My good friends David and Robyn got married on Saturday. They’ve been together for as long as I’ve known them, but they decided to make it official with a touching ceremony held at the Taipei Artists Village, the site of many a late-night jam over the years. Jason presided over an impressive and apparently endless spread of delicious food and tents were set up, under which friends from all over the world mixed and mingled. Hakka singer Lo Sirong as well as Chalaw & Passiwali provided great tunes over the course of the afternoon, and I got on stage to play trumpet for a few songs while rings of guests joined David and Robyn in aboriginal-style dancing. The weather was brilliant, specially arrange, David told us, by Jason, who apparently has an in with the weather gods.

The highlight of the afternoon was definitely the vows the happy couple had written to each other. I always find myself abashed and slightly in awe of such genuine displays of mutual affection, especially between two of the nicest people I know. Then a woman asked everyone to hold hands in a giant circle and close their eyes while she gave her bilingual blessing.

Things were winding down by 7 p.m. Chenbl and I walked over to Q-Square to meet Steve and Masaharu, a friend from Osaka, who was in town for just one day. Something to do with frequent flyer miles, I gathered. Masaharu speaks almost no Chinese and very little English, and our Japanese is in its infant stages to say the least. After dinner we walked to New Park to meet one of Steve’s friends who is into Mongolian Throat Singing. He’s putting on a show early next month that I’m looking forward to attending.

Sunday morning was spent rather frantically trying to make the Water Curtain Cave somewhat presentable, as my friend Professor Wu from Kaohsiung was paying a visit. An art professor who is responsible for sending waves of students adding me on Flickr each time he uses my photos as teaching materials, Professor Wu had never been to Bitan before, despite a professed familiarity with Taipei.

When he arrived, he was amazed.”I had no idea all this was here!” he exclaimed when we went up to the roof to survey the area*. As the weather was fine once again, crowds of swanboats filled the lake, and tourists were crowding the bridge, stopping on the other side when confronted with the shabby illegal shacks surrounding the group of high-rises where I live. We had a nice lunch at the blue-roofed riverside cafe overlooking the river before retiring to the Cave to talk photography. I’m looking at publishing a photobook, but I need some direction on the direction, so to speak, and needed a fresh opinion. Professor Wu gave me some interesting views, and his advice made certain thorny issues quite a bit clearer.

As the afternoon progressed we walked down to the dock and took the ferry across to the unofficial temple, where I took photos of some gangsteresque fellows while pretending I was actually shooting Professor Wu. As the ferry glided across the sunlit water, I noticed, far above the people diving into the lake from the cliff, suspended walkways built into the mountainside. I’ll have to go explore those someday soon.

Professor Wu had never been to Dihua Street either, so we took the subway over and walked down the silent avenue among the old buildings in various states of repair. Chenbl had to remind him to ask the local gods before taking photos at a minor roadside temple, the kind where the ghosts of accident victims are pressed into service for various local duties.

Dinner was a lavish affair downstairs at Taobanwu…well, lavish for me anyway, in that it included little cups of vinegary drink in between the courses. Professor Wu had to get back to Kaohsiung on the bullet train, so we parted ways at the station. Hopefully he’ll be able to make it up next weekend to see some accoustic Muddy Basin Rambling at Huashan after Urban Nomad on Friday night.

*I should note that I am by no means recommending Bitan as a good place to live or that you should consider moving here. It’s colder and wetter than Taipei, the bridge swings in the wind, and the crowds of tourists on the weekends are truly wearing. Try Muzha; I hear they’ve still got a few spots left over there, with their fancy gondola and all that.

Ten years ago today, I sat down in front of my computer in my little room on Xinsheng South Road overlooking the park and wrote the first entry in this blog. I was working at Ogilvy & Mather then, which was still on Minsheng East Road at the time. A visit to San Francisco to see my friend Mindcrime a few months prior had convinced me to start my own blog, which was incidental to my photography website back then.

Ten years!

I won’t say it’s hard to believe, as it definitely seems like an eon ago. I’ve moved several time, had several jobs, and visited many other countries over the last decade. Wrote a book, made some films, bought a place, sold my bike. It’s been an interesting ride. Alas, I’ve been remiss in updating things here, simply because the day-to-day details are so much easier to recount in places like Facebook and Twitter than compiled here.

I will continue to write here, but I need to find a way to update the site. I have too many blogs now, and the design is outdated. It needs simplification, and the latest version of WordPress, which I can’t install because mySQL is too old or something. I have no idea. I’m hesitant to lose the gray-on-black format, as black backgrounds are so much easier on my eyes than white ones, which are like staring full-on at a light all day. I might even implement some kind of photo-of-the-day site here, but to be honest, all of that is way beyond me.

