The Road to Chengdu

This was quite possibly the most fascinating bus journey I’ve ever been on. The bus snaked along the mountain road, passing small Tibetan villages with their tattered prayer flags flapping in the wind, swastika adorned houses and monasteries and temples in the hills above. In many villages almost every house had a Chinese flag. That surprised me. It’s not a common site. I don’t know if these people feel more Tibetan than Chinese and are putting the flags up either due to external pressure to be patriotic or if they genuinely have patriotic sentiments towards the middle kingdom.

One of the villages (Songpan, I think) was clearly geared for tourists with every shop having a Tibetan, Chinese and English translation. Usually the signs in English are only for shops selling things relevant to travellers. In this village there was even a translation for the cement shop and scrap metal shop. I wonder how often a western tourist walks in and asks how much a kilo of cement costs…

Out of the villages yak and semi wild horses grazed on the parched grass, rickety looking rope bridges crossed silver streams flowing fast enough to drown even the strongest of swimmers, glacial lakes reflected the autumn colours and the towering white peaks glistened in the sun. In many ways it reminded me of Scotland, the mountains are often treeless, the white Tibetan houses look like crofts from a distance and even the yaks are similar to highland cattle.

I got ripped off at one of the toilet stops buying tangerines (8 kuai for 1 jin compared to 3 in rural Guizhou) and sat on the kerb munching on my overpriced fruit. A young Chinese couple were having a spitting contest with their apple seeds which I found hilarious. I decided to join in and only got 1/3 the distance of the girls 6 metres winning entry. It’s not a game I would phone up my friends to try and organise but when done spontaneously it is great fun. 

As the road led south and downhill there were many signs saying 5/12 followed by some text in Chinese characters. On the 12^th day of the 5^th month in 2008 the 21^st deadliest earthquake of all-time hit this region. The bus route goes through Wenchuan County, the region that was at the epicentre. The quake measured 8.0 on the Richter scale killing over 69,000 people and an estimated 4.8 million were left homeless.  On the 6^th November of 2008 the Chinese government announced they’d be spending 3 trillion Yuan in the next 3 years rebuilding the damaged areas. I visited on the 13^th November, just over 3 years on and there was still extensive damage.

There is a new highway getting built parallel to the old one that ran through the valley. There are still fragments of the old highway dotted around with huge concrete and steel 4 lane roads suspended over the river having been tossed about and thrown onto the valley below. There are bridges that just stop half way across the river with the steel rebar still sticking out from the edges of the concrete. There were numerous trails of rock running down the mountains from the landslides. One village had a handful of semi collapsed housing next to a huge pile of rock that had fell from above assumedly destroying the rest of the village.

The landslides blocked the river resulting in lakes being formed which flooded the buildings that had survived the initial quakes. There were many boats used for dredging dotted around the valley.  

This village appeared to have been buried and was only just being dug up.

3 trillion Yuan goes further in China than it would in Europe or North America, and I’ll bet this area is almost unrecognisable now to what it was like immediately after the quake. What I saw was only a tiny proportion of the carnage that was unleashed; I can’t begin to imagine the level of destruction that the quake produced. Office buildings in Shanghai, 1000 miles away swayed and towers in both Shanghai and Hong Kong were evacuated as a result of the tremor.