Hainan: June 2008

This afternoon I had one of those moments of awakening of self-realization. You know, the kind you get when you realize that you picked the same coffee with milk no sugar from the machine ten times in a row over the last two weeks, and thoughts rapidly escalate to a more general speculation on how repetitive your office life is. You suddenly step back from reality and see yourself with a clarity that truly puts things into perspective. Your little frustrations and triumphs all pale into insignificance and you think to yourself, what is the meaning of it all anyway? This often leads to mid-life crises or retreats to buddhist centers in the countryside but in my case it was somewhat different.

I opened my eyes and looked down at my feet. My legs were clad in red silk. ‘That’s odd’ is all I had time to ponder before a clamour of drums and gongs pounded my ears and my body jarred into action. My head snapped up and I saw flowing above and around me a gorgeous, sinuous, radiantly orange dragon rippling through the air to the beat of the drums. In front, more figures clad in red jumped and danced, pulling the dragon through the air on long poles which they wielded as weapons of martial arts. And I realised I was one of the dancers, dipping and weaving and pulling the dragon through the air with them, inviting, tempting, daring the spirits of my ancestors to come flying, come screaming out of the temple that reared up before me.
And then the moment came. Behind the chanting crowds, through the air rippling in the midday heat I saw the car. A perfectly ordinary silver Toyota Prius, patiently waiting for the crowds to pass so it could carry it’s owner to his lunch date, meeting or appointment. An artifact of the everyday world of logic and schedules, coffee machines and team take-outs. And I thought to myself, ‘What the ****? I’m supposed to be an ordinary Jersey lad, beavering away at getting my fledgeling software company up and running!’ And then perspective vertigo hit.
It had all started a few days earlier with a call from a fellow Brit here in Haikou. She got straight to the point.

“I’m here with a producer from Haikou TV, they’re looking for a presenter for a travel program, you’re probably way too busy and wouldn’t be interested anyway, but…”

It wasn’t long before I was puffing up the sides of a volcano trailed by an ailing camera crew and taking full advantage of my new (unofficial yet undeniably effective) media license, leaping across ‘Strictly no entry’ barriers and randomly bursting into people’s houses and interviewing them. The volcano is now dormant, and is the prime specimen among a chain of a slowly-weathering siblings, remnants of a more active period 15,000 years ago when the continental plate boundary lay directly underneath the island.

The side of the volcano has a number of side attractions including a park full of agricultural instruments of unfathomable use. Luckily, a forebearing lady from a nearby drinks stall sallies forth to come to my aid and give a terse explanation for the stupid foreigner. Whoever says that the chinese aren’t ingenious will have to eat their words when they see these contraptions – there are devices for grinding beans to make tofu, for mashing sugar cane to extract the juices, for pounding, crushing, ploughing - you name it, they’ve got it.

Climbing the steps towards the crater lip, we overtake a group of startled Dutch tourists who appear rather bedazzled by being surrounded by chinese cameramen and seem a little uncomfortable with the casual conversation I tried to strike up.

Finally, we reach the lip of the crater and stare down into its interior. Far from the dried dusty black expanse of volcanic rock that I expected from visits to other sites in New Zealand and South America, the crater was overflowing with a lush abundance of giant ferns mixed with other tropical vegetation. Water was gradually seeping in through the steep walls of the crater, feeding a tropical microclimate, a little Jurassic Park. We sheltered in the crater for a while, relaxing in the cool moist air and sheltering from the blistering sun outside before beginning the long journey to the bottom of the mountain and a well-deserved hearty lunch.

The programme is an entirely new format for China – take a foreigner who pretends to be completely new to and extremely excited about all things chinese (the latter needing no pretense on my part) and wanders seemingly at random around Hainan looking at everything there is is to look at, eating everything there is to eat, experiencing everything there is to experience and generally having the most fun that he can possibly have. He gets to be accompanied at various points by different experts he ‘randomly’ encounters en route who explain the background of everything to him (and the camera).