Anyway, more things are afoot. I now have an agent in New York for the army book, I’m looking into publishing a photobook, and who knows, the long-delayed movie might even see some progress for all I know.

In any case, here’s to the next ten years!

Good weather had returned by the next morning when we exited the hotel and got into Mr. Cai’s car once again. We were headed out to another fishing village, this one much closer to Quanzhou, and the goal was once again to take pictures of women with unusual headgear. I didn’t quite understand the appeal of the “women with unusual headgear” aspect, but the others seemed interested, so I just went along with it. As before, we walked along a market street taking photos. No rocks were forthcoming this time, but one small boy did spit at us several times, to the delight of the adults present. We walked through the alleys, lined with houses constructed largely from massive oyster shells and being cussed out by a series of old women engaged in various tasks. It was Qingming, so firecrackers were being set off here and there, and vats of ghost money was being consumed by flames, lending the scene a smoky, slightly surreal atmosphere in the strong sunlight.

We walked across the broad new road to the waterside, where dozens of blue fishing boats were moored, Matzu’s flag flying along the PRC’s on many of the masts. Chenbl dared me to walk across one of the thin metal gangways leading to the boats, and I did so; it didn’t seem like such a big deal, but when Mr. Cai tried it he lost his nerve halfway across and ran back giggling like a frightened schoolgirl.

We had lunch at one of the shops on the market street, fresh seafood mixed with firecrackers being set off at the temple next door. Afterwards, as I walked back to the car, I came across an old women trying to buy something from a vendor who was apparently not from around there. She was speaking in Minnan, which he didn’t understand. It was interesting to watch, but I felt that intervening to help translate would cause more problems than it solved, and they managed to strike a deal eventually without my help in any case.

Mr. Cai drove us back out to the HSR station, which in daylight was revealed to truly be out in the middle of what looked like a desert. Only a few small villages were located nearby; Mr. Cai lived in one of them. He had to rush back home to take part in his family’s Qingming activities, and we were left alone at the station a full two hours before our train. While the others slept, I prowled the station taking photos of passengers, rows of seats, the ceiling, and the appetizingly named “Corn Juice” stand.

When the train back to Xiamen finally came, I got a window seat and almost immediately regretted it as the train wasn’t fast enough to escape the depression issuing from the industrial wasteland through which we passed. Next to me, a local girl did not pause to take a single breath as she complained to her friend about various boys she knew. I glanced at the railway magazine, which promised a glorious future for the nation’s HSR network, but I’d seen the idealized paintings next to their real-life counterparts and knew that such reading required a metric mountain of salt.

The ride was smooth enough, though each and every tunnel made my ears pop. It was late afternoon by the time we returned to hazy Xiamen, which felt almost familiar by now. We picked up some fast food in case the shipboard fare was unpalatable, and caught a taxi driven by a middle-aged women out to the port. “You shouldn’t catch cabs there,” she admonished us as we set off into traffic. “That’s not the place where you catch cabs.” I wanted to tell her we were from Taiwan, where everywhere is the best place to catch a cab, but I kept my mouth shut. She was a great driver, and got us to the port with plenty of time to spare. This was a good thing, as Chenbl and the others spent a while arguing with the people at the counter over some fee they hadn’t expected to have to pay.

Despite the fact that hundreds of people were waiting to board the ship, there was exactly one (1) woman checking people through, and of course this took quite a while. In immigration I was asked for my Taiwan passport in addition to my Taiwan compatriot passport, and as this was a waste of time that I hadn’t encountered before in my travels to China, I pressed the “This official wasted my time” button on the “How is my service?” machine at every counter. I’m sure it doesn’t do anything except make the presser feel slightly better about being inconvenienced.

Back aboard the ship, we put our things back in the same cabin we’d had on the way over and went back up on deck to watch the sun set over the harbor, all kinds of vessels, large and small, plying back and forth in the gray water. Many were fishing boats hauling in their nets for the day. As dusk fell and the ship cast off, issuing blasts to warn other ships, the port building flickered to life as thousands of apparently cheap fluorescent lights, the kind you find at small utilities shops, struggled to life along the building’s dusty roof line.

The ship moved slowly out into the harbor, past Gulangyu, the city beyond a bright, colorful horizon. I could make out the path we’d taken around Gulangyu as the ship slid past, and the dock where we’d taken the ferry back to the city. The wind picked up, and most of the passengers went below, but I stayed on deck, savoring the feeling of being on a ship headed out from a Chinese port, out to sea as the last glimmers of the sun faded from the sky. Wonderful.

