Croak of frog and squeak of bat

The sun is shining – it’s not yet sweat-box-hot – perfect day  for a Saturday afternoon peddle round campus, starting with one of the lotus ponds right outside our building.

Echoing round are the strange sounds of the frogs – maybe they’re croaking in pu tong hua (Mandarin)?  It’s a rather metallic, robotic sound – a bit like the two-tone bleep of reversing lorries.

The frogs are heard but rarely seen, apart from those splatted flat on the roads.

Unlike the bats, which ping around the evening sky, squeaking merrily.  There are two huge trees which seem to be the centre of their swirling –  the bat base!

This tree grows all over campus.  It just glows with these outrageously orange flowers.

Half way along my route from flat to college building is a pond, thickly carpeted with green algae speared through with clusters of iris – blue, red and yellow. ……

And an extraordinary tree, with heavy flowering branches dipping down into the water.

 

The fields that are part of the Agricultural College are full of people – past and former university staff – who live on campus and look after their own plots.  

And at risk of sounding clichéd….. this is the probably the image of China I’ll keep with me  – paddy fields – timeless and calm –

– dwarfed by mega-construction – modern and frenetic

At the rear of the college –an area I’ve not explored before- I hear more noisy but unseen creatures.  Hidden behind walls are farms obviously full of pigs and chickens.  

The lanes are edged with wild hibiscus, purple vetch, yellow and white daisies and all sorts of flowers I don’t recognise….

..leading to brick cottages for the farm workers.  Human beings still anchored to the earth and not yet rehoused 30 storeys in the sky

I know why the caged birds sing – in China

The caged bird sings  
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom. 

Maya Angelou

How wonderful -bird song – at last!  That was my first thought as I heard a fantastic trilling and chirping, while walking through the trees towards a temple in the woods, high above West Lake in Hangzhou.

BaoPu Temple

But like most things in China – it wasn’t what I expected.

I’ve been shocked by the lack of birds here.  On the three day boat cruise down the Yangtze I saw a couple of seagulls and a few ducks.  Walking or cycling through the countryside over the last few months I’ve seen small groups of white cranes, the odd twittering flight of sparrows and very, very occasionally a multi-coloured dove/jay or something similar.

Pollution of everything – air, water, land accounts for a lot, along with the incredible pace of industrial development and the voracious Chinese appetite.

So the unexpected chorus coming through the trees was a glorious sound.

And a tragic sight. 

Dozens of yellow-throated thrushes were set out in the temple courtyard, on the floor, on tables, on chairs, hanging from trees.  Each bird in a wicker cage, some too small for the tiny prisoners to flap their wings.  They were singing their hearts out.

I’m not a soppy animal-loving Brit (when I said I wanted our aging cat to go and play out on the dual carriageway – I was only joking).  But I hate to see creatures that are meant to fly free being imprisoned.

I’ve seen the same pathetic sight in other Chinese temples since.  I’ve heard two explanations – neither of which is the least bit rational.

One is a Buddhist belief that by freeing imprisoned animals or birds you are moving towards enlightenment.  There are certain festivals when caged birds are released.  Which would be laudable if they weren’t trapped in the first place.

The second comes from a sycophantic NatGeo programme I saw last night extolling the “harmonious relationship” between the Chinese people and the wild creatures that share this land.

They filmed a park in Beijing where every day people bring their feathered friends, in cages carefully covered in blue velvet cloth, with pretty decorated feeding bowls and ornate perches.   They know “the birds don’t like being cooped up all day in a small flat” and so setting the cages down next to each other in the park for an hour or so allows the birds to chat.  Really?

Hi Fred, nice day isn’t it. Well apart from the record breaking toxic smog we’ve had all winter.

Hiya Mike, well let’s just be grateful we don’t have to fly around in it.  How’ve you been?

Oh you know, just perched here in my cramped cage, staring at the bars and the four walls 23/7.  No point getting in a flap about it.

Chance would be a fine thing, hey, Mike?.  (chortle, chortle, cheep, cheep) 

 So here are a couple of other pix I managed to take on the four week trip of birds doing what they should be doing……………..

keep moving birdie – just a few hundred yards from his caged brethren

birds below Hangzhou hill temple

Isabella’s river – tamed.

…seeing what Isabella would have seen……

“Hankow, Wu-chang and Hang Yang” would be one city, Isabella Bird wrote of her  1896 journey,  “were they not bisected by the broad,rolling Yangtze, nearly a mile wide and its great tributary the Han.”

Prescient woman.  Thirty years after her visit the three cities became one mega metropolis,Wuhan.

 I wouldn’t have bothered to go there had I not been following her route west along with Yangtze delta.  

a rare sight of old houses

“The glory of Hangkow, as well as it’s terror, is the magnificent Yangtze” 

Not so magnificent when it’s pouring with rain and so grey and misty I could just about make out the bar-chart of tower blocks on the opposite bank.

I trudged for about 5 miles –  along the Han, to where it flows into the Yangtze and then along the main river frontage to “Walking Street.”

plenty of room to rinse a mop where the Han joins the Yangtze

Here are the few remaining remnants of Isabella’s era – huge, pillared stone buildings that look like Victorian town halls – redolent of Empire and the days when Hangkow – like Shanghai – was a valuable British “treaty port”.

a reminder of colonnial times

As for the terror – well the river’s been tamed.

Isabella travelled upstream on her own house boat.  And it was a truly life-threatening journey.  The Yangtze was a series of raging rapids, whirlpools and lethal rocks.  Boats depended on armies of “trackers” along the tow-path to haul vessels by rope through the torrential waters.    The men worked, almost naked, for a pittance.  Isabella witnessed two fatal accidents with other boats.