My first encounter with one of these experts was standing in the entrance of the rather cotidianly named ‘72 holes’, a series of passages and tunnels hollowed out by the flow of lava thousands of years ago but still not fully explored. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll have heard that our near neighbour Hong Kong had the heaviest rain ever that day and I didn’t have an umbrella. Not that it would have been of much use – a nuclear bunker may have been more appropriate. The fronds of the bamboo forest jittered and swayed under the battering they were receiving and (thankfully luke-warm) water streamed down my face. Scenes from ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’ flashed through my mind and I expected to see a be-robed kung fu master fly down from amongst the waving stems at any minute. Instead, the fronds parted and a portly elderly gentleman wearing scruffy shorts, a T-shirt and a big grin entered stage center on a clapped out old bicycle splashing mud in every direction.

We instantly hit it off and decided to ignore the unfortunate weather and get on with the job. A small huddle of non-mandarin speaking old ladies were conveniently on hand to sell us parafin torches so we could see where were going and we set off to explore the caves. This turned out to be a mixed blessing as they stuck to us like glue as we explored the cave and it became a herculean task keeping all of them out of the picture as the team filmed. Giving tips and pointing to the exit seemed to work temporarily but soon wore off and they were back with outstretched hands for more. All the same, exploring the caves was a spooky experience pervaded with sounds of dripping water and dust particles swirling in shafts of light falling from the ceiling.

Of course, the TV station wasn’t content with us using our normal names – I was given a new one, ‘Ku ku’ which I thought rather too cute for comfort, it translates roughly as ‘Mr Cool’ or maybe ‘Hot stuff’. My earnest friend was betitled ‘Green dragon sword’, a reference to a famous weapon in history that I didn’t quite understand. To his credit, he did try to explain it to me, but his thick Tianjin accent kept the kernel of his message out of my grasp. This also applied when we were filming meaning that whenever he said anything I often had to put on an interested expression and reply, “Is that so?” or “I didn’t know that” whenever his lengthy expositories came to a close whilst not having the foggiest what was being talked about. The safest course from this point was to change the topic with an unrelated question and getting clued up later from one of the cute intern chicks who were along for the ride.

The next length was a piece on how short on water the region was. Luckily the rain had paused for breath and I’d brought a change of clothes so I wouldn’t have to undergo the ridicule of bemoaning local desertification and shortages of water resources on camera whilst dripping from head to toe. Whilst water is plentiful elsewhere in Hainan, the volcanic rock in this locale is full of cracks which rapidly absorb surface water, leaving soil bone dry. This lead to a peculiarly local custom of collecting the water in vast vats into which drained run-off from the tiled rooves during tumultuous downpours and storing it for the dry periods which followed. This in turn led to a local saying,

“Don’t marry into gold, don’t marry into silver, just count the number of vats under his eves” which neatly sums up the scarcity of water here before the arrival of modern society. We were to visit an old village, constructed entirely of black volcanic stone. It felt a little like a trip to the lake district with its cotswald stone walls and hamlets – the walls were piled from boulders with no cement and looked incredibly flimsy even though they’ve stood for several hundred years. We visited an old lady living in a dark little room with her husband. Seeing her portrait on the wall, it was clear she was a real beauty when she was young and seeing the fine construction of the house and the number of water vats outside it was clear they were once a wealthy household. However, civilisation came and their children moved off to the city to find work, leaving the old people of the village left behind materially but more importantly linguistically - they don’t speak any Mandarin – in Hainan you’re already as far away from Beijing as London is from Kiev. They don’t own a television – there’s no point as they wouldn’t understand anything broadcast on it. Many old people stretch out their hands to passing tourists for money, muttering in their local dialect or simply sit by the village gate waiting for their offspring to return home to visit. These two are clearly too proud and usher us in as honored guests offering us what little they have. I notice a mysterious design carved into all the beams of the wall, looking a little like a bat unfurling its wings but am unable to get an explanation from the old couple.

We wander round this and neighbouring villages, happening across a little temple with masterfully carved plaques adorning its walls. Whilst the meaning of the inscriptions are written in an ancient chinese way beyond my comprehension we manage to track down and interview the artist who speaks to us in a broken Mandarin. After a few questions, conversation turns to his son, and overwhelmed by his feelings he breaks into a guttural Hainese which we will have to decipher from the recording later.