Our dinner was cold by the time we got to it, but I didn’t mind. The waves didn’t build up as quickly as we headed out to sea. The baths were fuller this time, the water sloshing out and across the floor to the door, where a crewman was frantically mopping it up. I lay in my bunk, perfectly content, reviewing photos and writing in my notebook as the ship rolled across the sea.

I slept soundly; we were already approaching Taichung Harbor by the time I made it up to the restaurant for breakfast. I chatted with one of the deckhands about the possibilities opening up for ship travel, including perhaps a Keelung-Shanghai route that would take about the same time as the Taichung-Xiamen trip. We agreed that there was demand, and since the Japan disaster it seems a lot of the tourism is moving south. A Taiwanese businessman agreed with this assessment later as we lined up to get off the ship, which was being turned around in the harbor by a tugboat. “Air travel is just terrible these days,” he said. “They treat you like crap, you’re always being rushed, and all the time you might save is just wasted on all the extra security and getting to and from the airports.” True enough if you’re shipping out of Keelung, I thought, but Taichung Port is just too inconvenient.

In the meantime, I had to get to work. We were first out of the gate, and Chenbl had called a taxi when we were entering the harbor. We bought standing tickets on the bullet train back to Taipei, and within an hour I was walking in the office wearing my travel clothes and a week’s growth of beard. It was good to be back.

So that was my trip; hope you enjoyed the account.

For the first time on the trip, we were greeted by cold wind and rain after a nice hotel breakfast the next morning. Mr. Cai was waiting for us, no doubt wondering what we could possibly be up to in such weather, but he gamely drove us out towards the coast, past massive construction sites, half-finished resorts and an extremely long bridge that extended so far out into the mist the other end was invisible. Our destination was a fishing village where the women wore colorful scarves and generally ran the show. On the way we had to thread our way through a roadside funeral procession. Dank paper objects lay at the group’s feet.

The continued as we reached our destination, so we bought some cheap umbrellas. Chenbl and the others were intent on photographing the colorfully-scarved women, but I was just there to see what was what, so as they prowled a small fish market I holed up in a middle-aged fishmonger’s stall and chatted with him about the place. He said he used to work in Shanghai but moved to the Hui-an village to seek a simpler life. The buildings reminded me of Taiwanese fishing villages. Eventually I wandered over to the market and took some shots. The men whose photos I took seemed shocked and surprised, even pleased that I chose them as subjects; no doubt they were used to every single photographer that came by always zooming in on the women and their scarves.

I realized at one point that Chenbl and the girls were playing the role of people from Xiamen for Mr. Cai’s benefit. Whether this was planned or whether it just happened due to false assumptions I had no idea, but it didn’t matter; I’d been playing the part of a Westerner the whole trip. But I suspected that Chenbl was going to try to get away with paying local fares.

We drove through the rain and wind on roads lined with discarded stonework to a larger fish market, where I was yelled at several times for taking photos. It was lunchtime by now, and we drove a little ways towards another part of town to find a restaurant. We had just parked and were walking down the street when a curious sight greeted us; an electric pole, tied up to bundles of wires leading off in several directions, had been mounted by over a dozen workers. Apparently the pole, located in the center of the two main streets, had been hit by a truck and was about to collapse. It looked more like an elaborate circus act than a repair job, and most of the town had turned out to stare intently at the job, while I envisioned sprung electrical wires snapping through the crowd.

We had a mediocre lunch of beef noodles nearby, safely out of the reach of the wires. While we waited for the food, I trekked up the hill to take photos of a dog that had been spray painted pink, rolling around in the dust. The rain had stopped. Back at the restaurant, while the first few bowls contained actual meat, by the time I got mine it was just meat droppings and undercooked noodles. It seemed the restaurant never had more than three costumers at a time, as they only had three bowls. The rest of us used plastic bags.

After we finished, the pole had been successfully replaced. The town was saved! But something told me that such incidents weren’t all that uncommon. We walked up the street, taking pictures as we went, stopping at a construction site where a team of colorfully scarved women were making cement. They shot us dirty looks, picked up rocks, and threw them at us, just missing our feet. I suppose they knew they might get a reaction if they actually hit us, but after it happened a few times, the rocks getting closer and closer, I was wondering at the efficiency with which these people were driving away any potential tourist dollars. They others quickly retreated, but I took a few steps towards them, pointedly took out my notebook and wrote in it, glaring back at them as I did so. That’ll show ’em!

