Monkeys in waterfalls

January 16th 2009

Ahh my parents tell me that my blog doesn't have dates attached, so it's hard to tell when I post things. Well maybe this will start a trend, I'm not sure. Today we woke up a little later, ate breakfast with Chou and Austin: rice noodle-type things, chives, and some bok choy type stuff. After breakfast we said goodbye to Chou and took off to see the Huangguoshu waterfall cluster. We drove a few hours out of GuiYang and finally arrived at the entry to the waterfall area where we bought tickets to the three primary sites, ate lunch, and headed to the first site, the main waterfall area. We took our time walking through a large area filled with more than 100 bonsai trees of all types, and began our decent to see the waterfall.

The waterfall was beautiful. After a slow decent of picture taking merriment, we crossed a swinging bridge and began to go inside the 'curtain waterfall'. After taking the trail under the waterfall we came to a sign which explained that this very waterfall was found by a certain monkey, a very famous monkey. It turns out that this very waterfall was where the Buddhist monkey from Journey to the West lived as king with his monkey ilk. Wow. That's amazing...and depressing. I remembered the story faintly, but there were tons of monkey ilk and to be honest, the passage under the waterfall could hold 50 monkeys tops.

We returned to the car and drove to the second site. We walked through the entry passage and began walking on stepping stones leading through several ponds each labeled a different day in the year starting with January 1, January 2, etc. On the bottom of some of the plaques were Chinese characters, of which Austin assured me they were the names of famous Chinese people born on these days. We walked along until we hit March 28, anticipation was in my heart...what great hero would be born on my day, hopefully someone great, hopefully someone at all (some stones just had the date and no name listed underneath). We came to my birthday and there were three characters listed below. I looked to Austin to let me know what great person was born on this day. He was on the phone with the driver... I scowled and pressed onward to find out which brilliant individual was born on my birthday...

He covered the mouthpiece on the phone, "I have no idea, I just know that it's some famous person."

I didn't even take the time to write the name down and do the research on my own. I'm pretty sure if Austin took the time he would have seen that the three Chinese characters on the rock translated perfectly into my name, something like 'J' 'O' 'N'. We continued along the rocks to find Austin's birthday which had no name listed below the date. Carl's date wasn't even on the rocks at all, apparently December 19th and on just get left out of whatever was happening on these rocks. The whole time we were hopping from rock to rock a swarm of beggar children hopped with us. We gave them peanuts and tried to play games like rock-paper-scissors with us. They kept chanting in unison that they wanted money for school books and pencils. When we offered the peanuts to them they would say they wouldn't want them, but when we would set them on the rocks they were trying to sell us they would smile and eat them anyways.

We then came to a lake where the monkey's pig friend in Journey to the West fell in love with a beautiful woman. The lake was small and didn't have much interesting going on so we took a picture of the sign and continued on.

Next up was the largest cave I have ever set foot into. After entering through a long corridor the cave opened up to an astounding size. Stalagmites and stalactites surrounded us wet, seemingly permanently damp from the humid stale cave air. We explored the cave for a bit, walking around the stone trail lit by various colored lights ranging from purple to orange. We hiked around a bit more and exited the second site panting and ready to call it a day. Our driver came and picked us up and took us to a restaurant where we ate a meal with several interesting dishes. One dish was chicken pieces - feet, heart, stomach, liver, intestine, etc. Another dish we had tried the previous night supposedly protected GuiZhou citizens from contracting SARS. There was a fried bok choy dish, and 2 soups. One of the soups as congeled blood, tofu, and chives (the only dish I didn't try...its true I ate the intestines, heart, etc.). The other soup was a bird, like a chicken which we later found out was possibly endangered and illegal to hunt because the government was trying to help 'save the animals population'. Carl is a biologist, and was quite furious to hear this. We have yet to find out what exactly the bird was, or if Austin really understood what we were saying when we asked if it was 'rare' animal.