Another feature of the villages are the miniature stone temples scattered around their perimeter, dedicated to the villagers’ forebears. I get scorn poured all over me when I point out the brightly pink painted skin of the little figures inside makes them look more like westerners than Chinese.

We find yet another village, but this one is by far my favourite, the one that I’ll never forget. When we rolled up in our 4x4, the entire village’s population of around 200 people had all gathered in the main square to see us arrive. And the village’s troupe of musicians had collected under a large tree (pomengranete?) and started to pull all manner of weird and wonderful chinese instruments out of their cases. I was in heaven and wanted to try out everything. Here I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. Though words may have been inadequate, this sequence is undeniable proof of the connection music creates between people from any culture, any time, any place.

The following day was one that shook my faith to its roots. In this case, that of the unquestionable superiority of the English breakfast. Emerging sleepy-eyed from our little country hotel my habitual first question of the morning (‘Where’s my breakfast?’) didn’t need to wait long for an answer as I looked up and a thick branch loaded with enormous ripe lychees swam into focus. They just don’t taste the same after being frozen and flown thousands of miles to London.

Like a small two legged elephant eating its way through the african jungle, I trod a path of gradual gastronomic destruction leading through orchards of dragon-fruit, lychees, big tasty lumpy things my dictionary tells me are called jackfruit in English, and other fruits whose heavenly flavour is indescribable in any earthly language (ie, I forgot their names).

As it was 6am, I was quite surprised (and a little sheepishly guilty, with fruit juice dribbling down my chin) to turn a corner and run into a troop of workers meticulously trimming the branches of the fruit trees. Turning a blind eye to my rampage of greed, they cheerfully chatted to me. I learned they’d already been working an hour, and would be there until dark, a full 15 hour day for which they would receive a princely sum of $5. I felt like I’ve been on holiday my whole life.

Next were the paifang, or ornamental arches. These were erected in honour of graduations, entry in the mandarin elite etc. You’ll see this in the video as the bit where I dress up in costume and pretend to be a top chinese scholar graduating from university attended by standard bearers and all (actually, they’re a camera man, two porters and the driver dressed up, the only point in the film where you get the sense that there are around ten of us travelling around at any one point, not just me on my own!).

The arch you can see behind is one of two still standing and is over 400 years old, but I can still read the characters on it almost as if they were modern chinese. Because of the chinese system of writing (which is attached more to the meaning of words rather than to the way they are pronounced), changes in speech habits over the years didn’t tug at and twist the written language in the same way they did European languages, so the written form has remained incredibly conserved over thousands of years. To give you a sense of how conserved, imagine you could read Cicero or Plato in the original in the same way you can read Shakespeare today and you have an idea of the intimacy with history any chinese can access straight off their bookshelf. You might consider yourself well-read if you can quote from Dickens, but I met a 5-year old yesterday who chanted a poem for me (under the proud eye of his mum) and told me it was his favourite. Written by a Tang poet, it was 1300 years old. I saw a scan of the text of Beowulf (from roughly the same period) and I couldn’t even recognize it as being related to modern English, let alone read it.

Back in the village of the many chinese instruments, we’re shown around an old tower built to protect the local wealthy from bandits and so forth. Apart from being square not round, it bears a striking resemblence in many ways to the Martello towers that speckle Jersey’s shores, complete with arrow slits and little protruding balconies with holes in the floor from which nasty concoctions of boiling liquids can be dropped on enemy heads. I guess killing people is pretty vanilla wherever you are in the world…

And before you can say ‘Bob’s your uncle’, I’m married. Bundled yet again into archaic garments (this time a rather emasculatingly luminous pink) and with the scratchiest helmet known to man thrust upon my sunburnt brow I plunge headfirst into matrimony, take one. The utter humiliation incurred to date was obviously not yet sufficient. The director (now growing little horns and puffing smoke from his nostrils) decides we need a icky sequence where (presumably accompanied by cheesy love songs) I chase my new wife among the old buildings and in and out of the courtyards and we gaze lovingly at each other’s reflections in the vats of water. This was all turning out to be more Mills and Boone than Lonely Planet.

