"Rock Clibming"

"You've got to be careful," warned the man in charge of the festival, a foreigner.

"They don't know how to handle you. It's like the officials have brought in a cage of tigers and have just let them loose. They're scared of what you may do."

They, was the rural town of Luo Cheng in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi. Only six months prior, the first foreigner had entered the region. A white faced waiguoren was still an enigma here.

As one of the poorest regions in China, especially for the province, the Chinese government was looking to sprinkle some of its excess funds to the local economy. Rather than deposit a lump dollop of yuan directly in the farmers' pockets, the government was looking to the future--tourism.

However, the small town of a few thousand, small for any country's comparison, but especially China's, had no infrastructure. What it had, authenticity and the surrounding karst mountains--a climber's dream.

So, the "2010 Guangxi Luo Cheng 'Rock Clibming' Tourist Festival" was born. With a cash reward of 5,000 yuan for both the top male and female climber, a sum many times more than the local farmer's annual salary of 350 yuan, any serious Chinese climber came.




I had been in Yangshuo for a day too long. I had ticked off the list of my "must-do's." Bike and hike Moon Hill, jump off the bridge on the Lijong River, rock climb, and drift down the Li River in a bamboo boat, as well as unexpectedly swim across the same river (much to the surprise of the boat master, when he refused to lower his bargain price of 50 yuan per head to drift us across, we jumped in and swam the length instead). I'm fairly confident I won't grow an extra toe.

On the travel scale, it had been an 8. Yet, I still wanted something more.


"Free food, free stay and climbing. No catches," read a poster hanging on the city wall across from my hostel.

Centered on the poster a hill greater than Yangshuo's famed Moon Hill, noted equally for its unique shape and location, as well as its visitors, including President Nixon, dominated the gloss. I didn't know what the "2010 Guangxi Luocheng Rock-Clibming Tourist Festival" was, but the post-it attached held the subliminal message that said, "Come climb." My mind stuck on one word, FREE.

I had only two days left in my travel time in Guangxi province before my plane was scheduled to take off from Guilin back to Zhengzhou, but as if I already knew the competition's slogan, Think less, climb more, I set my alarm for the 9 a.m. bus.

I'd figure out the rest of the details later I thought as I drifted to sleep on the hard bunk bed.


An hour after the planned time ("China time" usually happens fashionably late), we disembarked and I, along with 30 other climbers, from the professional to the novice, were sharing a gravel road with a water oxen and its owner in the middle of karst country. We were an odd sort, representing 17 different nationalities to be exact, and looked the rough and dirty shape of a backpacker. In Luo Cheng, our arrival caused a minor traffic jam. As people grabbed their ropes and quick draws from below the bus, equipment as odd as we were, the officials swiftly instructed us to step inside.

We were the tigers.



Not until 1987 did climbing, the way we know it, arrive in China. Since then, Yangshuo has become a climbing mecca, with over 600 bolted routes, it easily ranks as the country's best place to climb on. Chris Sharma has even touched rock here.

Five hours away, accessed by single lane gravel roads, at times, Luo Cheng had the same karst mountains, but none of the bolts. Where people are more concerned about food for tonight's dinner, the pronation of one's climbing shoes becomes a moo point, if they even understood why you would want to crunch your foot at all. Foot binding is recognized as illegal here now.

Unlike the history of China, a long and complex tale, China's climbing history is similarly as short as the Qin dynasty, its reign lasting only a mere 15 years on the long line of emperors. Yet the effects of the Qin Dynasty still define China today, the construction of the Great Wall in the North and the 7,500 unearthed life-size terracotta warriors in Xi'an. For Luo Cheng, the new sport of climbing in China was going to define the area and at the same right, be the spring board for its rise to success. Naturally, the only way to mark this was with a festival equal to the inauguration of a president.

Obviously when I had hopped the bus to Luo Cheng, I hadn't anticipated the significance of the event. The presence of our foreign faces was the catch to "free".



As a guest, I was declared a foreign VIP. As an English teacher in China, I am also a "Foreign Expert" in a week I'll have the documentation to prove it. If you want attention, come to Asia, your need to feel special will dissipate fast with each flash of a Nikon, usually inches from your face. Being a foreign volunteer for the Olympics prepared me for this kind of assaulting attention, my first full day in China started with a front page photo in Tsinghua University's campus newspaper, an unflattering picture of our arrival at the airport. Yet, I still had a lot to learn about China and its face to the world.

Things were about to get weird.


It began with our gift packages, a quick drying bright blue shirt emblazoned with the words, I (heart, in the pattern of the Chinese flag) Luo Cheng, along with a matching red hat adorned with the climbing logo and a polo of the same color, sized from XXXL to XXXXL. Apparently part of their assumptions about foreigners included a notion that we were all sumo wrestler trainees. We took our bags to our free hotel rooms and rushed to our free hotel buffet lunch that would prelude our free dinner banquet that would start an hour later, down the street in another hotel.

If you've never been to a Chinese banquet, set your mind open. It's the center stone of Chinese business and is a practiced tradition that usually involves Chinese people attempting to drink their guests under the table. Gan bei, China's version of cheers, literally means "bottoms up!" (I'll write more about this later in a separate blog post detailing HMC's first banquet. It involved many shots of baijo and a few trips to the bathroom for one unfortunate victim.)

Complete with chicken feet and Peking duck, the banquet featured the usual Chinese delicacies, however, as I was leaving I spotted the unusual visitor, a tall, tall man. In China, I'm a giant, in the metro I can usually peer over the black sea of heads. The hushed voices surrounding me said, that's the tallest man in the world.

What was he doing here? I had no idea, but I snapped a picture regardless. Time for the prey to become the predator, it only seemed fair that it was my turn to take a picture.

Next, we walked along with the masses to the headline event,"Enjoy the fun: Township of Melao Ethnic Minority", hosted by the Luo Cheng Communist Party Committee. As it turned out, the festival wasn't about climbing. The reality, It was a showcase of Luo Cheng for the sake of tourism. When we arrived, several thousand already sat occupying the sea of plastic stools. The fifteen part act included songs and dance by many of the minority groups within China, including a solo sung in Mongolian by the tallest man I had spotted earlier. During act 11, two of the foreign "VIPs" clapped on stage to It's a big, big world and the crowd roared. Three hours later, the madness finally ended with a short show of fireworks.

We were then instructed to go directly back to our hotel and sleep. Tomorrow would bring more of the same, another banquet and a "friendship building" tree planting ceremony. Climbing wouldn't actually start until the third day of the festival. By then I would be back in my bed in Zhengzhou, or so I thought.

More to come.