Back in Quanzhou, Mr. Cai dropped us off near an old temple complex with a pair of pagodas there were, say it with me, over a thousand years old. We strolled through the grounds past groups of old men concentrating on chess and qi-gong, and managed to catch a glimpse of some beautiful golden statues inside before a couple of smarmy, brusk monks shut the doors. “We’re closed! Go away! Shoo!” they told us. After reading a poster describing how Chinese President Hu Jin-tao had deigned to visit them, I understood; the likes of us could never compare to such an exalted presence. Back outside, I discovered that punks on electric scooters lose quite a bit of their punch without the sound of revving engines; all they could manage was a high-pitched whine.

We walked through more alleys are night fell. The alleys of Quanzhou are quite nice, interesting and dense. Dinner was had another little hole-in-the-wall place, where I had some good, if salty fried rice. The owner was from Quanzhou but his wife was from another province, it seemed from their accents. After dinner we walked along broad, tree-lined avenues back to the hotel, dodging electric scooters and passing empty lots of land that had surely been old neighborhoods before being razed; one building that looked as if it had been split down the middle by a giant axe.

We got up early the next morning to go have another look at the flower fields. As we approached, a loud buzzing reached our ears. I thought surely there must be a large bee’s nest nearby, but it turned out (obviously) that the field itself was full of the stinging insects. Chenbl didn’t seem to mind this and told me to go stand in the middle of the field so he could take a picture. “Now wave your arms!” he called.

“That sounds like a really bad idea!” I called back, and then went over to talk with one of the villagers in a safely non-bee-infested area. He was skinning a duck for dinner; guests were coming over, he said. He was Hakka, in fact, and his features reminded me of some of my Hakka friends in Taiwan.

As I waited for Chenbl and his co-workers to finish their flower-shooting, I took a stroll through the village, chatting with people I met, my Minnan getting quite the workout in the process. I talked with a man on a bicycle who said he lived in the nearby mountains, and an old woman with immaculately combed hair who spent most of her non-hair-related time gathering firewood. Everyone seemed to be surprisingly fashion-conscious when choosing their attire; every garment matched just so. Even the woman with a baby on her back collecting cowshit could have been on her way to a tea party.

After breakfast at Mr. Lin’s house (“Have some more strawberries!”), we walked through the open fields towards the village center. The Earth God Temple was reflected in the lines of the crops, along with the distant mountains. Farmers toiled as farmers do, and an older woman carrying bags of harvested veggies strode up to us along a stream. Her brilliant green jacket matched the color of her crops. She took us to her home nearby, where she was raising pigs, and she showed us a picture of a huge swine that was her prize possession.

Mr. Lin led us to the old part of town, a ghost town, really, as very few people still live in the ancient stone houses that formed a spooky labyrinth despite the bright sunlight. We followed the sound of singing through ally after narrow alley, only to find a large speaker propped up against one of the houses, facing an empty square. It was funeral music; someone had died, but there was no one about. The disembodied mourning did nothing to alleviate the eerie atmosphere.

We made our way to the town’s center to the local museum of the Chinese Communist Party. There was no electricity, but the girls who ran the place urged us to take a look anyway, so we used our flashlights to tour what seemed like a big expression of regret over decades of useless wastes of time like the Cultural Revolution.

Our next stop was the village’s claim to fame, in the form of a really big, really old tree. They used to have another, but it died, and so the tree’s corpse is the second-biggest attraction now. It is surrounded by beehives.

We had another delicious meal for lunch at a place opposite the big old tree. Chenbl and the others went out to prowl around more ancient alleys, but I found them depressing by that point, so I just sat in the restaurant and drank tea. Afterwards, we piled into Mr. Li’s van and headed out into the mountains, some featuring scorched sides that suggested deliberately set fires.

After a series of white-knuckle, brake-scorching hairpins that I’m sure Mr. Li’s van couldn’t have ascended under its own power, we were back in grey, smoggy industryland. We passed on what looked like a temple-themed amusement park and ended up at a somewhat more authentic temple that was, of course, over a thousand years old. The weather was chilly, the air full of smog, and the place gave off nasty vibes as I prowled the alleys in a mood of elusive discontent. We chatted with some more old people about what had changed in recent years, before stumbling upon the ancestral home of Taiwan’s legislative speaker, Wang Jyn-ping, an impressive structure empty of people but full of pictures of various famous Wangs.

It was a relief to get back to the relatively friendly, modern streets of Xiamen. Mr. Li dumped us somewhat unceremoniously in front of the train station, where we bought tickets on the high-speed rail to Quanzhou. Before getting on the train, we had a pizza-free dinner at an oddly deLux version of Pizza Hut.

The HSR wasn’t quite as HS as Taiwan’s version, only traveling at about 250kph, but it whisked us to Quanzhou in fairly short order with no fuss and very little muss. Chenbl’s seat wouldn’t recline, and when he asked the stewardess about it, the mere force of her glare unlocked the seat from whatever issues it was having.

