Wulingyuan

Yangshuo in guilin southern china used to be on the top of my list as the most beautiful place I've been to, It's a small chinese village by the river surrounded by green mountains shaped like parabolas going upwards. The small houses around the village kept their traditional chinese designs, complete with these little red lanterns all lined along cobblestone roads where peddlers sell all kinds of junks. Most of the houses though are coffee shops because the whole place is being frequented by foreign people looking for a cup of coffee to relax with in the middle of all this goddam charmingness.

A couple of days ago I found something better than the yangshuo landscape. Me and my brothers went to this remote town of wulingyuan in western hunan in china where the place is surrounded by kilometer high pillars made up of quartz and sandstone with all sorts of trees growing on the sides instead of mountains, and when you see the whole landscape from the top with all this fog around, it wouldn't seem like planet earth anymore.

It was the landscape that these ancient renaissance chinamen were so fond of painting, for a time I thought they made these whole pillar thing up from doodles and each artists that copied it thereon must have made stone pillars more segmented. But goddam things are actually real. I found myself swearing while saying how awesome the place looks like. Hell I swore even more than I used to in front of a lot of people, they were chinamen and didn't understood crap anyway.

There is a river that leads down to a valley where their little town is located, but unlike yangshuo, their little town doesn't have much of those chinese architectures or any charm around, most of the houses are like concrete blocks piled after the other, complete with red banners that read out to the people to mobilize for the glory of china. They don't have coffee shops around either, tea shops probably, and the streets are instead lined up with these little restaurants serving their bizarre cuisine surrounded by chinamen eating on the streets. It made it more fun to be there in the middle of nowhere and having no idea where to go. Even at midnight, the only place you could see open were these restaurants, and it made you think that there was nothing else better to do in the middle of these mountain pillars but eat, and eat almost anything. The restaurants had their ingredients lined outside their windows from vegetables to the living animalia and the dead, like chickens, frogs, turtles, dogs and oysters the size of my shoes all on deathrow. I couldn't make out if it were really a dead dog hanging in one shop though, it was cut in half and dried and it would look like a dog if you tried to fold the whole carcass mentally back into one piece.

Me and my brothers would walk around the streets at night and the restaurants were still open with a couple of chinamen still eating on the streets. We would go try eating ourselves with my youngest brother always yelling in mandarin that we're foreigners and to give us the specialty of the house while laughing so hard, like crazy foreigners. Anyway everything we ate was good even the goddam frogs, and they all came in a cheap sidewalk pricetag, I swear I'd get fat if I lived here.