Weird Mountains

Dr. Seuss must’ve visited Yangshuo. The mountains there are strange, disconnected—plopped as an afterthought atop a plain of rice patties and marshes. One looks like a rumpled Sorting Hat, another, a Diglett. There are Bird Beaks and Mashed Potatoes and Totems and Marshmallows and Others that surely inspired The Lorax.

I visited this lovely, mystifying area, located in the Southern province of Guangxi, during Chinese National Holiday. The National Holiday celebrates the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, a monumental event only overshadowed by the installation of the world’s first automatic streetlights in Connecticut, the testing of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, and the birth of Meryl Streep. The Holiday ushers in one of China’s two Golden Weeks—seven days of vacation, frolic, and paid holidays for employees.

I traveled with a group of eight others, a tiny pocket of familiar faces amongst China’s 1.3 billion people, all of whom seemed to take the 20-hour train ride from Shanghai to Guilin, a city near Yangshuo, for their Holiday. We were fortunate to ride in the hard-sleeper car on the train, an area smushed with three-tiered bunk beds, squashed pillows, and squatty potties. One group of Pepperdine students last year had, apparently, failed to purchase hard-sleeper tickets and were forced into a car with standing room only for a 30-hour train ride. To me, this is bu hao (not good) and our group made sure we did not repeat the experience.

The ride itself passed without much event, although I was mocked for ordering two bowls of mifan (white rice) in the dining car without a main dish of pork or chicken or fish head. Apparently, ordering only rice in China is like ordering only butter in the United States. You get strange looks.

Other than that, and the fact that the bathroom walls were splattered with an unidentifiable liquid, it was as if we were on a Chinese-muggle version of the Hogwarts Express. Every thirty minutes or so, a fruit trolley would pass by, and we bought grapes, and apples, and jujubes, and we wished they were chocolate frogs stuffed with Mao Zedong and Confucius cards.

The morning after we arrived in Yangshuo, we woke at dawn and sunrise-hiked to the top of a Diglett, where the men of the group proceeded to take “epic” photographs, otherwise known as Johnny Bravo posing. After admiring God’s creativity, we then experienced a three-hour kayaking adventure, followed by a scenic, four-hour bike journey that ended in a tour of the Buddha Water Cave, where a man bathing in mud yelled “white people!” at us.

The next day, tianqi xiayu le (it rained). It rained, and we hiked, and gulped clean air, and ate banana pancakes and drank hot chocolate, and my heart and mind and body and spirit were replenished and refreshed, and I remembered what it felt like to be fully alive and fully awake and fully present, three “fullys” that I had not yet experienced in China. But now I remember, and now I am awake. Let the morning bring signs of God’s love.