The grand station that awaited us was practically empty, grand echoing halls with a lone security guard urging us to get out so he could get back to his game of solitaire. Outside, after we’d purchased return tickets, we found most of the taxis had buggered off as well, and we ended up in the car of one Mr. Cai, with whom Chenbl negotiated a package deal to take us around the area for the next couple of days. Chenbl’s negotiation skills are really quite impressive, I have to say.

It took us a while to get into town; it turned out that the reason the HSR station was so empty is that it’s in the middle of nowhere. Mr. Cai just happened to live nearby; his wasn’t a real taxi. It was just his car.

We were all tired by the time we pulled up our hotel, a refreshingly modern establishment, and I had flashbacks of pulling into the red-hooded alcoves of various Howard Johnsons motels as a kid whenever our family made the trek from one part of the country to another.

Unlike the motels of my childhood, however, here I could check my email on the free wifi in the lobby. This I promptly did, noting that Facebook doesn’t work in China, and I’m not sure if Twitter does either. I was planning on retiring to my room for a much-needed rest when Chenbl and the others came out of the elevator, intent on taking a stroll around town. As I said, Chenbl’s negotiation skills are legend, and I was persuaded to tag along.

We walked and walked. And walked. Quanzhou’s a nice town, interesting and clean, with remnants of the old architecture, broad tree-lined avenues and electric scooters whizzing about neat little alleys with all kinds of restaurants and shops, but I was dog-tired by the time we made it back to the hotel. More exploration would have to wait until the next day; now it was time for a lovely, long, hot shower.

Having gone to bed so early, we got up with the sun the next morning. It was shining in the window over another dilapidated tulou just behind us that I’d missed the night before, huddled among newer, uglier buildings. Before breakfast we walked over to take a look; the round courtyard was full of garbage and stray animals, and only a couple of people lived there, apparently. I wondered if Mr. Lee in fact came from this tulou instead of the one across the stream.

After breakfast, we drove to the “King of the Tulous“, a splendidly restored/maintained structure containing a small city of concentric circles, with lanes in between, around a temple-like structure. Here we could go upstairs, though there was a photographer waiting there to take pictures of tourists standing on the railing. The day was warm and bright, and I wondered what it must have been like to live in such a little castle centuries ago, in one of the upper rooms facing the veranda, with a small window to the outside, one of a huge clan.

We hadn’t planned on hiring a guide, but a local woman kind of “adopted” us with her cheery good manners, a refreshing change from Mr. Li’s complaining about how slow we were. She took us all around the tulou, pointing out the various wells, the school areas, etc. Mr. Li was jealous and took her to task for this when he thought we weren’t looking. She brushed him off, though, taking us to the two adjacent tulous, both square and newer, though still centuries old. One of them was apparently held up by scaffolding, and an old woman who had married into the clan at 60 lived there alone. She had wallpapered her little room in bright blue.

We hiked up the mountain against which the tulous had been built to get a better view of the community. The trail was lined with tea stands. The samples we drank went extremely well with the local peanuts. At the top of the hill, where a pavilion for tourists was being constructed, another young man waited with a camera to take photos of any tourists that came up there. He said we were the first that day. After we talked for a while, mixing Mandarin with Minnan as usual, he said to me, puzzled: “You look like a foreigner. You don’t sound like one, but you look like one.” The others in our group were getting bored with these kinds of statements and said I should just tell everyone that I was a Uighur.

Back at the tulous, we had lunch in one of the newer ones, built only a few decades before. The food was delicious once again, simple dishes like mifen, but very tasty. I wondered if the slightly salty well water had anything to do with the taste.

The drive back towards “civilization” started out nice as we traveled down winding mountain roads, but all too soon we were back amidst the industrial swirl of noxious chemicals, garbage and general nastiness. We stopped at a small fruit stand that featured pitiful specimens only a quarter of the size of those in Taiwan, yet more expensive.

Thankfully, we were headed back out into the country, for our next destination was a small village in a valley called Shanchong. We arrived at the old house-turned hotel in the late afternoon, putting our things away in the modernly appointed rooms. After Mr. Li’s place, it seemed luxurious indeed, with a/c (though it was cool enough without it), TVs, nicely appointed bathrooms and showers. The sound of screaming pigs gave me pause, but I was assured that they were just being pigs, not being slaughtered. At least most of them weren’t.

We walked along the pleasant riverside; the village was also amidst construction/renovation, apparently hoping for tourists. Teens draped themselves across scooters, talking on cell phones. A man led a cow across the road, and across the stream was a field of yellow flowers; women washed clothes in the stream under the huge trees. There were no streetlamps. Dinner was at the first restaurant we came to, and the food was great once again. I’d been worried that the cuisine might be more like Guangdong dishes, which I generally don’t like, but everything so far was delicious.

