Dingle Speaks

Ok, this is the very last post on Xiamen (IIVB), I promise!! Oh, hold on, I just remembered something else, I might hold onto that for a while though before we all OD on Xiamen (IIVB)

You might remember from my first couple of posts about Xiamen (IIVB) that we’d been a little underwhelmed by it all, we’d got the distinct impression of just another Chinese city which happened to be on the coast and was largely inhabited by a temporary heaving mass of the dreaded bus tour groups.

Well, on day 3 we’d done the tulou tour, which had been awesome and as we woke on the 4th morning (a tuesday as it happens) we were a bit stuck for what to do next. In the end we decided to just pop for a look at Nanputuoshan temple, which was very close to our hotel and had been recommended by Tina.

The first thing we saw on arriving at the temple was a large pond with quite a number of people looking into the water. We wandered over for a look and ended up spending about half an hour there, the thing was positively humming with turtles (probably terrapins to be exact), I had no idea it was even possible for so many to survive in one place. The floating turtle coop in the centre of the pond was underwater due to the sheer weight of turtles, stacked 3 or 4 deep on top and everywhere you looked in the water turtles swam and I was surprised to see that somehow large catfish had managed to survive until adulthood and were competing for food alongside the turtles.

H grabbed some berries from a nearby bush and started dropping them in the water attracting a large group of turtles over towards us, several families started doing the same, the kids were having a great time pinging berries off the back of the turtles. After a couple of minutes H pointed to a group of turtles and shouted LOOK LOOK, I looked over to see that one of the large turtles had grabbed one of the baby turtles by the head and was pulling on it like crazy. Within a couple of seconds its head was off and then the other turtles all joined in tearing chunks off wherever they could, all the while being pelted with berries by the unimpressed watching kids. We decided it was time to take a look at the temple..

Not impressed with the berries the turtles quickly turned to cannibalism

Somehow we managed to get in without paying, there was a gate where people were walking through and we just kind of followed, then we noticed attendants at the gate who weren’t really doing anything as we walked past and that other people seemed to be holding tickets, it was all a bit late by this point though, we were already through, unchallenged.

The temple was nice enough, but having just been on a trip to Beijing with my family and visited the Forbidden City (for like the 4th time..) and the Summer Palace we were having fits of deja vu and quickly lost interest. The arrival of a couple of coach tours quickly made our mind up and after playing around throwing coins into the mini-pagodas (it never gets boring..) and taking a few photos we headed back to the hotel for lunch and a nap (well we were on holiday you know…..)

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Second stop of the day was at Yuchanglou Tulou, which is apparently famous for its leaning structure.

The first impression of this tulou was that it’s huge compared to the tulou at Tianluocheng, also it has an ancestral hall at the centre. As with a couple of the tulou at Tianluocheng it’s pretty commercialised, everyone has a market stall selling the usual nik-naks, there were signs everywhere saying that no tourists could go upstairs which was a shame but understandable I guess, if a coachload of tourists all went upstairs at the same time the whole thing could come tumbling down (as we’d find out a few minutes later). We took a few pics but there wasn’t much here to hold our interest, the arrival of a coach tour made our minds up and it was time to move on.

aggressive smoker

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On day 3 in Xiamen we went to visit some Tulou (traditional Hakka earth buildings).

These are quite a way from Xiamen (150km or so) so we actually considered a group tour for a short while, I blame a momentary lapse of sensibility, but after looking at their schedule we thankfully decided otherwise. They were all something like 3 hours of travel followed by a rapid visit of various tulou with about 10 or 15 minutes at each, an hour for lunch, then 3 hours back to Xiamen again.

Actually deciding which tulou to visit was the first headache, there’s something like 20,000 of these traditional Hakka houses in Fujian province, but we opted for Tianluokeng, which is a World Heritage Site and probably the most famous (as well as being a national AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA tourist site or something like that)

So H looked for a driver and eventually found us one at the reasonable price of 750rmb for the whole day (bearing in mind the distance to be traveled), which was obviously considerably more than the group tour, but without the rushed schedule, stops at silk factories/jade museums and megaphones, we could take our own time and decide our own agenda.

The guy picked us up at 8am and we set off for Nanjing County (not that Nanjing). In the few minutes before H took over the entire rear seat and fell asleep she had plenty of time to figure out the driver, “he is too pale” she said, “he must have some kind of disease”, which is Chinese for “I wish I was that pale”. Diseased or not he could drive reasonably well enough but had a dreadful taste in music which H soon put an end to as she was nodding off.

Anyway, let’s forget about the journey, nothing of interest happened apart from to say that it was a loooong journey. After 2 hours we started climbing and I figured we were nearly there, but we just kept going and going on a road thankfully devoid of coach tours (we’d timed the trip well for the first weekend after schools went back and this was the monday morning).

Roadworks on the way to Tianluokeng

We finally arrived and paid our 90RMB entrance fee to the Tulou area and continued driving for another 20 minutes or so before the driver finally pulled over and indicated the viewing point across the road. We got out for the first view of Tianluokeng.

Tulou are either round or square. The story goes that when the US first sent up the spy satellites they became convinced that China had constructed thousands of missile silos all over Fujian, all ready for it to kick off in Taiwan..

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The big news this week is that I’m an uncle! Again!! My sister had a baby boy earlier in the week making an older sister of my niece Millie (I can’t believe she’s so grown up already), we’re all very pleased for them, they’ve got the perfect family now! I haven’t seen any photos yet though, HINT MOTHER!!!!

Difficult to follow that, here’s some photos I took instead!

Last weekend I met up with a photography group called Shanghai Exposed in the Jewish Quarter in Hongkou. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, I’d been along to a few flickr meets when I first arrived in Shanghai (mainly with the intention of meeting girls.. I was young, free and single!!) but I never took any nice photos with the group, it was more of a social event, and I’d made plenty of friends outside the group so I stopping going.

Anyway, I’d not really taken many photos for about 3 years but I started again recently and heard about the group on Fiona’s blog and thought I’d give it a go.

They mostly meet in the daytime during the week which isn’t so good for me but have occasional weekend meetups, which is where I ended up last weekend, in the pouring rain..

They were a nice group and I actually took some semi-decent pics for a change, a few of them were featured on Shanghaiist this week (just shows how standards have dropped…), anyway, enough babbling I’ll just get on with it

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