September 10, 2024 to September 11, 2024
T-6 & 5: 陇西 → 武山 → 天水
After checking out of our hotel, the first full day starts out with a thoroughly unexciting visit to a jade factory cum outlet store¹. Or maybe it was a very unexciting visit² to a botanical garden focusing on the collection and propagation of herbs that probably have medicinal properties³.
Luckily, this is followed by the Li Family Ancestral Temple, where—in wandering away from the docent and translator and most of the media—I stumble across two late 16th century frescoes that were discovered behind a layer of clay during renovation work in the early 90s. There's also, with the help of someone who works there, a pair of 18th or 19th century rafter paintings.
I'm failing in my role of seriously listening and nodding and smiling where the cameras can see me, but my video is currently at 119,821 views, 1,256 likes, and 236 comments on Douyin⁴ so no one is complaining.
I'll spend all of the visit to the big convention center type place that used for sales of TCM-type products looking at my phone either editing my video or doing work related to reporting on the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi so it makes even less of an impression that it otherwise might have.
The new hotel, either overlooking the upper reaches of the Yellow River or overlooking a very loess colored tributary of the Yellow, is about 30% more expensive than our first night's lodging. Officially foreigner-friendly by their listing on the booking apps and a poster on the wall, they provide us with the first paper registration forms I've seen at a hotel this decade.
A lukewarm water heater and a bathtub that takes over 30 minutes to fill round out my reasons for why I much rather be staying someplace much smaller and much cheaper. They will, however, have some excellent yogurt at the breakfast buffet.
Day Two begins with a scheduled visit to the Shuiliandong Tourist Area. It's marked on my Great Map of All the Things so, even though it's not super close to any of my previous routes for a ride through Gansu, I must have encountered information about it somewhere along the way and decided it would be a worthwhile destination.
A mixed Taoist/Buddhist site with some enormous 6th century low-relief carvings of the Sakayumi Buddha and two Bodhisattva, Shuiliandong seems like it would be very inconvenient to visit when transiting an area by bicycle so, even if there's far too much rushing to the next Photogenic Point, I'm very happy.
President Xi is in the area, visiting the place we're supposed to be visiting in the afternoon, and completely messing up our schedule. As a result, we end up at Daxiangshan where I probably would have been a lot more impressed by the Big Buddha had it not come after the Buddhas at Shuiliandong, the lack of toilets on top of the mountain, or my stomach's sufficiently forceful rejection of one of our recent meals that, when we get into Tianshui, I go straight to the room and don't come out again until breakfast.
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¹ Although there is no forced shopping, getting "taken to the jade factory outlet store" is a trope in Chinese group tours the way "the butler did it" is a trope in murder mysteries. Prior to this, I had—possibly on account of my not generally participating in mass tourism—somehow managed to never go to one.
² I'm not intentionally throwing shade at the places we visited. Most of the time when I'm bored out of my skull by something visited on a media trip, it's because this isn't the way I would choose to experience this particular place.
³ One of the reasons I'm so down on TCM is because of the resistance to using scientific methodology to find out what is or is not actually effective.
⁴ My WeChat Channels followers are a very different crowd and I've only got 1,400 views over there
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