Are you going to Okains Bay?: Banks Peninsula, 2

As my travels continue, I've been exploring my personal travel style, learning what I like and don't like, my preferred pace, how many museums versus parks versus restaurants I can handle before it all gets to be too much. Spontaneity is one ideal I've maintained-- I say "ideal" because often being spontaneous causes me a lot of stress and anxiety, but I try to persevere because it means being able to take advantage of the random opportunities that sometimes present themselves on the road.

I left off last entry at one of those opportunities, the chance to see a Maori-centric celebration of Waitangi Day at Okains Bay on Banks Peninsula. I had planned to return to Christchurch after one night until I heard of the celebration, and so I had to scramble to find accomodation. All of the hostels in town were booked up, but I finally lucked into a free room at a local SERVAS host's bed and breakfast. When I arrived at her house, up a steep hill outside of town, it was immediately clear to me that the lady, whose name was Val, was significantly batty-- not in a malevolent way, just enough to prattle on about the discovery of Atlantis, past life regression, and the coming golden age brought on by a Buddhist Jesus figure as we ate her delicious vegetarian curry for dinner.

That evening I walked down to town, watching the sunset and trying to figure out how to get to Okains Bay, about 20 minutes away by car, the next day. In the US, such a celebration would warrant shuttle busses, or at least taxis, but I could find evidence of neither. In fact, the single taxi driver in Akaroa told me that she had advertised for a shuttle service and had had no responses. She apologized, but if there weren't any more takers the trip would not be worth her while.

I was flummoxed. It seemed incredible to me that such a big-deal celebration happening nearby would merit no public transport, but as it stood I would have done better to go all the way back to Christchurch and then get a bus to Okains Bay the next day, rather than stay in the immediate area of the celebration. But now that I had committed to stay, I was determined to figure out a solution. I started asking around in the restaurants and shops in town, and most of them recommended hitchhiking. I decided I might try my hand at it for the first time as a last resort, but first I would ask to see if there was anyone in town who was already planning to attend and had a free seat in his/her car.

And so I did. Akaroa's single main street is about a mile long, lined with little stores, galleries, coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, and bars. And I went into every single one of them (well, the ones that were open past dinner time) and asked the waitstaff, the clerks, and sometimes the patrons if anyone was planning to go to Okains Bay. It was a difficult task: I'm not a big fan of talking to strangers, in general, and this required me to continually break the stranger barrier for two hours. But I was generally greeted with politeness and friendliness, although this was always followed by apologies. When I reached the town's main pub, I stooped to asking every single customer. Finally, a well-dressed man seated with a group looked me up and down. "I'm not planning to go to Okains Bay," he said, "but I'll run you over if you like. You don't need a ride back, do you?"

I said I didn't: ironically enough, my Christchurch host, Theresa, was planning to drive down to the celebration and had agreed to give me a ride back to the city.

"Great, my name is Robert," he said, and extended his hand. "Do you like a fast ride?"

The next morning, after I had said goodbye to Val, I saw what he had meant. Equipped with a coffee for myself and one as a gift for Robert, I climbed into his beautiful blue Porsche at 9 am on the dot. We took the winding roads from Akaroa to Okains Bay at at least twice the speed limit, and he explained that he had a beach house on the peninsula, that he had started a factory business with three friends and when they weren't sure if they'd do well they'd agreed to each buy a Porsche if they succeeded. He paused to throw the car into third gear. "Well, two of us bought them. The third fellow didn't because he's Fijian Indian, and if he drove it people would think he pinched it," he said. I opted not to respond to this comment, instead silently admiring the car, which was all curves and growls.

View from the road to Okain's Bay
Out of breath from the speed, we arrived in Okains Bay, I thanked Robert and hoofed it down the road to the town's marae (remember, that's the Maori word for meetinghouse), the center of the day's festivities.

The beautiful blue Porsche. See what some determination and two hours of asking everyone in sight for a ride can get you?
At the marae, things were just getting underway.

The Okains Bay Waitangi Day schedule
The day started off with a powhiri, or formal welcome ceremony, in which a Maori representative challenges the visitors to prove their intentions before they are allowed on the marae. That day the powhiri was purely for ritual's sake, as there were no tensions to be resolved, but the sight of the chosen warrior stomping his feet, bugging his eyes, and sticking his tongue out angrily was still affecting. I looked around the crowd, which was filled with both white and Maori faces, rapt at attention. And for the first time I saw a Maori woman with a moko, or traditional chin tattoo. According to what I've read, moko used to be used to indicate rank and identity. They disappeared for a long time but now are making a comeback.

Performing the powhiri

Maori woman with chin moko

Once the powhiri was completed, we settled in for a lengthy program of Maori language and English speeches, discussing the history of New Zealand (Waitangi Day commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, where virtually every important Maori chief agreed to become a subject of the Queen, creating modern New Zealand-- just what "becoming a subject of the queen" meant to both sides was where the problems started) and emphasizing the importance of understanding and peaceful coexistence between Pakeha (White European) and Maori. In between the speeches, a group of Maori girls performed traditional songs, an interestingly diverse group (note one red-haired singer in the group below) in one-shouldered dresses swinging their hips and arms to the beat.

