Raft Trip at Longhu Shan ("Dragon-Tiger Mountain")

In 2004 my wife and I took a trip to Jiangxi, an inland province that, while no doubt changing rapidly, is still lagging behind the coastal regions in terms of development. (Personally, I think a little less comfort and a little more local flavor makes a trip more interesting, but that’s for another post.) While there, we visited Mount Lu and a truly poor rural village, among other places, but one experience that also sticks out in my memory is the raft trip we took at Longhu Shan.

(video by CIT)

One great thing about China is that you can truly get away from it all there, especially in inland rural areas like Jiangxi. This raft trip was a profoundly relaxing experience. Check out the trained cormorants catching fish for the fisherman on one of the rafts! (On our Yunnan Highlands Local Culture 11-Day Tour, you might see cormorant fishermen in action on Lake Er at Dali.)

(video by CIT)

Waaaaaarm beer! Peanuts! Get yer warm beer and peanuts! A bamboo raft trip at Longhu Shan: just like a baseball game, but without that loud obnoxious drunk shouting and crowding your space, and without the threat of a foul ball bashing your head in unexpectedly, and...ok, it's nothing like a baseball game; it's much better, though that beer could have used a little refrigeration. And that raft vendor could use a little more charismatic sales patter. (Our tours that include Guilin feature a raft trip like this one; those that include Kunming, Dali, the Three Gorges, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Zhouzhuang, and/or Suzhou all feature gondola or boat trips that you may find even more relaxing or stimulating.)

(video by CIT)

During the last part of the trip, we walked overland as the bamboo rafts were portaged past an impassable section of the river. It was a good opportunity to get some footage of the beautiful farmland in the area, record the deafening sound of the obnoxious local cicadas, check out an ancient Taoist temple (where an immortality pill was created by a Taoist master, who's unfortunately no longer around to tell us how he did it), and take a rickshaw ride. At one point during the walk, a local man started to talk with me, and you can hear him saying that I look like an American before the conversation is cut off. (The identification of "Caucasian" with "American" is very common in China, and comments like that always make me want to launch into a lecture about why such assumptions are wrong - but maybe he just meant that my flagrantly casual clothing and wide-eyed, foolish manner were unmistakably American, in which case I can't argue with him.) After the raft trip resumed, we watched a flashy "cliff acrobat" rappel down the side of the mountain as a prelude to a "hanging coffin" show; the area was once home to a minority (non-Han) culture that placed its coffins in grottoes in the cliff face. Unfortunately, either my battery or my tape ran out at that point, so I was unable to record what followed. (If you’re interested in these “hanging coffins,” our tours that include the Three Gorges feature a boat trip that will allow you to see similar ones.)

Progress in China

“Progress” is a word that carries all kinds of philosophical and historical baggage. However, progress of some sort is undoubtedly being made in China, and foreign visitors are invariably impressed by the speed and scope of the changes there. On our most recent trip to China in November, we saw all of the usual and obvious signs of this progress—new buildings under construction, massive public works projects, infrastructural developments, people earning and spending money everywhere, technology being integrated more and more into everyday life. But there was one small fact in particular that seemed incredibly significant to me: even while we were in a remote, rural mountain area, we were able to get perfect cell phone reception deep down in a cavern and also in a mountain tunnel. Wow. Having a crystal-clear conversation with people on the other side of the planet as you walk among stalactites and stalagmites definitely makes an impression.

Progress: A "touchmedia" screen
with advertisements and visitor
information in a Shanghai taxi.
(photo by CIT)



Progress? Now you can
find Pabst Blue Ribbon even
in remote areas of China.
(photo by CIT)



Local beer, properly bottled,
not made with formaldehyde.
Ahh...Now THAT'S progress!
(photo by CIT)

As an American who values what our political system gives us, I certainly wouldn’t want to exchange our system for China’s. But these days China has an unquestionable ability to Get Things Done. What China has been able to accomplish in the last 25 years is truly remarkable, and other countries can certainly learn from China’s successes. A couple of months ago, Time published an insightful article about this issue called "5 Things We Can Learn from China." It's definitely worth a look, and in fact there are links on that page to a number of articles that should interest anyone wanting to understand contemporary China. Happy reading!