After dinner we had tea with a middle-aged local man, Mr. Lin, whom we’d met near the hostel. He lived next door and spoke Minnan exclusively until he reached the limit of our language abilities. It was apparently strawberry season in the village, and we ate quite a few as we chatted.

Breakfast at the Best 8 consisted of the usual steamed buns, hard-boiled eggs and congee. While the others packed I took photos of an annoyed maid washing mops behind the elevator. The light was nice.

Downstairs, our driver, Mr. Li, awaited. Mr. Li has an even higher voice than Chenbl, who is already able to sing Yang Lin songs quite as well as Yang Lin herself. We piled into the small van and set out for the hinterlands. I sat in the second row of seats, noting photo after photo pass by without being able to take them. Eventually I switched to the front passenger seat, where I got a couple of shots, but the scenery was quickly becoming less and less palatable as we approached the ring of industrial wasteland that surrounds cities in China. Toxic fumes in the air, sludge-filled rivers, mountains of trash…the whole works. It was depressing until we emerged into more rural environs, and the journey quickly came to remind me strongly of riding from my hotel in Kaiping to the factory in Cangcheng every da back in 1993. 18 years ago. Damn.

Even in rural areas, tall apartment buildings were going up with no thought or preparation for earthquakes that I could see. We spent half and hour edging around a large rock that had somehow fallen off the back of a truck not much larger than the rock itself. Mr. Lee grudgingly put a cigarette back in his pocket after we told him we’d rather he didn’t smoke. Well, he did ask.

The road began to wind up into the mountains as the morning progressed. We passed a sign proclaiming Annette Lu’s ancestral home in a small town. Scars from massive landslides, both old and new, marked the hillsides. We were headed for the earth buildings, or tulous, round castle-like edifices built of mud and wood by ancient Hakka and mistaken for missile silos by U.S. intelligence satellite photos in the 60s. The roads were still under construction; China obviously has big plans for tourism in the area.

We stopped for some delicious lunch before heading to our first tulou, where seeds were floating in the air like snow. A woman was offering to take up upstairs for a substantial fee, but Mr. Li had said to just ignore them. The circular building was three or four stories high, a little community unto itself. We walked around the old village outside, talking with some of the local residents, partially in Mandarin but mostly in Minnan.

Mr. Li said we had a lot to see that day and had better get a move on. I found this a bit annoying, but he’d said he’d only been doing the driver gig for a month or so, so I cut him some slack. We drove to a nearby village on a river, just across an old bridge. The front part was very nice, but everything behind it was still being renovated. It was very pleasant, artists painting the huge, thousand-year-old trees and old buildings lining the stream. I walked through the backstreets, watching farmers burn excess vegetation and bricklayers at work. At the local barbershop, I found a curious pair of old fellows, one deaf and the other mute. A man down by the riverside invited us to tea. It was the first of about a thousand times we were asked to sit down and have tea. It was the first step in getting us to buy tea, making it hard for us to say no after receiving their hospitality, so we usually declined.

The next stop was a square tulou five stories in height, a pretty amazing achievement for almost a millennium ago, again we were asked to pay to see the upstairs. I took a photo of an old woman at work in a field; she yelled at me, taking a couple of steps towards me and brandishing her hoe. I gathered she wasn’t happy about being photographed. “That old woman sure doesn’t like visitors,” I told Chenbl, who is always saying how being nice to people pays off.

As I skirted the other side of the field, I heard Chenbl greet the old woman. “Go to hell!” she barked.

Mr. Li was rushing us along; his admonishments were becoming quite annoying. We drove even further up into the mountains, among the lines of tea fields gracing the slopes, to a cliff overlooking a group of several tulous together. After posing for pictures, we trekked down to the community and split up. I left Chenbl and the others to wander around on my own, taking photos. One of the tulous was playing host to a funeral, so I avoided it. The well water looked sparkling and clean. Kittens and dogs scampered about in the afternoon sun.

A while later, when the others found me, they said the people I’d passed said they hadn’t noticed any foreigners passing that day. One man I took a picture of, however, said that “All foreigners love to take my picture.” He was mystified at this phenomenon, and none of our assurances that he was quite handsome had any effect; he insisted that he was really ugly.

At the next tulou, Chenbl was yelled at by another old woman at the door for taking her photo. She pointed her cane at him in a plain warning. “I’m sorry!” he said, smiling, and she pointed her cane at him, laughing in such an evil, mocking caricature that I shuddered.