“Suddenly both tow ropes snapped, the line of trackers went down on their faces, the junk flew into the air, a mass of spars and planks.   It was inhuman work….they are piteously poor and work so hard to keep body and soul together.  Many fall over the cliffs and are drowned, others break their limbs.  On every man almost are to be seen cuts, bruises, wounds, weals, bad sores.” 

So how did I sail along the Yangtze? Well on a four decked, luxury cruise boat of course, with a proper bath-tub in my cabin, three gut-busting buffet meals a day and cabaret performances every evening in the top-deck bar…..which probably were terrifying….and I avoided.

Isabella was journeying into the unknown.

“the author’s boat” – a bit bigger than Isabella’s version

As no one….had travelled in the region which I hoped eventually to visit, there was no information about it to be gained and I left for my journey of 6 or 7 months remarkably free from encumbrances of every kind.  

Today the Three Gorges trip is one of China’s tourist highlights.  Like most people I opted for a four-night/three day cruise.   Maybe because it was the New Year holiday – or maybe just because this is China –  our boat was jam-packed.  I saw them putting camp beds into several cabins – I don’t think health and safety is such an issue here!

There must have been well over two hundred Chinese passengers, mainly three-generation family groups.  Then there was a group of about twenty elderly and exhausted Americans who were being herded around China in 11 days with their own Chinese guide.  A British couple from Bournemouth and me.

Mealtimes were, as always in China, interesting!

“Eat” is far too passive a word for what happens here. Shovel, gorge, cram, wolf……all far more accurate.  The moment the restaurant opens my fellow passengers pour through the doors, pushing and shoving their way round the enormous buffet spread, loading a plate with huge helpings of salads, half a dozen different meat dishes, rice, noodles, vegetables, bread, chips, cakes, puddings and fruit.

Plates are so full that morsels often drop off during the hurried trip back to their seats.   It’s almost as though they’re scared everything might magically disappear and they can’t come back for seconds, thirds or fourths.

Who ate all the pies?

People hunch over their plates, as if guarding them from other marauding mouths, faces inches from the meal, one cheek already tight,balloon-like with food, scooping in more and more.

who me? I’m too busy guarding this temple

And then – almost as suddenly as they arrive – it’s over.  Fifteen minutes into the one hour lunch the dining room is almost deserted.  Apart from us three Brits, languidly enjoying the vast array of fantastic food that’s still sitting on the buffet. (The Americans eat in a different dining room!)

Isabella survived on tea and curry powder,mixed with whatever fresh produce her crew could find.

But the genuinely significant difference in our journeys is the Yangtze itself.  For much of this stretch the river is about 200 meters deeper than it was in Isabella’s day.  So gone are the stony beaches and shorelines, the jagged protruding rocks, the whirlpools and rapids.  And maybe some of the magnificence.

Gone too – hundreds of thousands of homes, countless villages and communities. All flooded by The Three Gorges Dam – masterpiece of engineering – civil engineering in every sense – it’s effect on people every bit as monumental as its sheer size.

“hanging coffin” – several hundreds years ago the dead were left in wooden burial boxes high in the cliffs

“My old home is under here”, says a Chinese guide on one of the shore excursions.  He points down to the water.  “We have new homes now”, he gestures to concrete tower blocks lining the hillside.  He’s coy when we foreigners ask him if he likes his new home.

As the day progresses he becomes chattier.  His new home is bigger.  His family received compensation but still paid out a lot of money to secure a larger flat.  The old people aren’t happy.  They can’t visit the graves of their ancestors.  They don’t know their neighbours.  But what had been an ever-present fear of flooding is gone.  The predictable, flat, river now behaves itself.

a side trip up a tributary of the main Yangtze

And the gorges are still beautiful, with evocative names – Witches Gorge, Wind Bellows Gorge.  Most stunning of all is a narrow inlet that cuts up through dark green tangled hillsides, almost like rain forest, dripping with ferns and vines.

one misty, moisty morning along the Yangzte

 

perfectly placed for tourist pix (pity about the ugly water pipe)

Here the shallow water is turquoise, set with traditional fishing nets, small boats and village homes.

And before you think – ah, how wonderful that this lifestyle has been preserved – it’s a shore excursion for the tourists!  Artfully set into the scene – a pretty girl playing a Chinese harp on the far bank, another one standing motionless on the fishing boat, holding an umbrella, two more girls casting blue nets into the water.

Don’t you hate all this posing for tourists? Yes, but they’ll be gone soon and we can still get to Walmart before it closes,

The Three Gorges Dam itself is also beautiful in the way that industrial architecture is monstrously gorgeous. The change in the river level is so dramatic that all boats have to go through a flight of 5 enormous locks – it takes about 6 hours.

It’s late afternoon when we edge smoothly into the first huge metal box, with only a few feet to spare on either side.  The gates take several minutes to close. It’s only the gigantic “inchtape” on the wall that shows we’re rising – slowly, slowly, slowly.

steaming through the locks

We go in with 85 meters of water below us.  We come out at 115. The next time I go out on deck – 2/3 locks later – the marker is showing 145 meters.

By morning we’ve floated through the effects of the dam and we’re back out on the river – as always was – with sandbanks, pebbly shores and small streams adjoining. We’re also through the glory of the gorges and into industrial China.

sailing out into China’s industrial heartland

Enormous container ships chug past carrying cars, lorries steel  and sand.  Forests of factory chimneys spew out clouds of steam, smoke and the occasional flare.

About six o’clock on the fourth day we dock in Chongqing.  

Isabella landed further downstream and took a huge detour – carried in a sedan chair – before rejoining the river.  But that’s a story for another day.

Chongqing….. bling bling