The third day was my favourite of all of them. We head off into the outback countryside and I become the first foreigner ever to visit the village of Gong Qi, the largest and proudest of the villages around Haikou’s outskirts. They know how to throw a party, and today is party day. It was the Duanwu holiday, known in English as ‘Dragon boat day’, when across China people celebrate the life of the great patriotic poet Qu Yuan. In protest against government corruption and in sadness at the capture of his country’s capital by enemy troops, committed suicide by throwing himself into the river (this being the summer of 278BC and more convenient means of lodging complaints with the government hadn’t yet been invented). Dragon boat races are held and people make little triangular pyramids full of rice and tasty goodies wrapped in reed leaves and tied up with string. Traditionally these are thrown into the river, purportedly to keep the fish from eating poor Qu Yuan’s remains, but they’re so good to eat I can’t imagine anyone wasting them that way these days. At any rate, they are when made properly. It took me a quite a few inept fumblings and unintended splurges of raw duck egg under the watchful eye of my newly adopted ‘Aunt’ (and that of the camera) before I managed to get anything remotely resembling a pyramid out of the leaves. And even then, it stubbornly remains a egyptian four cornered beast rather that conforming to the three cornered chinese style. At any rate, after they were cooked I took them home and proudly shared them out among guests, receiving such exalted praise as ‘better than the ones we bought from the the street vendor in Shanghai’, perhaps recalling an acute case of food poisoning, and ‘I’ve never eaten one that’s so difficult to unwrap’. At any rate they’ve got the cutest name in mandarin – DZONG-dz which you can can pronounce correctly by pretending you’re a spoilt little child saying ‘No!!’ very loudly.

Hell, this is the internet, I can give you a recording…

And I guess finally the introduction needs some explanation – another great advantage of being with a TV crew is that if you encounter a professional dragon performance troupe you can barge in minutes before they go on stage and demand that they teach you how to make the dragon dance. You know, the huge silk dragons that you see at chinese festivals that seem to twist and turn with their own life, somehow controlled from below by a troupe of brightly dressed dancers. So, how is it done? ‘Fraid I can’t tell you, ‘cos I’d have to kill you. Seriously, it’s both harder and easier than it looks. Easier, because you just have to hold your part of the dragon up on a pole and then swing the pole like a staff in a figure of eight and this naturally makes the dragon dance, clever, huh? But also harder because that dragon head weighs at least five kilos and you have to heft it about for long periods of time at the worst possible leverage on the end of a pole which is exhausting work in the tropical midsummer sun. Anyhow, I got to join in the ceremony and dance up to the temple to summon the spirits of my ancestors who, to my great surprise actually did emerge from the temple on little palanquins bourn by four young men bucking and spinning as if drunk on dragon dance.

We definitely deserved a good lunch at this stage and a good lunch it was. Treated as honoured guests, we quite literally had a trench table groaning with a kingly feast laid out before us.

Then, a crucial part of any chinese celebration. Noise. LOTS of noise. We camped out on the roof next to the main drag through the village and a wall of smoke and fire blazed towards us down the street as literally tens of thousands of firecrackers were set off. We were deafened. The streets became coated centimeters thick with the paper wrappings from the things and the smell of gunpowder was overpowering. As the wave of explosions passed us, a young guy obviously to intrigued by the camera crew and not paying attention set off his stockpile of firecrackers before throwing them over the road and everyone screamed and dived for cover (at least I assumed the open mouths meant screaming, nothing could be heard over the explosions). The entire pile exploded, throwing a chair into the air like a scene from an Gaza strip suicide bomb. I had to turn side-on to escape the sting of being pelted by empty wrappers. Luckily, no-one was hurt and the party continued without interruption. Without interruption for three hours. The slowly advancing wall of flame was followed by dancing dragons, jousting lions, soldiers carrying wicked looking ancient halberds and jagged swords, schoolchildren a-drumming (sorry no partridges or pear trees) and floats depicting various chinese myths and fables. The teenage ‘beauty queens’ on the floats wore extremely heavy makeup (a little like in the film Memoirs of a Geisha) and had obviously been instructed not to smile at any cost so I had great fun trying to break their resolve by pulling faces, resulting in lots of frantically controlled twitchings of mouth corners. The little drummer girls were the cutest, we interviewed some of them on our way up the line and from then on they would be scanning the skyline looking for me and waving and grinning whenever they saw me. Can you imagine British 12-year olds obediently drumming in perfect time, solidly without a break for three hours??? I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The day finished off with a show including the tireless dragon and lion performers and a group of Shao Lin Kung Fu performers – I was happy to recognize one or two moves my teacher had showed me while I was there.

