Of holidays, angry rivers and memorable bus journeys
Hello, greetings from China. This is Owen and this is my podcast for Friday 5th December, 2014. First of all I'd like to mention that the new mobile app for our podcasts is now up and running. The PodClub App allows you to listen to all the latest podcasts in all five languages. It's available for you to download for free from the App Store or from Google Play. If you didn't quite catch all of that you can find all the information on our website. As I mentioned in my first podcast last month, Kunming, my new home, is sometimes called ‘The City of Eternal Spring'. Now, I'm a little confused as to how Kunming got that nickname [1]. Autumn here was rather short and now it's cold, almost wintery cold and we aren't even close to the depths [2] of winter. Houses and apartments in Kunming and in the rest of South China don't have central heating. In fact they don't have radiators or heaters of any kind. My apartment is very open with a large living room and dining room and lots of big and thin windows. So, as you can imagine, my apartment is very cold now that the temperature has dropped. Even colder than outside! Still to come on today's show, I'm going to be talking about Chinese national holidays, a different part of the Yunnan province and a rather memorable bus journey.
*
There are many strange things about China. Many things I don't understand. An example of this is that everybody in China - and by everybody I mean almost everybody - goes on holiday at the same time. There are two main national holidays. Everybody gets these holidays and they tend to be the only holidays they get. The first one is usually in late January or early February. It's a week's holiday they have for Chinese New Year. The second holiday is at the beginning of October. 1st October is China's National Day. 1st October to 7th October is a holiday for all Chinese. If anyone is planning a trip to China, I wouldn't recommend visiting during that week. Those days are generally a good time to get out of China. Buying a train ticket for the beginning or end of these holidays is nearly impossible. It's a time everyone goes back to their hometowns and this results in a big scramble [3] for train and bus tickets. This year though my girlfriend and I went against my own advice and decided to explore a corner of our new home province, Yunnan. My girlfriend and I went to the Nujiang valley. The Nujiang is a river that starts in Tibet before entering north-western Yunnan, which is the area we visited during our holiday. The river then continues into Myanmar. Further south it forms the border between Thailand and Myanmar. And in the end it flows into the Andaman Sea. The river is named after the Nu minority who live along the river. However, because the Chinese don't have a phonetic alphabet, they chose a character which is pronounced the same. The Nu in Nujiang means ‘rage [4]', so Nujiang can be translated into English as ‘the raging river' or ‘the angry river'. And I can assure you that that is a very good name for the river. We didn't see a single boat on the river. It is only at the mouth of the river in Burma where boats can navigate. The Nujiang is the longest free-flowing river in China. This means there are no dams along the river, although there have been plans to build dams. However, the people living in the area have been very strong in their opposition. They have also received a lot of support from environmental organisations and agencies who are worried about the damage a dam would do to the area. For the moment I don't think any construction is taking place.
*
From Kunming it is a long distance to get to the Nujiang valley. We chose to take a night bus which left Kunming at six in the evening and arrived in a town called Fugong at ten in the morning the next day. We didn't drive for all those hours because, apparently, the main road in the valley is too dangerous to drive on in the night. So, after driving for about eight hours and arriving at the south end of the valley, we had to stop and wait for the first light of the morning before we could continue our trip. I didn't really mind because I sleep very well on buses and it doesn't matter whether the bus is moving or not. During our stop a group of men, who were on their way home for the holiday, decided to get off the bus and have a few drinks. In the early hours of the morning, when the driver decided it was time to continue the trip, the group of men got back on to the bus. The strong smell of alcohol followed them onto the bus and they were in a very merry mood. They settled back into their seats and it went nice and quiet as the bus slowly started moving again. However, it didn't stay quiet for very long because one of the men was in no mood for sleep. Instead, he really wanted to sing a song. Unfortunately for him none of his friends wanted to join him. And unfortunately for everyone else on the bus that didn't stop him from singing. So this is how it went for a good hour: he sang a few lines, then stopped for a moment and called his friend “Ardhu! Ardhu!”. Ardhu didn't answer, so he started singing again on his own for a couple more lines, then stopped and called “Ardhu! Ardhu!”. No answer, so he started singing again, but only the first two lines of the song. And again ‘Ardhu! Ardhu!”. At this point Ardhu drunkenly managed to mumble [5] ‘I'm tired, I want to sleep'. But that didn't stop the drunkard from singing. That is until his wife interrupted. This led to an even louder argument between the wife and her husband. She, however, didn't have the energy to argue for very long. So the whole bus had to continue listening to the drunk man singing the first two lines of the same song over and over again, stopping only to loudly encourage his friend to join in. Ardhu, however, never joined in. Now, nobody on the bus seemed to mind too much. At no point did anyone tell him to shut up. I've noticed that the Chinese have a very large tolerance for noise. It's a very loud country. But on top of that I think the fellow passengers recognised that this was the first day of his long awaited holiday. And nobody was going to stop him from enjoying it. As for me, I couldn't stop laughing.
*
Eventually we arrived at our destination. And I must say, it is a breathtakingly [6] beautiful place. We were very fortunate with the weather. On all of the days we spent walking and hiking in the valley we had beautiful blue skies. Where we were the river is rather narrow [7] and flows very fast. There are many bridges crossing the river. And on either side of the river the mountains rise steeply into the sky, with snow visible on some of the peaks [8]. In the valley itself it can feel very cold and dark. It's almost as if the mountains are perfectly vertical and reach all the way into the clouds. On some nights we camped in the valley and we wouldn't see the sun until about eleven o'clock in the morning. As well as the Nu, there are two other ethnic groups in the area, Tibetans and the Lisu. And most of them are Christians. We spent our first night in a Christian Tibetan village. From there we hiked to the top of a mountain and camped out in a Christian Lisu village. It was a little strange to see Christian churches in such remote areas of China. All in all it was a fantastic week.
*
Before I go, I'd like to thank everyone who left a comment on our website after my first podcast. I was very happy to read all of your kind messages. And a special thank you to Maya for being the first. Now as Raphaela mentioned in her comment, China and the United States have agreed to new goals in cutting emissions, which was announced during the APEC [9] meeting in Beijing. And it was very interesting how blue the sky was in Beijing for the meeting. That particular shade [10] of blue has a new name in China, it's now called APEC blue. Often when important people visit Beijing, the authorities manage to make the air pollution disappear. But why can't they improve the air quality for people who actually live there? This is the question more and more people are asking. Well, that's it for my second podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions about life in China that you'd like to ask me, please write them in the comment box on our website www.podclub.ch. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions you have. I'll be back with my next podcast on 5th January. I didn't have time to tell you much about Beijing in this podcast, but I will next time. I'll also be talking about a day they call Single's Day in China. Until next time! Goodbye!
Glossaire: Owen in China [1] nickname: an informal name for something or someone
[2] depths: here: middle
[3] scramble: here: a race for tickets
[4] rage: violent anger
[5] mumble: to speak quietly and unclearly
[6] breathtakingly: extremely
[7] narrow: having a small distance from one side to the other
[8] peak: the top of a mountain
[9] APEC: Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
[10] shade: a type