Cops gambled in a group inside, betting on cards. A woman wanted money to take us upstairs, and an old guy wanted me to give him two dollars. “Sorry, all I have is Taiwan dollars,” I said. He said that was ok. “You really want two Taiwan dollars?” I said. He nodded, and I gave him two NT. The whole place gave me a bad feeling in the light of the late afternoon sun.

Our next stop was a picturesque village with a river running through it. We walked around, visiting an old building where a woman was planning a hostel. In an alleyway a man was playing a traditional Chinese instrument. We chatted, and it turned out that he was a big fan of Ma Ying-jeou.

We drove into Mr Li’s home village as the sun set. There was a dilapidated tulou across the street from his home, across a small, muddy steam where women washed clothes and disposed of garbage. He claimed that he had grown up there, but it was falling apart now, parts of the structure completely collapsed, and only a few residents remained. We had originally planned to spend a night in one of the tulou that had been somewhat refurbished, but Mr. Li wanted us to stay upstairs at his house. We went upstairs at his tulou, but it was just awful. No water, no toilets or showers, ancient floorboards with holes in them and no lights at night. We gave in and decided to stay with the Lis. As they had no doubt planned from the beginning. At least dinner was tasty. As there was simply nothing to do, we were all in bed by 8:30.

We caught the high-speed rail to Taichung on the night of the 30th. There the four of us, myself, Chenbl and two female co-workers of his, caught a taxi out to Taichung Port, speeding along the highway skirting Mount Dadu and through the neon-betelnut-signed valleys and empty parking lots. Taichung Port is a lonely, out of the way place. I’m not sure why anyone decided to put a tourist port there, so far away from anything interesting. Surely Keelung and Kaohsiung ports are much more suitable. But the timing of the Taichung run fit with our tomb-sweeping holiday schedule, so Taichung it was. I was toting the Invincible Rabbit with my usual two lenses and a Canon S95 for video, but decided to leave my ancient Thinkpad at home, as it’s just too heavy to be hauling around Fujian Province for a week. Instead I wrote down notes by hand so I could compose these journal entries later (I have to admit an iPad 2 or 11″ Macbook Air would have come in handy, though).

Inside the port building, the shouts of Chinese tourists rang through the smoke of their cigarettes. “This one’s taken!” one of them shouted as we moved towards an empty seat. There were plenty of empty seats further away from the gate, however, so we sat there while the mainlanders crowded around the exit, afraid the ship might leave without them, I guess. But they were all in tour groups, so we, as individual tourists, got to go in first in any case. The shops selling local paraphernalia shut down, the employees taking down the signs for cheap liquor and snacks and rushing off home as we were called to go through customs and immigration.

The ship, the Cosco Star, built in 1993, is refreshingly old and grungy for those used to glittery cruise ships, with most of the lower parts for cargo and vehicles and a few decks on top for passenger cabins. Though the registry lists it as a Hong Kong vessel, I suspect it used to be Japanese, as all the original signage is in Japanese, Korean and English, with Chinese additions pasted over. It used to run from Taizhou, but nobody apparently wanted to go there, so now it goes to Xiamen from Taichung and Keelung, and occasionally Kaohsiung. We were welcomed by uniformed crew, all mainlanders. A tugboat on the other side of the ship pressed it to the dock as the lines were cast off. We put our luggage in our foreward-facing cabin, the porthole providing a fine view of a winch, and then went out on deck to watch the cargo ships and docks slip by as we headed out to sea.

As soon as we hit open ocean it was obvious that this was a much smaller ship than the likes of the Star Cruise variety I took to Okinawa; the waves pummeled the hull and sent small shakes through the cabin, and there was quite a bit of motion, even more than the Taima Ferry to Matsu. As our cabin had no facilities, we had to use the common bathroom and showers, whose hot pools looked out through windows on the dark ocean, the water sloshing about with the ship’s motion. The shouts of the mainlanders came from the cheaper inside bunks, which only cost about NT$1500 or so I think. We got more motion in the front of the ship than the other parts, I think, but I didn’t mind. Though the air conditioning was giving me a headache, I always enjoy the rocking motion, the creaking and swaying sensation of sleeping on ships. One of Chenbl’s co-workers was distinctly uncomfortable with the situation, however.

I got up at 7 a.m. the next morning, as we passed a series of small islands on our approach to Amoy, known in Mandarin as Xiamen. The breakfast servers yelled at Chenbl to only take his own breakfast when he tried to get both of ours. Breakfast consisted of some steamed buns, porridge and a curious piece of meat product involving corn and wrapped in plastic. Huge freighters passed us on our way into the harbor, and the sun was doing a poor job of warming up the chill sea air. The view was shrouded in haze, but I could make out the tall buildings of downtown and traces of an impressively long bridge in the distance. The mainlanders seemed excited at the sight of the new port facilities, a huge, half-built complex, as we sidled up and docked.

