chicken really hit the spot. We all were really tired from being on the bus all day and the past couple really long days so tonight we are just taking it easy and going to bed early. Tomorrow we fly back to Nanjing and get ready to go to Beijing and Shanghai before we head back to the states. The end of our trip seems like the near future as we’ve been counting down the days and planning out everything we still want to do. I’m sorry about not being able to post while in Tibet, but internet wasn’t really an option. I hope you do enjoy this blog though and I should be keeping the regular schedule from here on out. Well once again its time for bed so I will let you know how tomorrow goes. We miss you BK, Anna, Lauren, Kelsey, all the parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends, and anyone who is reading this. Be sure to check out my flickr account for more pics from the triphttp://www.flickr.com/photos/martyprevitte/ We miss you all and will see you soon. Marty
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From: Auntie Adrienne...
ReplyDeleteOMGosh you guys are so smart!! I LOVE reading about your fabulous trip and I am so proud of you all living such GREAT lives!!
So, I have been educating myself about your trip, from "Dap", to Monkeys, to pandas to buses, and "manning up" about the restrooms...not finished reading yet but THANK YOU MARTY for your blog and having extended family be a part of your China trip!!