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The "Beautiful Countryside" and the Most Dangerous Canyon

Trying to avoid injury as I head off the beaten trail in Guzhang County, Western Hunan
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This essay was originally posted as a Twitter thread on July 17, 2022. It has been reposted here with edits and revisions for long-essay format.

After my disappointing experience with Furong Village, I needed something else to do for the next day. Originally, I had planned to go to the Red Stone Forest, 红石林 a cool-looking geopark nearby. However, Boss Xiao told me Red Stone Forest is developed by the same company that runs tourism at Furong Village. I checked the corporate structure of the Red Stone Forest Tourism Development Company and found out it's true….Red Stone Forest is one of many Hunan attractions invested in by Changsha Huaxia Investment Company.

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In fact, Changsha Huaxia holds 80% of the shares of Red Stone Forest and the other 20% are held personally by the firm's founder/chairwoman. I guess that makes it a 100% private attraction. The local gov't probably had no money to develop so they leased to Huaxia to develop privately. I asked around and discovered that this actually a fairly common arrangement to develop tourism in more rural areas in China where the local government doesn’t have the resources to develop a site themselves.

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It’s a a shame, because it really does look interesting, but after my experience in Furong and learning about how the villagers were displeased with how they they treated, I didn't want to give any more money to this company. Unlike Furong Village, Red Stone Forest is a natural scenic area, so there aren’t any local villagers relying on tourism, just a natural environment that had been monetized. Boss Xiao suggested I check out Zuolong Canyon 坐龙峡 instead, which I hadn’t been considering visiting at all, but turned out was only 5km away from the guesthouse. So, on the morning of my last day in the Furong area, I woke up at 7:30AM and hiked over to the Zuolong scenic area.

Putting 100% of my faith in Baidu Maps, I ended up on small winding farm paths cutting among orchards of tangerines. Google tells me they weren't actually tangerines, but something called a pankon 椪柑, a hybrid of a tangerine a pomelo. They are the main agricultural crop here. Boss Xiao mentioned before that one of the reasons the area around his guesthouse had so many flying bugs was because of the vast fields of citrus nearby.

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Although I've never been, the landscape reminded me of pictures I've seen of California wine country, with gentle rolling hills covered in low scrubby brush.

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In this picture, you can see the bridge across the Xishui River that connects Guzhang County to Yongshun County.+

it was not quite 8am and the heat hadn't turned up yet, so my trip through the Hunan fields was mild and enjoyable.

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As I was walking, I reflected on how rarely I ever see the “real countryside” of China. When traveling to smaller cities from large cities, (or Pudong district in Shanghai) we often make jokes that we’re “going to the countryside.” but of course that’s not true…a 4th tier city is actually very developed, as we saw in Chenzhou or Jishou. And most often when we travel to rural areas, it’s also not reflective of how most Chinese people are living in rural areas, because there’s usually a major tourist attraction nearby which has already transformed the local economy and made it non-representative of the rural Chinese economy as a whole. On this short walk, I felt I was seeing the lifestyle and infrastructure conditions far more representative of the countryside where 500M Chinese work and live. Houses were scattered here and there among the fields and the area was overall pleasant, green, and heavily agricultural.

As I emerged from the fields and onto a larger road, a plaque informed me that I was entering a "Beautiful Countryside Demonstration Village Area (”美丽乡村”). The Beautiful Countryside is a part of the rural infrastructure development program I will discuss in-depth in a future post, but it involves spending lots of money on improving the visual aesthetic and quality of public infrastructure in rural areas.

I spotted evidence of recently-spent money, including new wells, irrigation ditches, and just-planted red flowers lining the road.

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Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of a sidewalk here, so I had to hop off the road and onto the embankment any time a truck came by. I got the feeling that there weren’t usually a lot of people walking around here.

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After about 35 minutes, I arrived at the entrance to the Zuolong Canyon tourist attraction (translated as Zuolong Valley in the picture below). There was just one small parking lot with no cars. At 8am, I wasn't even sure it was open, since I didn’t see any visitors or signs of activity at all, but a bao’an waved me over and directed me to the ticket office. They told me I was the 3rd visitor of the day.

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As I headed in, a group of locals near the entrance accosted me and told me I need to buy water, snacks, and gloves for the hike, or else I'll be sorry. I understood the need for water and snacks, but why gloves?

"You'll need the gloves to hold onto the chains" the auntie tells me.

"You sure I need those?" I ask, suspicious I'm being hustled out of 5RMB. "Oh yes" she says. "You'll be pulling yourself along with metal chains. Look at your hands. They are so soft and pretty. You need gloves."

I look at my hands. They do look soft and pretty.

I buy the gloves.

I head into the attraction. This was a last minute plan change and I really know nothing about it, except that it's a canyon, and that supposedly I will need gloves. Oh, and Boss Xiao says it's "a lot of fun". It starts out as a metal/plank path along a quiet clear stream, under a canopy of fig trees.

