The Long Road Home

Finally here I am in the town of Songpan. I arrived here 2500m up in the mountains of northern Sichuan yesterday evening. It’s taken me four days of climbing to get here. I’m stopping for a rest for a day, and just now am sitting under an umbrella having green tea by the covered wooden bridge, with all its fancy plaster dragons and doglike things with horns and big teeth madly running on its roof tiles.

Songpan has a bit of a wild west feel, like a frontier town. There’s a watchhouse on the hill above the town with a massive stone base, little upturned wooden eaves and flags flying. The town has massive surrounding walls with gatehouses under which the roads enter through tunnels. There are Tibetan women in thick cloaks down to their feet, red headscarves, and heavy silver buckles round their waists. There are men in wool cloaks with handwoven bags slung over one shoulder, and sort of cowboy hats. Young men from the hills are wearing huge sheepskin coats swaggering, jumping on tatty motorcycles. I was quite nervous to talk to people but it seems OK; a fierce dark Tibetan man in cloak and hat smiled and said goodnight very gently last night when I walked by and spoke to him. Tibetan ladies with gold teeth and big round things like oranges tied in their hair turned out to speak Mandarin and told me about their children at school. There are lots of Muslims here too, bicycling around, all neat in white hats. You can buy saddles and leather stuff (?tack) in the shops.

The ride to get here was really hard, so I would just eat and sleep in the evenings. I didn’t write till now. Now I’m catching up.

As soon as I left Dujiangyan down on the Chengdu plain there was aleady a stiff climb in hot sun, zigzagging alongside the Min River. That first part had loads of scary lorries and buses. The road surface was poor, and I was struggling at edge with bumps and potholes with lorries grinding past. There were bends after bends up the valley, and tunnels which people were driving madly through, overtaking etc. Wet and potholes in the dark in a tunnel with crazy lorries is a bit frightening. People mainly were driving madly. When you see roadsigns saying ‘lots of bends, no overtaking’ actually it means ‘watch out there’ll be people doing lunatic manoeuvres on blind bends’. Just blast your horn and go.  I didn’t really enjoy it. The river was green and wide in deep rock gorge with monstrous dams and engineering works and sluices with water spurting white and huge.

I made it to Wenchuan and stopped in a hotel with the river on one side and a coffee shop on the other. The stars over the river were really bright. The plough upsidedown. The coffee was gorgeous.

The next day was at first fantastically sunny with deep blue sky. Everything was cheerful. Ten ladies in red costumes were banging drums and gongs at the toll gate out of town for some reason, and suddenly cheered me along shouting ‘ni hen xiong’. People say this a lot here. I thought it meant ‘you are very fierce’, but I now realise it means ‘you are heroic’. I decided it was too sunny to be heroic and I would go slow and stop a lot. There were suddenly mountains with SNOW on the top. It’s surprisingly thrilling to see snow. I ate pears and minuscule cherries sitting above the Min River looking east at the snowy mountains. There were Qiang watchtowers, some all smartly tidied up, some just jagged stumps on the hill tops. Hollyhocks, roses, yellow marigolds at the roadside, and deep pink vetch, and little purple lilies. There were blue flowering bushes like people have in gardens in England. The river was now paler green and sometimes white over rocks. I ate a lot of piba fruit which people sell at the roadside and I think are loquats.. Gorgoeus like apricots but with smooth skin and several slippy pips inside. I went in a tiny temple with a statue covered in cloaks above a stony village. There were fewer and fewer villages. The road wound up and up with gigantic cliffs above and mountains on and on ranging ahead. On a windy corner I saw a hand-done sign for ‘dragon king temple’. I went down the path and there was a little tiled shed with three statues inside, looking out over the river bend far below through the wind. It was lonely up there. The sky had clouded over. A huge wind blew up dragging the bike across the road. I stopped at the town of Maoxian. The town was full of women in extraordinary pink gowns with long apron strings down their backs. I ate delicious flat bread from a stall and get wet in a big storm with a lot of lightning.

