After Zhangjiajie, we split off into different directions: Jen's parents had to go to Beijing to meet up for a tour with their friends, Guili went to Xi'an to check out the Terracotta Warriors, and we decided to head to the ancient town of Fenghuang.
Before we talk about Fenghuang, let us tell you about our journey there and how we ended up being escorted in a police vehicle...
Wanting to play it safe (since we were going to Fenghuang on a weekend), we decided to book a hotel in advance. The further you get from the big cities the harder it is to find people who know a bit of English, so, to be practical, we mapped out and took a picture of the hotel location, as well as its name & address in Chinese characters. Going to Fenghuang was pretty easy - a noisy 5 hour bus ride - but once we arrived in the city, it became a bit more complicated...
Since we had the mapped location, we figured out where we were and set out in the direction of our hotel. 20 minutes of walking later, we reached the area where the hotel was suppose to be…. hmm.. no hotel.
We asked several locals around the area, but between our 3 words of Chinese, their 5 words of English, and a whole lot of gestures/miming (which, interestingly enough, is not necessarily as universal as one might think!), no one seemed to be able to tell us where this hotel was. One lady tried to tell us (on a map) that it was on the other side of town (where we just had arrived from), but then she pointed us in the opposite direction, so.. baffled, we discarded her advice.
After thoroughly walking the area from both directions, we decided to give up and just take a taxi. We waved 2 taxis down and, oddly, neither of them knew the location of the hotel either (or they were unwilling to take us to the address for some weird reason...??).
Out of options, we spotted a police station and decided to ask them (with the hopes that they might speak some English). We showed them our booking info and they invited us to have a seat. After about 20 minutes of watching them speaking Mandarin to each other and smoking a few cigarettes (whilest we had no clue what was going on), one of the police officers suddenly stood up and said, "please... follow me".
He took us out to a police car… and what do you know... they actually drove us all the way across town to our hotel, AND got out to escorted us on foot through the narrow alley until they successfully delivered us to the correct hotel location.. AND, they did all this with a smile and a friendly, "…Welcome to Fenghuang"!! They were SO super nice!! Thank you Fenghuang police!! :)
Anyhow....
The name "Fenghuang" is a Chinese Phoenix that is supposed to rule over all other birds. It's also the name of a small city in the Hunan province where the old town is built around a small river and the original architecture is really well preserved. Unfortunately, it rained for most of our time there.. but we did manage to enjoy one dry morning :)
The old town is lined with local handicrafts and food: from dried fruit & ginger candy to dried pig face (which we did not dare try). Most shops and restaurants stay open past 10PM so you can enjoy browsing and strolling through the old town well into the evening while the city is all lit up.
Another cool thing is that every night, the locals setup food stalls in the night market where you can choose from a variety of ingredients and have them prepare it for you. Nothing is too "out there".. the weirdest thing is probably the little crabs and snails. The nice thing was that since they cooked BBQ style, there was a lot less oil that went into the preparation (relative to most of the other chinese food we'd been eating so far!!). :)
So.. this is our last post from China! We are next en route to Nepal!! :)