Camping with Chinese characteristics

By Christopher Williams Source:Global Times Published: 2014-2-19 19:23:01

Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT



During the recent Chinese New Year holidays, southern China enjoyed unusually fine, dry weather. So I did what I had promised myself to do for the longest time, throw my gear into the back of the car and go find someplace in the countryside to go camping.

When I first mentioned my intentions to my Chinese friends, their universal and automatic response was "Be careful!" When asked what I should be careful about, the answer had something to do with the unspecified menace of bandits lurking in the hills.

Generally speaking, Chinese people don't camp out and they don't travel alone. They don't understand what the attraction is in lying on the hard ground in the middle of nowhere, dealing with bugs and dirt and inconvenience when you could be watching TV at home instead. They don't have an infrastructure here to support such things and don't know why anyone would want to.

My foreign friends, many of whom have children with their Chinese partners, were anxious to find someplace where they could get their kids out of the city for a weekend and introduce them to the pleasures of the great outdoors, just as we had learned to do as children. So the search was on.

I went first to a famous geological park in Guangdong, and was able to convince the people there that I was just a harmless traveler with a backpack looking for a place to sleep for the night. After climbing a dangerously steep set of stairs in the dark, I met a group of bemused Buddhist monks who said I could camp at the pagoda at the top of the sacred mountain, so for Chinese New Year's Eve, that's exactly what I did. I woke on the first day of the year, watching the sun rise over the national park, nothing but green valleys and ancient rock formations and a sense that all was right with the world. Why would I want to be anywhere else?

The next day I traveled to the Nanling National Forest, which is the largest in Guangdong and has the highest mountain in the province. Like the day before, I had arrived before the holiday makers and was virtually alone in the park - a wonderful feeling. I went down to a secret reservoir and decided to sleep by the waterside for a night. And there I found it, a series of makeshift campsites and fire pits that had been used by the local people before me. And it was covered with plastic bags, beer bottles and other assorted trash. What a shame. In other cultures, where camping is a necessary rite of passage, respect for nature means cleaning up after yourself and leaving no trace behind when you leave. If China actively supported an appreciation for its natural heritage - of which there is much - and encouraged people to camp in order to enjoy it, they would also develop a sense of social responsibility and cleanliness that just might infect people's daily lives. Next time, I'll bring more trash bags with me and show them how it's done.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.



 



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