The next morning was just gorgeously sunny. The moon was still white above white snow mountains when I woke up. I had tea at a mosque with a man called Mr Ma. The town of Maoxian had a kind of seaside feel, with lots of hotels on the edge of town with plaster walls painted pink or cream (nice) or blue (not). I brew coffee at the roadside above the river, looking for birds which as usual failed to appear. The rock faces at the roadside look like shale, all flaking and splitting, and there are big sweeps of gravel where little bits are trickling down, rather worryingly. The village houses were mainly plaster with odd little triangular ears poking up at the corners, and people decorated the front with animal horns. Even public toilets had ears.. Suddenly the road went into hairpin bends. There were laburnums with the flowers blowing off and I was getting confused with the shadows and the flowers blowing. Also quite tired. I had noodles at a stall selling dried mushrooms, where the people turned out to be Tibetans. A cute three- year old girl with ruler-straight fringe who only knew her name in Tibetan. Her father told me how pleased everyone was that the government had cut rural taxes and abolished school fees last year. Cheering up the rural population seemed working well there. The hairpins went on and on reaching deep into the mountains. I didn’t expect to go so high. It was wild and lonely. I stopped high above the vast empty valley near a shrine draped with silk coloured cloth, with paper spirit money blowing off over the edge of the road, and the river far far below. I ate oranges and made quite a mess.

The little settlements didn’t have any guest houses so I camped for the night on a stony terrace above the river. There were prickly trees, maybe loquats. I’m not sure.

The next morning was misty grey and completely still. The sun almost burned through a couple of times like a yellow circle but then failed. There were no shadows and the only sound was the river. I was getting almost dizzy looking at the river waves on rocks and hearing only water on and on day after day. Even when it’s out of sight belwo the road you can hear the water echoing from the rock walls. When I first heard that I thought it was a waterfall somewherw, but it’s just the river. I had tea at a village to talk with people and liven myslef up. The house had a wood stove and cosy seats round three sides, with three kettles on the stove.

There were now white anemones, blue speedwell, buttercup like things, or celandine, bushes with pink flowers, pink dog roses, may bushes in bloom, and very bright pale purple violets. The wild flowers are really great. Spring is a good season to be doing this. There were goats on the mountainsides and conifers. Some large black crows. The houses were now dry stone with wooden cabins above. Quite fancy beams and balusters and carvings. There were footbridges slung across the river. Children were scuffing around the hills near villages with little syckles collecting some kind of grasses and putting them in homemade rucksacks made from grain sacks.

It started to rain and I stopped at a village shop. The women invite me in and I had rather a lot of their homemade bread sitting at their wood stove, all cosy. They were Muslim Hui people. They feel sorry for me that I don’t have children (this very common) and try to give me their baby to take back to England. He’s in a wicker papoose basket, sort of standing up. The neighbours come in, a lady with a lovely smiling face, who says she’s Tibetan. Her birthday is almost exactly the same as mine, and her mum and dad exactly the same age as you, M and D.  Her daughter does a dance for everyone, all fingers and wiggling her head. They try and give me the daughter, who looks surprisingly enthusiastic to be donated to strange foreign woman with a muddy bike.

It’s cold and windy. I go on through one long valley after another, now with conifer forests up the mountainsides. Slowly the peaks ahead get less high, and I’m looking round each new bend for the grasslands which I think there are around Songpan. Suddenly there is open space and grass and brown cows with bells. Some people in cloaks trot by on ponies (very exciting). Some Buddhist monks appear getting out of a minivan and tangle around with their purple cloaks getting into another minivan. Also very exciting. And then at last I arrive in the town of Songpan. Phew. Hot water and nice clean sheets! Bread! A day not riding a bike uphill! It’s been LOVELY to stop here. I’ve had about eight refills of tea and will stop writing now, and look for some dinner.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 21st, 2006 at 10:58 am and is filed under On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.