Gansu
On Beijing time out west, it’s still bright out even past 9 p.m.
On one such dusky evening, an American urban planner, ecologist and I sidled into a fluorescent-lit side booth at a restaurant off to the side of Zhangye’s Food Street full of open-air stalls, or da pai dang. This shop and many other copycats like it on the same strip were selling cuo yu tang, or “fish noodles.” The dish doesn’t have any fish meat but were so named for the way you rub the pasta noodles into short, thin tapered strips. The resulting shape looks like a small fish, about the size of a sardine. It was served in a bowl doused in a thick savory sauce with slices of braised meat. In this part of the country they also always serve vinegar with a kind of homemade chili sauce on the table.
We had just spent the whole day in awe of China’s natural geological forms. For the absurdly cheap price of 60 kuai arranged by our Silk Road Travellers Hostel, a driver took us to Danxia National Park’s two sites. Most people know about and flock to the famous rainbow-hued cake layers Qicai. But few are aware of the wind-worn canyons of Binggou, where rows of gorgeous hoodoos rival the skinny spires of Bryce Canyon in Utah. While tourists swarmed the stairwells of the rainbow hills, there were only a few small groups at Binggou, which by comparison was so empty it felt strange.
Binggou’s lesser status was also a blessing. Planners didn’t truss it up as much as other landmarks, such as laying swaths of concrete for caravans of big buses in the middle of the park. That’s rare in China, where development and crowds can surge so quickly the local government has a difficult time properly installing the kind of facilities and infrastructure that don’t distract from our appreciation of the natural beauty of the landscape. At Binggou the road cracked into a rift so deep the bus couldn’t cross over it.
Crescent Lake in Dunhuang, Gansu province
At Danxia’s painted hills, the tourist center was enormous. While it’s certainly a grand piece of architecture, what message is the local government trying to send? For sure, China is heavily populated, and facilities need to accommodate thousands of people. But the bigger puzzle to me is, why do we as humans feel the need at all to compete with and distract from Nature’s splendor? And as my fiscal-minded city planner friend put it more succinctly, “Who’s paying for all this?”
Good question.
