mu ge cuo

after having a nice breakfast of bao-zi and duojia (soy milk) i met patrick at a hostel so he could have some "coffee" (nescafe). while we chatted and he sipped, a chinese woman about my age asked if we had any plans. when i am a tourist, i become very suspicious and defensive. i treat everyone like they are trying to rip me off, and i'm always looking for an angle. here the angle was they had four people, and they needed six for a minibus up to mu ge cuo. it turned out she was just a nice person like us, and we were (like we were quite often this trip) at the right place at the right time.

we took the minibus (and yes, the honking and the passing continued) 35k out of town. as we drove northwest, the foliage became more striking, and the altitude became higher. the six of us were 3 seperate parties. two girls were masters students from southern sichuan, and the other two were a couple from shanghai. the woman from shanghai was fairly haughty. i told her that one of my goals was to learn chinese. she replied, "i don't want to worry you, but..." she had a friend from hungary who came to shanghai for a year and then went back and studied on his own for a few years and became a chinese translator.--so far, it sounded good.--after fifteen years however, he still makes mistakes. she made it sound like he was barely fluent. great. another example of the brutal honesty you can be exposed to when meeting new chinese people. she was no longer my favorite.

we arrived, and it looked like the parking for a fair. a field was stuffed with cars, and minibuses and cabs drove up in a steady stream and deposited chinese tourists inside the park. mu ge cuo consists of six lakes with a 9 km road connecting them all. you can walk the road, but with the 4 hours our minibus driver gave us, we decided we better ride. that being said, we spent about an hour in line all told for the bus. i'd say there were about 300 people in line for the bus when we first got there. fortunately, the buses came often so we didn't have to wait long.

the leaves were changing slightly, giving the forest an overall green feeling with highlights of warmer colors.. this is where my homesickness got rough. the red and orange made want to see new hampshire foliage in a bad way.

after disembarking halfway through the park, we got in line for a minibus to take us to mu ge cuo, which is the largest lake in the park. after a ten minute ride around hairpin turns we arrived. a quiet foggy lake encircled with a board walk was what greeted us. we began to circumambulate the lake when it began to rain. we drew near a skewer stand that was putting up an umbrella and we ducked in there. by the time patrick had ordered us a few delicious meat skewers, the rain had died down, and we continued to walk.

each pagoda we passed had at least one skewer person in them, surrounded by chinese trying to warm their hands. we kept walking, and slowly the density of people lessened until it was about 2 per 100 feet. it was nice. we finally arrived at the end of the board walk where three laborers sanded, varnished, and fixed the final pagoda. then it began to rain.

we began to walk back. we met two of the other people we came on the minibus with going the other way. they were both dressed in warm, yet not waterproof coats. we said hello and kept walking. patrick began to draw away from me as i stopped to snap photos like a good tourist. by the time i was halfway to the bus pickup point it began to pour in earnest. i ducked into a pagoda, and was welcomed around a skewer fire by a bunch of vendors and tourists. the vendors had been in the open and had come in when it started to really dump. we had a nice conversation, and i had some skewers while i warmed my hands by the barbeque. at the end of the storm it began to hail, and finally after that, it let up.

by that time i was wet and cold. the lines for the bus down were non-existent as most of the tourists had already left. we went down to the halfway point and walked around there for a bit before heading back down to the parking field.

the field looked like a woodstock had been there. muddy tire tracks, litter everywhere, chinese tourists walking around looking dazed. we met the two of our minibus party we had met before, and they seemed to be in good spirits, all be it a little wet. at about 4:15, fifteen minutes before we had agreed to meet the minibus, they began to worry. where was the minibus? why wasn't he here? they couldn't seem to care less about the shanghai people, but it seemed it was very concerning to them that the bus wasn't fifteen minutes early.

at 4:29 by my watch, the bus driver showed up, and a few minutes after the shanghai people did too. we drove back to the hostel where i crashed. my new mantra is you can never have too many chinese tourists.