By Evan
Ok, this will be a short one, just to let you know that we haven’t died in a horrible rice wine / fireworks accident over CNY.
As I write now, we’ve crossed the border of Guangdong from Fujian, which is arguably the most colorful province we’ve visited so far (in really tight competition with Zhejiang). We’re currently sitting deep in Hakka (客家) territory in an old town called Chayang (茶阳镇), with an old section that seems to have once been very beautiful but is just rotting to pieces before everybody’s uncaring eyes. Other than that, these Hakkas have a unique (that I know of) tradition of hanging red lanterns (红灯笼) over their doors with the family’s last name printed on them. Very cool, but I digress.
Anyhow, after the last post, we entered the southwest corner of Fujian, the home of the famous Tulou, of which Andy has been posting many and several exquisite photos. We’re working on a post about that at present, hopefully to come out soon.
We ended up spending our New Year in a place called Luxi (芦溪镇) with a peasant family surnamed Ye (叶, the common surname to all in the village) right next to a Tulou. It was a beautiful experience, and needless to say is destined to be written into its own post).
Since the jubilation of CNY a few days ago, there has been a doom cloud hovering over our heads, and it’s really beginning to wear on us. First off, it was cool that everything was closed up for the holiday when we had a family to treat us to food. Since then, the lack of open restaurants and open price gouging due to the season has begun to boil the blood. Worse than that, however, is the interminable cold rain that has stretched itself over southern China like a bum in front of a liquor store. We tried to wait it out for a while, but the weather forecast calls for rain for as far as the predictions stretch. In the last two days, we’ve decided to roll through the rain, but the recent loss of my poncho (and my sleeping bag, for that matter) is making runs through cold weather nearly intolerable. We’d stop for a while, of course, but as my visa expires in 8 days, and we’ve got 450 km between Chayang and Shenzhen, we’re going to be caught in a grind between the behemoth forces of nature and PRC immigration policy. If you’ve got weather rockets, please fire them. If you’ve got an open line to the man in the sky, please put in a good word for us. If you’re Irish, please send us some good sad ditties about the rain.
More coming soon. Good night, and happy Year of the Tiger from all of us at PLBX!