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Before long, the route changes to a series of pleasant green pools and waterfalls, with a chain “fence” on the end of the path. I'm laughing that I bought the gloves. Ah well, it was just 5RMB (less than one dollar USD).

I take a moment to marvel how the path next to the water sometimes has no fence. Can you imagine what a litigation risk that would be in the US? You would never see that.

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The plank pathway abruptly changes to a stone path. I'm not wearing hiking shoes; these are regular runners with heavily-worn treads, so I'm starting to slip on the water-slicked stones, also covered with moss and lichens. The gloves come out. I mentally apologize to auntie for thinking she scammed me.

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Green cliffs rise up on both sides. Water drips from the mossy canyon walls and everything is now muted and damp and gurgling. The walking path begins to elevate over the stream bed. In some places, metal plates are driven into the canyon wall to serve as steps.

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Funny that I was laughing before about the litigation risk of unfenced sections of path alongside a placid pool. Now we have unfenced sections of path over a 2-3 meter drop…

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In some places the only thing keeping me upright is my clinging to the chains, because the path underfoot is so slippery.

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The path starts going up the canyon wall a little bit, and the stream narrows and deepens below. I pass the other tourists who entered ahead of me and turn around to take some pictures for scale.

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Looks so easy to slip in…

Around the next corner, I discover a waterfall and a deep green pool of water. Substack only lets me upload one video per post, so I’ll have to embed a tweet here instead:

When I climb up to the top of the waterfall, I film the video clip that’s embedded at the top of this post. The water cascades down the side of the canyon, over dozens of smaller mossy rocks, creating a mist of water spraying through the air. The path to get here was tricky and a bit dangerous, but this scenery is incredible...it looks like a film set.

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Around another bend of the canyon, another small waterfall, and it's not clear where I'm supposed to go next, until I see the chains continuing up straight up the side of the cliff. Oh, I see, this is what we're doing now. Okay then.

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After this, the trail got even more treacherous. I entered a tight section of the canyon called the Black Crack which continued the trend of mossy slippery stone and chains, but now with a 5-meter drop into the rushing stream. You can reach out with your hands and touch the canyon walls on both sides in some places. Then the path widened out again and went up the side of the cliff on a ladder.

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Somewhere around this time, I slipped on a boulder and cut a nasty deep gash into my hand, despite the gloves. I wash it out with river water, but the palm of the glove on my right hand turns red as it oozes blood. That’s the price I pay for splitting my attention for a second to drink water and walk at the same time.

I continue, on, but after a few more sections of slippery stones and clinging to chains, I had to call it quits. If I had proper hiking shoes and wasn't hiking alone, I would have continued. But in this situation, I decided it wasn’t safe for me to keep going.

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At this point, I was getting mental images of news stories: "dumbass laowai tourist slips and dies while hiking canyon solo". Plus I didn’t know how far I still had to go to the top, and I was worried about the timing to get back out, return to the hotel, and get to the train station, so I turned back.

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Little did I know at the time that I was actually only about 15-20 minutes from the top, AND that this trail is supposed to be a one-way path, with the exit at the top, at a village where you can get a ride back down to the entrance to the tourist area. Going back, the way I did, was MUCH more dangerous…and dumb. The path that felt dangerous to climb up was even more dangerous to climb back down with those slippery and wet rocks, not to mention crossing paths with other tourists climbing up on the narrow trail. I had a map, but it had been turned into a mushy wet mess in my pocket a long time ago. Ah well…

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Zuolong Canyon sneaks up on you. At first, I was shaking my head laughing about the idea I might need gloves, chuckling about litigation risk. And then I was scaling a wet cliff, clinging to chains as my shoes slid uncontrollably across the moss, in the end turning back before the peak.

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All things considered, Zuolong Canyon is a great option for young, healthy, physically capable people to explore. And yes, you need hiking shoes and gloves. It's only a 3A attraction, but I think that has more to do with its undeveloped infrastructure, not the quality of its scenery.

And its underdeveloped infrastructure probably is rooted in the fact that it's 100% owned and operated by local government, with no outside investment, and they have no money to invest in upgrading it. I checked online to confirm…the Zuolong Canyon Tourism Development Company’s only shareholder is Guzhang County.

This tourism infrastructure standard I think was common 20 or 30 years ago for many top attractions that have a 4A or 5A rating today like Huangshan or Zhangjiajie, before they installed plank paths and fences and cable cars and snack bars.

Maybe it’s not suitable for everyone, and yeah, it probably is a litigation risk, but Boss Xiao was right: it is indeed a “lot of fun,” and an uncommon delight in a country full of over-commercialized attractions. If you end up going to Furong area, it's well worth your time.

This concludes the two-part series on Furong Village and Guzhang County. You can read the first post in this series here.

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Authors
David Fishman