A Bouyei (布依族) man in a long line of other Bouyei men and women hauls watermelons from the river to the road above. Many of these porters were in sandles, busted shoes, or barefoot. The watermelons sell for 2 yuan ($0.29) per kilogram in Guiyang.
Mar
22
2010
22
2010
The People South of the Sea
By Evan
*For less verbiage and more color, see all our pics and videos from Hainan so far here
Picking up from the last post, we ended up spending two days in Haikou for post-train R&R and a little exploration, even though it turned out to be yet another unwalkable, giant, concrete crapper overlooking the murky strait that divides it from the mainland, with a few sprinklings of palm trees here and there. After this long and so many places traveled, the ghastly state of the place is not at all a surprise, but my heart pains to think that they build the capital of their island paradise to look exactly the same as their monuments to megalomania in the Gobi Desert! After our nice dinner with some long-time residents from back stateside who follow this silly blog (thanks to Nicki, Erik, and Marian for a nice time and good advice), it was with tremendous relief that we made our exit to the southeast, even though it meant beating tropical sun and a dead-on headwind for 105 km. Incidentally, it’s redeeming to finally be in weather where I feel natural while the two northern nancy boys hyperventilate.
Speaking of northern nancy boys and this tropical island, thankfully the locals have derived a cultural phenomenonof which I never thought the Chinese capable: drinking cold tea (any self-respecting Chinese can reel off a list of dangers to health posed by cold beverage consumption, which was told to them by their grandmother) to beat the heat. After passing innumerable little tea houses on the way down, we flopped off the hot highway around the apex of the heat and into some plastic lawnchairs for tall glasses of bottomless iced red tea (turns out they use Lipton, which I still think is crazy, but it’s the ice that counts here).
Tilapia farmers of Wenchang, by Andy
As always, we were hounded immediately by the group of men sitting around their table playing cards with the same lines as always: “Where are you from? (是哪裡人!) You speak Chinese! (你會說中國話!),” etc. etc. ad nauseum. I responded with my usual puerile joke that always gets an LBX laugh or two: “Yes, we speak Mandarin, but we haven’t quite mastered your [fill in local area] language (普通話沒問題，只是還不會你們某地方話)” (more…)