We returned home exhausted but happy.

I’m beginning to feel a little like Indiana Jones, but even he never got to look for Atlantis. Around 400 years ago, a massive earthquake pulled large parts of the north of Hainan under the sea and it’s only at moments like today when there’s a maximum spring tide that you can strike out across the mud flats and examine the remains of the civilisation that used to exist here. So we’re again up at 4:30am to catch the low tide.

As we reach the docks at 5am the fishermen are just pulling into shore after a long night at sea and selling their bounty in a flurry of waving hands and much machine gun bargaining in Hainanese. Every kind of fish you can imagine, sandpipers, crabs big and small, blue, red, orange and white, trilobytes (surely they should be protected from fishing?) and langustine are all on display. I’m painfully reminded I still haven’t had breakfast.

We take a boat out to north harbour island, the best place to see the sunken villages and it’s clear the tide is already a long way out as it’s a long jump down from the bottom of the dock steps to the deck of the little ferry. The expensive camera equipment gets passed down hand over hand along with chickens and bags of supermarket shopping.

North Harbour turns out to be a very pleasant surprise, a beautiful tropical island village of around 1000 people living off the sea and sleeping their siestas in hammocks hung between palm trees. We quickly walk across the island and plunge into the mangrove forest on the other side. Strange salt water ducks waddled around the roots exposed by the low tide, sifting through the sand with their beaks and long bendy necks for mussels.

“They’re really tasty!”. The village ‘chief’ walking by my side introduces me to the local flora and fauna. Maybe they’d be salty?

We cross the couple of kilometers or so of sand flats in search of the village and on the way I get taught how to dig up oysters with a rusty meat chopper by an old lady.

Then we run into a hiccup – we reach the water’s edge and still no sunken village. It turns out we need more transport to get across and see it. The director doubles as fixer and gets on his phone and secured a promise from a local fisherman to carry us across the straight. Meanwhile, the water swirls ominously around our ankles as it’s clear the tide has turned and is gathering momentum to race back in across the sands. I was suddenly reminded of the oyster harvesters in Morecambe and had no desire to be stuck nearly a mile from dry land on spring tide with ten chinese who couldn’t swim and seemed to have no conception of the potential danger of the situation.

We waited another half hour for the boat before it was clear that the boat couldn’t possibly come up to the beach in such shallow water and we finally trudged back from the water’s hungry edge before the influx of water really got underway. Relocating to the island’s little pier we caught the boat and managed to get to Atlantis before it disappeared back under the waves for another few weeks. Four hundred years hadn’t left much of the village, the thing that most caught my attention being the open stone coffins with no bodies in them, the lids and headstones having being dispersed by the sea. In other places it was possible to make out the layout of foundation grids. It only remained to rescue our director from the sucking mud on the sea floor before we got ourselves back on dry land.

Our transportation saviour invited us back to his house to dry off, a huge compoud once housing an extended family of over 100.

Stuffed full of antique furniture which must have been worth a fortune if he ever wanted to sell it, the electrics had obviously been rigged as an add-on to the existing structure which give us some idea of the history of the place, passed down from father to son over the years.

A 90+ lady relative of his took a shine to us and started distributing the most enormous and tastiest lychees I’ve ever had in my life. She talked at me continuously in Hainanese, not seeming to grasp that I didn’t understand a word. I thought it was about time I started learning some and made use of the afternoon we spent waiting for our van to drive round the headland quizzing the locals on some basic phrases. I’ve now asked a number of Hainanese and they all say they’ve never heard of a foreigner picking up the language before, I could become the first non-chinese ever to learn it, how’s that for a motivation?

Wow it’s been a whirlwind few days and I certainly need a good night’s sleep!