Fairy Hill

 

Judge for yourself--Xian Nu Shan has been dubbed Fairy Hill National Park, the "Switzerland of the East," with snow-capped peaks ringing around grasslands and green forests. This was the destination last weekend for a baker's dozen of us "waiguoren," or foreigners, all of whom teach at Southwest University in Beibei. "Frank," our watchful and helpful university "waiban," cooked up the plan, made the arrangements, and plied us with one Chinese feast after another. I understand that it is possible to sit in front of a huge lazy Susan laden with ten or fifteen Chinese dishes and not eat five times more than necessary, but I haven't any earthly idea how to do it.

Over half of our crew are twenty-somethings with ties to St. Johns University, a liberal arts college in Minnesota and also a sister school with our Chinese university in Beibei, Southwest. The rest of us are no longer twenty-something and hail from such places as Belgium, Russia, Bosnia--and my Missouri corner of the USA.

As different as my Missouri hometown is in most respects from Xian Nu Shan, my hometown  happens to be situated in a belt of karst limestone, full of caves and crevices and natural bridges. In Xian Nu, a limestone bluff here, a natural bridge there would remind me of home.

As pleasant as the scenery was, other things often caught my attention, including the very short skirts and very high heels of many of the female hikers. How can they walk? How long will their shoes last? What will their backs be like in a few years? It's all a mystery to me. The people who had difficulty weren't usually those wearing high heels--they tended to be older and took rides in little chairs carried by human porters.

Among the things we could buy along the way was meat--think whole animal, everything but the fur. If a dog or a cat, you could make out the skull, the body, the tail, everything.

Also interesting was the bus ride from this southeastern part of Chongqing back home across the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) to our college town in northern Chongqing. A traffic accident on a mountain road backed up mountain traffic for ages, it seemed.

 Eventually, we rolled on, through green terraced countryside that occasionally erupted with new building projects on a massive scale. We rolled past Fuling, the town where Peter Hessler (author of River Town and former resident of Columbia, Missouri) lived while serving in the Peace Corps.  

 . . .and finally home to our own mountain city, Beibei, not pictured here.