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Published: October 21st 2011
Village of Taxia
Amidst the buses and clamour of tourists, this village is, I imagine, so serene without the fuss of all the extra eyes looking at them. Gorgeous. I am writing this blog entry almost 2 weeks since I visited the Hakka houses; none-the-less, the memory of the trip is still much with me. The cinnamon/paprika coloured dirt hills, the huge black and neon blue butterflies hovering mid-air, and very unfortunately, the garbage everywhere. Leafy bamboo canopies black as pitch underneath in full daylight. Prong-horned cows and bulls here and there.....it felt so GOOD to be rural. LOL I didn't realize how much I enjoy my small town life and its proximity to nothing but "outside" until that moment. I relaxed in the "green" and breathed sweet clear air. Everything in China is loud; it is a very noisy culture, we find. The sheer population, the fact that that many people living, dying and otherwise going about their businesses in such close proximity to one another creates a heck of a pile of noise and even less privacy. There was a constant stacatto of vehicle horns startling passengers and other drivers from the many, many tours buses ferrying Chinese tourists on this day because this was part of the National Day Week and the Chinese were enjoying their time off. Joyce and I often are so glad to just
Enroute to Taxia
Picture I took through the bus window of one of the many towns we passed through. be home and quiet. No tv, no radio, no nothing. Even then, there is often a lot of racket outside...someone is always making a fracas about who-knows-what! Couples argue in the evening, late into the evening, fueled by liquor and maybe who forgot to buy rice or who didn't pick up his socks. Kids play outside at 11 pm and even later sometimes! The children here don't seem to go to bed till late at night yet rise quite early to be at school. We are long sick of our children and have put them to bed hours earlier in Canada--we tell them it's good for them but we all know that sometimes those early bed-times are good for us and our sanities! LMAO! The tour bus intercom was seemingly specially designed to cause one to become deaf...how considerate, you say? What? Still can't hear what is being said? (As IF!!) No worries, the speaker will SHOUT EVERYTHING INTO THE MICROPHONE to ensure that you hear the message! I jumped at every roaring announcement and had to cover my ears to survive the message delivered at way, WAY too many decibals. Horn honking is almost a national sport here. And
Hakka House
Glimpse from the hill of a real round house, a Toulou. Amazing! because pedestrians have no rights at all, we share the wide and colourfully tiled sidewalks with cars, motorized bikes, mopeds, and somebody is always, always around you, behind, in front of, beside and lots of times above and below one as well. And nobody, NOBODY is really safe on the bloody sidewalks--a car or other form of motorized transport is honking behind you or coming at you head-on and its up to YOU to get out of the way! I have hit a couple of cars' hoods loudly with my fist to communicate my displeasure at being an almost victim! Once when I was walking with Joyce a car backed into her, and luckily she was unharmed. Yikes.
Ah well, I digress, back to the Hakka visit. Our trip to Taxia was long. 3 hours by bus (a bathroomless bus, I note unhappily--yeesh) and we were told to be ready and waiting at our closest bus stop by 7:10 am. Pfffft. The Chinese are wonderful, but punctuality is not one of their strong suits and they are far more patient than Canadians, so these sorts of delays don't even register with them! We waited and waitied and waited. I
Street Vendor
Peeling fruit to sell at the first "viewpoint" stop. There were tons of vendors selling souvenirs, food, drink, etc. everywhere on the tour. Love the traditional hat, eh? inhaled an intensely unhealthy quota of bus fumes, cough, cough. Revolting. I had to use my ventolin inhaler to get relief from that. Finally, almost an hour late, the bus pulled up on the opposite side of the road. That doesn't sound like such a big deal but lemme tell ya, this is not the place to cross the road without really picking a strategic spot, such as a cross-walk. Ha! Cross walks are still a crap-shoot in terms of crossing safely, ie: making it across ALIVE! AND, AND, most importantly ALWAYS look both ways, because there are usually motorists driving AGAINST the grain of the traffic flow! WILD! Suicidal. Whatever! We are almost immune to it now. LOL Joyce and I had to walk quite a ways to an overhead pedestrian overpass. We were the last people to be picked up. Little did we realize just what that meant. It was not good. We were sandwiched into all the leftover passenger seats here and there. No chances for conversation. I was especially unfortunate in that I got stuck in the seat with the least amount of leg room. Yes, I am only 5'2" on a good day......you do the
Square Hakka House
Side view of a square Hakka building. math....it was a seat for a midget, Jezuz! So picture it, me, scrunched into smallest seat ever installed in a motor vehicle ....I was sure wondering where my angels were THAT moment lemme tell ya! The older man beside me commenced farting away nonchalantly and loudly, not even trying to hide it, yuk, yuk and yuk! Buddy! Pullease! I glared at him--he evidently didn't CARE that I was giving him my death stare or that I was entertaining seriously sick, sadistic and very satisfying murderous fantasies involving him. Stop it already, like, seriously, what the &*(# ?
About an hour into the trip, the bus stopped for a break at a large outdoor market with fruit, cookies and liquor. Liquor with a sting......YOWCH! There were snakes and scorpions stuffed inside the bottles! Ewwwwww! And bathrooms that Satan himself wouldn't even use....I smelled the head long before I saw it. Never a good sign. I opened the door with my foot and decided that I would rather pee in my pants than use that latrine soooooooo regretting I had not thought to wear some depends like a smart astronaut lady. I trudged back to the bus trying not to think
Persimmons
A Persimmon tree loaded with fruits. The street vendors sold peeled persimmons. I ate one, and it was quite tasty, if a bit perfumy. Interesting. about having to go......pee.......my new mantra? I do NOT have to pee, I do NOT have to pee....no no no no no no! LoL I would have even preferred peeing on myself but whatever. Who have I become in this country, anyway? LOL Yikes. 44 and bathroom issues. Suddenly. How very Freudian.
