A Grand Chinese Canyon

-by Ernie Diaz

Funny thing, the swarming streets of Chinese cities. You visit, and it’s exciting. You move to China, and it’s overwhelming. A few years later, and you can’t imagine public life any other way. A return trip West is equal parts Twilight Zone and post-apocalypse movie. Where did everyone go? Was there a war? Why do people hide in their cars instead of using all those manicured, empty sidewalks?

Still, things get to the point where you could shriek from the coziness of it all. And while we regularly strive to show you parts of China with less than ten thousand people per square kilometer, the truth is such locations usually involve either altitude sickness or the risk of bandit attack (A foreigner! We’re rich, boys!)

West Zhejiang Canyon, now that’s accessible remoteness. A river runs through it, the Qiantang River, which starts near sacred Yellow Mountain and empties out into Hangzhou Bay. But this is no lazy, silt-heavy river, the kind the Chinese love to turn into a monumental commercial drainage ditch. This is a fast-flowing river, with a man-sized tidal bore, nine meters high and barreling along up to forty klicks per hour, the kind of water wall that that turns extreme surfers into catfish chum.

So even though a tourist from Hangzhou’s West Bus Station can get there in under 3 hours, not that many bother, really. Scaling holy mountains on planks and ridges that give mountain goats pause? Not an issue for even your average fifty-something Chinese vacationer. Untamed rushing river, on the other hand, lacks all semblance of harmony between man and nature, making West Zhejiang Canyon blessedly people-free, relatively speaking.

No endless queues, no blue-visored retiree bumping your buttocks with her guidebook every time the line moves forward an inch. No knick-knack peddlers manipulating your guilty western conscience. So, for now, you can ignore the tourist pamphlets which proclaim it “The first Grand Canyon for tourism in the east China,” and concentrate on the fine print: “smallest resident population.”

Bring a few friends – enough to fill up a goodly-sized canoe, and start drifting. The hairy stretches of river are closed to the public, so little to no danger of pulling a Land of the Lost. Instead, you’re enjoying the most delightful, liberating way of covering distance short of growing wings.

The Cormorant Pool is long-since misnamed, but remarkable nonetheless for its clarity, and the lack of camera-bearing human reflections in it. Huanlu Pavilion and Feibai Cave lie hard by, but don’t go scrambling about unless you miss traditional locomotion.

Better perhaps to wait until Whitehorse Cliff emerges near Shangping Village. The Shangping stream tumbling down the hillside makes for a leg-stretching jaunt along a path that seems to lead right into a Grimm fairy tale.

Of course there’s a waterfall, a double dropper, Longmen and Yansheng by name. Thus ends the solitude, temporarily, for even a Chinese tourist with hydrophobia can’t resist the fengshui charm of a good-sized waterfall.

Yansheng is so-named in honor of Yansheng the charcoal-maker who would cleanse himself of his filthy craft in the pool below. Yansheng could have left a ring around an Olympic-sized swimming pool, but his statue is clean, and so’s the water now.

Hoving in sight of the Jianmen Pass means you’re close to done drifting, technically. You’ve just been through the Longjing section of West Zhejiang Canyon, an eighteen-kilometer stretch. Next up, if you dare, Shangxi and Zhemen Canyons, where things get a little more rapid. You’ve been warned.

Related posts:

1. Shanghai Grand Cinema Reopens

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.