bamboo and bonfires

(9th-10th/11/2013)
Yibin Bamboo Sea, Sichuan Province
Location: 330km from Chengdu, a six hour bus journey.
Famed For: Being one of the locations for the filming of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

'On Bonfire Night we should remember not to set fire to people'

                                                                                                                                                                  -Student quote of the week

Remember, remember, the fifth of November. Gunpowder, treason and teaching.

Bonfire night is a complicated lesson to give and makes me homesick for funfair food and muddy fields, cold feet clad in wellies, the flash of fireworks, and the smell of bonfires. It's always been a festival I've particularly enjoyed- a gory history lesson and an opportunity to set stuff on fire in the name of tradition. To be so far away from home is a little galling, but instead I channel all of my enthusiasm for this most British of celebrations into my lesson.I retell the story and show my students a clip of an experiment demonstrating what would have happened had Guy Fawkes been successful in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. Cue impressive explosion. I also show them a gory firework safety video, inducing shock, disgust and a lot of wincing from the students. I get them to list as many firework safety tips as possible, leading to some rather brilliant quotes from my students:  

 

Student a: Don't light bonfires indoors.

Student b: Don't light bonfires near gas stations.

Student c: Don't set fire to your clothes or other people's clothes.
Student d: Don't put fireworks in people. This may cause a mess.

As an experiment I also get them to be defence lawyers for Guy Fawkes. I list points on the board for them to use in their speech if they wish to but encourage them to come up with their own ideas. Of course, most of them then slavishly follow my bullet notes until my last student, Sue, who stands up and declares:

 

'I am the defence lawyer for Guy Fawkes. He is innocent. He was not trying to blow up King James, he just wanted to show him a new kind of firework.'

 

Historically accurate it may not be, but I have to give her points for creativity.

I spend my weekend as far from fireworks and the heat of bonfires as possible- being mostly damp at Yibin Bamboo sea.

It's something out of a half forgotten fairytale. The bamboo forest is dark and dense, mist filled and endless. We pass rock with deep grooves slashed into the stone as though carved by the claws of a giant bear. Statues emerge from amongst the foliage, stone figures frozen in time, toads in the river waiting for a kiss. There are great waterfalls that pour over cliffs and disappear into the bamboo below, temple fortresses cut into the sides of cliffs, labyrinthine tunnels, steep, winding paths clinging to the face of the mountain, and the occasional group of monks, clustered around an altar, praying, their thin maroon robes fluttering in the wind.

 

And hidden somewhere in amongst all of that greenery are wild pandas.

 

The Bamboo Sea, however, is also home to a rather large mosquito population and the world's most boring museum, the Bamboo Museum. Whilst it is impressive to see just how many different things you can make out of bamboo (furniture, vehicles, weaponry, paper and even clothing to name but a few), after a while there's only so many bamboo artefacts you can look at before it all becomes so much vegetation in varying shapes. It's the foliage equivalent of going to a balloon animal museum (which would probably be more fun). It's saving grace is that it's free. (And no, we did not choose to go there, we hired a car and driver for the weekend who took us on the standard tour route. Who knows how many others have suffered before us?)

 

 

The Bamboo Sea is also a rather humid place, giving me Monica in Barbados hair, and the guest house we stop at unpleasantly wet beds. K, however, discovers electric blankets and instead of being cold and damp at night we are now warm and damp, as though we are sleeping in a slightly moist armpit. The guest house also has a bathroom that clearly took it's design construct from the corridor in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory that gets narrower and lower the further in you go. As a consequence we have to become bent double to get to the toilet at the far end of the room. On the upside, the food is good and we feast on a meal of rice, shredded potato and ginger, beef strips and, unsurprisingly, bamboo.

The Bamboo Sea's claim to fame is that not only is it stunning, it was one of the shooting locations for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Eager to set out and explore we start early the next day; in fact so early that our driver is still asleep and has to be hunted down and woken up by our guest house owner, Joan, (who turns out to be the driver's aunt, or cousin, or his sister, we never quite understand) and when we arrive at the first cable car to take us up into the park it isn't even open.

 

After a half hour wait the cable car centre finally opens and we buy our tickets and walk through the deserted hanger to queue up for the cars, which turn out to be tiny, two seater boxes, made in the seventies and not updated since. They creak ominously and have no glass in the front windows. Or safety bars. Lean out too far and you could meet a very long drop very quickly into the forest below. Or at least what we presume to be a forest. We can only see the tops of the trees and the car in front because the mist is thick. Very thick. It's like going through cloud soup. Still, it makes it atmospheric if nothing else. You could make a good fantasy film here. Or a horror.

 

The cars, surprisingly, make it to the other side. Here there is more mist and more bamboo. In the search for the right path we almost walk into a bunch of Chinese tourists who appear out of the mist and then disappear again just as quickly. We head off after them in what we think is the right direction and find another cable car. This one, however, is much more modern, able to hold our group of seven and a Japanese family of five as well as the cable car operator comfortably. There is a recorded message playing in Chinese over the speakers in the car, telling us, we can only presume, about the spectacular views we are seeing as we cross over the sea of bamboo. The amazing vistas, the number of miles the bamboo stretches out for, the historical significance of the area. Instead, all we can see is a sea of white nothingness as though everything outside of the car has been erased.

 

It isn't until midday that the mist eventually clears enough for us to see what all the fuss is about. The view is spectacular. An endless stretch of undulating green as far as the eye can see, a mountain rising up to the north, terraced paddy fields to the west, a valley of waving trees to the south. Water criss-crossing the landscape in silvery veins. The air is crisp and fresh and cold.

 

Towering behind us is a sheer cliff face and we make our way up the snaking pathways and through the rock itself. We cross over a little lake manned by a tiny Chinese woman who ferries us over on a raft of bamboo. We walk down four waterfalls and slog our way back up again. We eat more bamboo. I get bitten. We don bright orange life vests and grab a bamboo paddle to man a raft and boat our way around a rather bleak looking lake. We almost lose our driver. We nearly forget one of our party, W, who goes to buy a drink as we all clamber into the taxis and it isn't until we've gone half way down the road that we realise we're one short. We take endless pictures and sweat our way up and down muddy paths and thoroughly exhaust ourselves, eventually making it back to the coach for the six hour journey back to Chengdu.

 

 

And when my students ask me what I did at the weekend, I tell them I went out for some fresh air.