We took a taxi to our hotel, the “Best 8” or something like that, a cheap affair that did the job, more or less. Already I liked Xiamen much more than Shenzhen, which isn’t hard as I dislike Shenzhen intensely. Xiamen lacked the air of desperate new money and accompanying thievery present in Shenzhen, which isn’t even a real city in my book. Our taxi driver wasn’t happy about having too many people in his cab, however. “You’ll have to pay the fine if I get caught!” he shouted, and indeed, he made several attempts to get caught just to prove his point, driving the wrong way up one-way streets and passing police cars illegally. The police didn’t care, and we got another cabbie with the interesting name of Fang Zheng, who took us out to the giant “One Country Two Systems” facing Kinmen. We could just barely make out the outline of Little Kinmen in the haze. I remember being in Kinmen many many years ago and looking across that same body of water at Xiamen. People strolled on the beach; it was too cold to swim.

Traffic in Xiamen, as well as in most of the areas I’ve visited in China, involves a kind of slow meandering amongst the lanes, between groups of pedestrians and stones that have fallen from trucks. Everyone assumes everyone else is an idiot, and everyone is right.

We drove to the Nanputuo Temple, the gates an obstacle course of beggars, and entered on the opposite side as you’re supposed to. Chenbl said this was just China “trying to be different” after the cultural revolution. Inside, people threw money at small holes in little pagodas and monks strode into the main hall to do some quick prayers before lunch. We had our meal in an adjacent vegetarian restaurant. Chenbl kept calling the waitresses “Xiaojie” and getting the sharp reply, “There are no ‘xiaojies’ here, thank you very much!” The food wasn’t bad, though. The dishes smelled like an old motel (I mean that in a good way.) Outside the temple, a group of boys rehearsed Journey to the West with puppets, and a young woman enticed a small white dog to emerge from beneath a pipe-covered building.

That afternoon we crowded onto the ferry to Gulangyu, a voyage even shorter than crossing over to Ba-li from Danshui. The lower level of the ferry is free, but the upstairs deck costs money. This was where groups of Nikon-toting birders shot photos of various waterfowl for the entire 30-second ride.

Gulangyu (“Drum Wave Islet”), as an old international settlement with cooler weather in the summer, is home to many old colonial buildings, as well as some of the most hideous wedding attire I’ve encountered. Groups roamed the streets, even on a weekday, loudspeakers blaring away at each other. We escaped the cacophony through mazes of alleys, talking with some of the elderly residents. We had the advantage of being able to communicate in Minnan, giving us a step up over Chinese people from other provinces, though only one of Chenbl’s co-workers speaks it really well; the rest of us don’t speak it that well, but we can get by. The old derelict buildings, many home to multiple families, reminded me of Qingdao or even Penang’s Georgetown, if it were left to rot for a century. Some of the buildings are nicely restored, however, including some interesting-looking hostels and restaurants. Many others were being worked on, stones being hauled up and down the narrow streets by men in overloaded carts. Above us, empty cable cars’ open doors swung freely, and an expert whistler accompanied his own guitar. We passed a military base inside which female soldiers were learning taijiquan. A unit of soldiers marched nervously past.

There’s a lot of walking to be done on Gulangyu, lot of interesting architecture and various nooks and crannies. We followed the coastline along beaches and through tunnels as the sun set over the silhouettes of factories on the other side of the harbor, only to find we were on the wrong side of the island from the ferry back, and temperatures were dropping rapidly. The electric tour cars that had been so ubiquitous during the daylight hours had disappeared, and I didn’t look forward to the long walk back in the cold and dark. Fortunately we found another ferry in front of a resort that was bound for Xiamen, boarded via a precipitous dock high above the actual boat. Inside, the passengers watched a blurry TV image instead of the brilliantly lit skyline outside.

Back in the city, I was reminded of Shanghai’s Bund, on a smaller scale and with fewer annoying touts. Dinner was a mediocre affair of overcooked dry noodles followed by a search for fruit juice to wash away the salty taste. We then strolled up the ritzy Zhongshan Road, lined with well-lit old-style new buildings and swank shops. The road was closed to vehicle traffic, fortunately. “All this opulence stops one alley in,” Chenbl commented wryly. I didn’t doubt it, but I also didn’t tell him this was just as well as the really interesting bits are back there. I couldn’t help but wonder, if Japan hadn’t colonized Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, if Taipei might end up resembling modern-day Xiamen.