We shopped for supplies in the morning and found a Chinese supermarket which was fun (for me). It did mean, though, that we had to walk down pretty much every aisle to work out where everything was. And, of course, use the translation app to decipher exactly what we were buying. They put meat into the most innocuous looking things.
Loaded with bread rolls, bananas, satsumas, nuts, dried fruit and savoury biscuits we caught the train to Wuyuan. At 6.5 hours this was our longest rail journey of the trip and it was nice to put our feet up and catch up on some reading. The countryside was mainly flat and we saw some typical Chinese views - a concrete flyover (high speed trains or cars), high rise flats and a construction zone in one, and sunset and metropolis residences in another.
Just so you get an idea of where we went here are a couple of maps. One has our route, and the other names and a scale bar (it is important that I include one). Sorry I haven't done anything better. To help, the distance from Xi'an to Luoyang is 375 km, and it's 1000 km from Luoyang to Wuyuan, which we did today.
We stayed in Skywells in the village of Yancun, a scenic village. Skywells is a beautifully restored wealthy family’s house from the Qing dynasty (about 300 years ago). These rich home owners made their money in trade and were away for months at a time. To keep their families safe they built large houses with very small, high-up windows. To provide water they left gaps in the roof through which rain fell and is collected in jars below - these are the 'sky wells'.
Saturday 19 October 2024
We explored some local villages today following a limestone trial. We started at Xinyuan, again finding large properties, such as this temple.
We walked by old paddy fields (yay I’m in rice zone) which reminded me of our walks in Vietnam. We spotted quite a few spider’s webs - not so great for the entrapped dragon flies.
We climbed 1318 limestone steps through the woods, passing limestone refuges as we went. A few days later, up our first mountain, we realise how much this was our warm-up!
Down the other side we wandered past Hucun village and its water buffalo.
And encountered a praying mantis.
We walked past an ancient bridge which was being refurbished with few tools except manpower and ingenuity.
We finished our walk at Hongchun. This is a designated scenic village so we had to pay 30 yuan to stroll around. The first payment we tried, via WePay, failed. As we’d already left the ticket office (also the local police station) the lady came running after us, animatedly talking to us in Chinese. We were easy to spot as were the only tourists.
Hongchun had beautiful old buildings but certainly looked as if the younger generation had left for greater things. We only saw elderly collecting water and staggering up steps with stupidly heavy buckets.
They washed everything in the stream - vegetables and clothes alike.
Later that day we decided to explore the neighbouring village, Sixi. Like many villages in the area it is a designated scenic village which means you have to pay to enter. I presume it helps preserve the heritage of the village. Sixi had a beautiful old bridge.
We also wandered around inside. There were numerous buildings 300/400+ years old with huge entrance meeting areas, two storeys high and intricate wooden carvings. All with sky wells to collect rainwater.
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The carving inside the (ex) treasury was wonderful.
The village has only one well. This is for feng shui reasons - the village is the shape of a ship and the well was positioned where the main mast would be. Of course, no village needs two main masts.
On the way back to Skywells we spotted how the much the locals re-use everything. This is vegetable growing in polystyrene packaging.
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