Longnan, Jiangxi Province
Over the weekend I went on what is probably my last trip in China but sadly it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment as I spent too much time on the bus and too little time exploring!
Longnan is in the countryside just over the hills of the Guangdong-Jiangxi border and it took me six hours to get there on the bus. Schools are still in so it’s not high season but the area definitely isn’t on the tourist trail, especially for foreigners. Thankfully the lady at reception in my hotel (£7 a night for an ensuite room!) was very helpful and Longnan is small so getting around town was easy even if getting out to the sights took longer.
The area around Longnan is home to many people from the Hakka group who arrived after the area was already settled and installed themselves on whatever spare land they could find. Partly because the locals weren’t always happy with this and partly because of roving bandits, the Hakka built themselves some fortified houses which are still standing. Unlike the Hakka houses I saw in Meizhou in January and the famous circular ones in Fujian Province, these are rectangular fortified houses and with imposing angular grey stone outer walls they bear more than a passing resemblance to castles in the UK. Unlike the vast majority of UK castles though, these fortified houses are still inhabited and, largely, in good repair. Maybe not for much longer though as there are now only a handful of families in each dwelling which formerly held entire clans as it’s hard for the younger generation to see the attraction of getting their water from a well.
The bus journey back was worse than on the way out because this time it took seven hours thanks to an unscheduled stop at a roadside mechanics. Although given that the bus back from school sometimes stops for petrol when it’s full of passengers, I wouldn’t be surprised if a coach scheduled a forty five minutes stop to have, amongst others, its tires checked whilst the passengers had to sit tight with no information about what was going on. There wasn’t even a dubious quality kung-fu movie to watch on the coach’s TV (the one on the way up revolved around identical twins who didn’t know about the existence of each other) and things got worse when the driver cranked up the sound on some Chinese electronic dance music with two hours left of the trip. They say no experience is wasted but I feel like I could’ve done without that one!
