Furong and Fenghuang, where six can mean sixty

Half price, and a taxi that wasn’t

Before we left Zhangjiajie we had our first foot massage in China, which we hadn’t planned at all. A woman doing hula hoops in the street lured us in, and there were already a couple of Dutch girls inside, which seemed like a good sign. The prices had clearly been bumped up for us, and it took a real effort to get them down by half, at which point it was a very good deal: a long soak for the feet first, and then a proper massage.

The train to Furong taught us something about Chinese stations that we’d been half noticing for a while. The gates only open fifteen or twenty minutes before departure, the queues are enormous, and as foreigners we always have to use the one lane where someone checks passports by hand. On a bad day that turns boarding into a small race, a long wait followed by a sprint to the platform. That day was one of the bad ones, with the train full of people going to Furong just for the day.

We were among the last out of the station at the other end, so there wasn’t a Didi to be had, and at that exact moment the sky opened. A local driver offered to take us, a taxi only in the loosest sense of the word, and we said yes without much hesitation. With the rain coming down like that, the only sensible plan left was a nap and a film at the hotel.

Six, sixteen or sixty

It was late by the time we went out, and all we really wanted was dinner and a quick look. But it was our only night in Furong, and everyone says you have to see it after dark, when the lights come on and the whole town glows like something out of a video game. So we walked towards the centre and found out, at the entrance, that the ancient town has a ticket, which nobody had mentioned and which wasn’t exactly cheap. We paid anyway (a student discount helped), and it was completely worth it.

The walk there came with its own entertainment. The streets were empty except for a big group of older Chinese people who decided to keep us company. They talked to us in Chinese, we answered in English, and nobody understood a word, not even the pointing. It doesn’t help that in China people count on their fingers with a completely different system, a separate sign for each number, which is how we’d already thought things cost six yuan that turned out to cost sixteen, or sixty. The group would talk to us for a while, wander off in whatever direction they fancied, and then reappear a few minutes later and start all over again.

The town, which took the name Furong from Hibiscus Town, the 1986 film shot here, looks a little like a scale model, too perfect in places and clearly built for visitors rather than lived in, like a theme park designed from start to finish, but it’s beautiful. The waterfall in the middle of it, around sixty metres high, was enormous and very loud, because after all that rain there was far more water than there should have been. Lit up at night, the whole place reminded Fernando of Spirited Away.

A bride who cries all night

We went back the next morning to see it in daylight, and the river had already calmed down to something like its normal size, which meant we could walk behind the waterfall, between the rocks and the falling water. There are caves back there with signs explaining that the town began with people living in them, who later mixed with the Tujia, the ethnic group that still makes up much of this corner of western Hunan.

The Tujia have a tradition we’d never heard of, the crying wedding, where the bride cries for days before her wedding, most of all on the last night, with her mother, sisters and friends crying along with her. They perform it on the bridge in front of the waterfall, so we waited for the show. It turned out to be one of the most boring we’ve ever sat through, mostly because we couldn’t understand a word and there’s only so long you can watch people pretend to cry. The setting, though, was lovely, with the bride, her friends, the family and the groom all in costume on the bridge and the waterfall behind them.

After that we took another high-speed train to Fenghuang, the second ancient town, which has the same kind of feel as Furong but a bigger centre, no entrance ticket, and people who actually live there.

Frogs, scorpions and a man who said what

The first thing we noticed were the restaurants, with live frogs kept out on the street, turtles, and more kinds of fish than we could name, and a few doors down, stalls selling fried insects on sticks: huge spiders, worms, centipedes and scorpions. Our apartment was close to one of the bridges, which matters here because the town is split by the Tuo River and the bridges light up at night. The riverbank was packed with people having their photos taken, a lot of them women in hired costumes, many dressed as the local minorities. Between the lights, the bars, the stalls, a little performance in the middle of the river and the small walkways across it, it was very crowded and very beautiful.

We had a good dinner looking out at the river, and after that the photo requests started.

At one point we walked into what was supposed to be a military museum, which turned out to have nothing in it except costumes you could put on for photos. A man who’d had a few started showing us his little daughter and talking to us at length without a translator. We understood none of it. We kept running into him around town afterwards, and every time we stopped for another photo, other people noticed and wanted one too.

Then there was the man who is still a running joke between us. He stopped us in the street to ask if he could practise his English, which was sweet, so we kept everything very simple. When we tried to tell him we’d heard it rains a lot where he’s from, he leaned in, took a step closer and said “what?”, and he did the same with every word he didn’t know, until we were acting out rain with our hands, falling from the sky. After a while we made our escape.

A llama in a tea shop

We went back the next morning to see it in daylight, and as usual the rain started the moment we stepped outside, so we ducked into a restaurant for breakfast and by the time we came out it had stopped. By day Fenghuang is even better, with grey traditional roofs, shopfronts closed with wooden planks slotted in one by one, and along the river a first row of diaojiaolou, wooden houses standing on thin stilts so the spring floods pass underneath.

The one thing we could have done without was the fashion for keeping animals in shops to draw people in: sheep, dogs, even chickens at the door. In one of them there was a llama, just standing there. While we watched, it relieved itself all over the shop floor, and the owner, not remotely surprised, cleaned everything up in a couple of minutes and went back to selling tea, which had nothing to do with the llama. The next day we flew on to Kunming.