I concentrated on the scenery to avoid thinking about having to pee, and the drive was interesting, fascinating, with gorgeous scenery once we reached the hills and mountains. The drive was dangerous...that is a given in China. Cars weave in and out of traffic, around buses and other vehicles. Car seats do not seem to exist for children at all. People pack themselves into vehicles, don't use seat belts and often ride in the back of little pick-ups, wind whipping them and forcing them into huddling compactly behind the cabs. Yup. People are maniacs on the roads.
After another couple of hours we stopped at the place where we'd board smaller tour buses and had some lunch consisting of fried sardiney type fish, rice, savory custard, rice, stir fried zuchinni or squash, soup, green seaweed and also stir fried greens, and some kind of unidentified meat.
Stop # 1
Fruit market with the stinging liquor and the satanic bathrooms. Ewwww. Yeah, NOT eating that mystery meat. I'm adventurous, but there is a limit. We had our suspicions about what it might be but we never did confirm anything! LOL I am definitely on a reduced protein diet during this vacation. LOL There was some great oolong tea, though, lol and overall lunch was alright and the place was clean. Clean is good. I LIKE clean. LOL
Then it was time to climb the mountains by bus, thankfully! Our buses climbed and climbed. The mountainside views curdled my blood, er, I mean, stole my breath away! Naw, it was just the crazy driving and our sometimes excruciatingly close proximity to the abyss below which rattled me! I was enchanted by the scenery. I would have loved to have spent the rest of my time in China in this verdant and intensely beautiful part of Fujian. Old China is gorgeous. Great flocks of white geese content to sit by the waters' edge and watch the world float or swim by. Green. Crumbling buildings. And the Toulou. So amazing. Words are inadequate so I'll just say check out the photos. I have spent quite a lot of time combing through the pictures
Two old fellas
Outside the big round house in Taxia. They were watching the world go by..... to share the very best ones with you BUT even so, have endured a lot of challenges uploading pictures and video. Therefore, I have not put the pictures back into order, and I apologize for that, but it is simply too labour intensive so just enjoy them knowing that they're out of sequence, okay? The Drive home provided ample time for reflection and comtemplative silence, even if Mr. Stinky was now falling asleep on me. Sheesh! He had no concept of personal boundaries. LOL Whatever. I can laugh now! Stay tuned...the next blog details a Chinese wedding!
And as for the history of the place itself, I have blatantly ripped this information STRAIGHT from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This is what it said about Fujian Tulou, an UNESCO World Heritage Site. Fujian Tulou (Chinese: 福建土楼; pinyin: Fújiàn Tǔlóu, "Fujian earthen structures") is a type of Chinese rural dwellings of the Hakka and others in the mountainous areas in southeastern Fujian, China. They were mostly built between the 12th and the 20th centuries.
A tulou is usually a large, enclosed and fortified earth building, rectangular or circular in configuration, with very thick load-bearing rammed earth walls between three
Side VIew
The belly of the Hakka....up close and personal with it. Massive in person, these round houses are quite something. and five storeys high and housing up to 80 families. Smaller interior buildings are often enclosed by these huge peripheral walls which can contain halls, storehouses, wells and living areas, the whole structure resembling a small fortified city.
The fortified outer structures are formed by compacting earth, mixed with stone, bamboo, wood and other readily available materials, to form walls up to 6 feet (1.8 m) thick. Branches, strips of wood and bamboo chips are often laid in the wall as additional reinforcement. The end result is a well-lit, well-ventilated, windproof and earthquake-proof building that is warm in winter and cool in summer. Tulous usually have only one main gate, guarded by 4–5-inch-thick (100–130 mm) wooden doors reinforced with an outer shell of iron plate. The top level of these earth buildings has gun holes for defensive purposes.
A total of 46 Fujian Tulou sites, have been inscribed in 2008 by UNESCO as World Heritage Site, as "exceptional examples of a building tradition and function exemplifying a particular type of communal living and defensive organization harmonious relationship with their environment".
Since the 1980s, the Fujian Tulou has been variously called "Hakka tulou", "earth dwelling", "round
Interior
Inside one of the big roundhouses in Taxia. WOW. So busy and noisy! Yikes. It was almost stimulation overload for me. stronghouse" or simply "tulou". Tu lou (土樓) literally translates as earthen structures. Whereas Fujian Tulous's literal translation is "Fujian earthen structures", and scholars of Chinese architecture have recently standardized the term Fujian Tulou, it would be incorrect to assume that all tulou-dwellers were Hakka people; large numbers of southern Fujian people have also historically lived in tulous.
Parts of Hakka tulou belong to the Fujian Tulou category. While all south Fujian tulous belong to the Fujian Tulou category, they do not belong to "Hakka Tulou". In effect, "Fujian Tulou" is not a synonym for "tulou", but rather a special subgroup of the latter. There are more than 20,000 tulous in Fujian, while there are only around three thousand "Fujian Tulou" located in southwestern region of Fujian province, mostly in the mountainous regions of Yongding County of Longyan City and Nanjing County of Zhangzhou City. Fujian Tulou is however the official name adopted by UNESCO for all dwellings of this type.
The Fujian Tulou is defined as: "A large multi storey building in southeast Fujian mountainous region for large community living and defense, built with weight bearing rammed earth wall and wood frame structure."
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Pauline
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Great Stories
Great photos Carolyn. I continue to be amazed at the cultural differences and can only imagine some of the scenarios you have experienced. Your description of the drivers there is very reminiscent of our experiences throughout our travels in South America. If there were any seat belts, they were only for the driver and street signs were for decoration only. But just think of the stories you will have to share. LOL Just don't let your guard down.