Maori girls waiting to perform
Following the speeches, we got to watch a NZ citizenship ceremony, which I thought was a very cool and moving way to observe the holiday. As we looked on, families from Samoa, Fiji, and South Africa recited oaths and started new lives. Each family was also given a tree to plant near their new homes, representing the roots they could now put down.

The rest of the day presented an earthy, down-home version of Kiwi culture, akin to going to a small-town Independence Day celebration in the States. There were sheep-shearing demonstrations, blacksmithing, arts and crafts. And intermingled with that, in a comfortable, unforced sort of way, were Maori traditions. Okains Bay has a fantastic museum of Maori artifacts, and lunch was a hangi, a traditional Maori meal of root vegetables and meat baked underground.

Cooking a hangi for 500+ people in the ground

A hangi lunch: sweet potato, pumpkin, chicken, pork, bread, and carrots all cooked in underground oven. Mmm, delicious.
Through it all came the voice of the day's announcer, a sharp Kiwi accent flowing continually through a PA system thredded across the entire festival site. He commented on the weather and current events, told jokes, and occasionally recommended that we go see a certain event, his disembodied voice assuring us with a classic Kiwism that this or that was "well worth a look." The sound of his constant patter added a lovely texture to the already fascinating day.

The afternoon ended on a fitting note, with a waka (traditional Maori war canoe) making a trip up the river feeding into the bay. The canoe paddled in from the Bay, with the occupants singing traditional chants in time with their strokes-- but those occupants were both Maori and Pakeha volunteers, and the revelers who packed close to the bank to watch the canoe come in were mixed as well, watching traditions made, stories celebrated, and centures of struggle not resolved but certainly remembered.

Paddling the waka

The Ruralest Ruralist (A Final Three-Day Yunnan Adventure)

Xiong Limei, the young woman who had been my translator but, more importantly, my friend during my Independent Study Project in May, had invited me to visit her family in rural Lanping county for the last few days before my trip back to the U.S., so after saying goodbye to my friends in Fugong, I climbed on a bus and braved an 8-hour trip through roads ravaged by the summer rain. I planned to meet my friends Jackson and Linda and to spend the afternoon with them before meeting Xiong Limei for the bus ride out into the countryside.

It was Sunday, and the city was alive with peasants coming in from the countryside to buy their groceries. I was particularly struck by the many Yi women in their bright clothing. It seemed to me they were everywhere-- in noodle shops, leaning against the open doorways of cell phone stores, dragging their purchases down the street. My previous encounters with Yi outside of Dali during my homestay had taught me that they can be very elusive and tend to stick high in the mountains. As fascinated as ever by this life that must be so different than mine, I watched with excitement as they went about their market routines. There was even an Yi nainai watching her grandchild play in Lanping's city center park.

Yi women out for market day in downtown Lanping


An Yi woman looks on as children play in Lanping park. This was the only decent picture I ever got of an Yi woman in married headdress-- you can really see how big it is


Lama people were also in abundance that Sunday. Here a Lama woman plays with a child (I'm guessing her granddaughter) in the city park, Lanping. I love her headpiece in particular.


Sitting on the street by Lanping park talking in the evening


I was lucky enough to be able to leave my giant suitcase with Jackson for a few days, meaning that I only had a small day-pack to carry as Xiong Limei and I caught the small, beat up transport van thirty minutes outside of Liuku on cobbled roads. She motioned to the driver to stop on a small, roughly hewn wooden bridge over a burbling river. There were no houses near-- we would have to walk to her village, 20 minutes off the road. As we disembarked, a Pumi man in a dirty baseball hat looked at me with a mixture of blank curiosity and shock. He regained himself and climbed in to continue his journey, but later in the week Xiong Limei's sister, who is a doctor in Lanping, told me he had talked to everyone he met about he had seen "one of those people with white skin, like on TV" for the first time in his life.

The hike to the Xiong house wasn't easy. The rainy season had turned the path into thick sludge, and my foot was not yet healed (and would not be for months.) Nevertheless, we slowly made our way up the flanks of a long, large hill (the foothills of the mountains which are foothills to the Himalayas.) When I arrived at the house I was warmly greeted by Limei's father, a spry man with gleaming black eyes, a stubbly chin, and an impish grin, and mother, a beautiful woman with a kind face, her black-grey hair caught up in the turban traditional to Pumi people. Both of them spoke the local Mandarin dialect with thick accents I often could not understand, but they had learned to comprehend Mandarin by watching Chinese TV so we were able to communicate in a lopsided sort of way, with one-way translation required much of the time.

Limei's mother was especially happy to have me visit-- she has suffered from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis since she gave birth to Limei in her early twenties. If she lived in the US she would be wheel-chair bound, but in the remote Chinese countryside she gets around using a pair of low wooden stools. Her basic mode of transportation is to sit on one stool, place the other in the direction she wishes to travel, scoot herself onto the second stool, and start again. She doesn't move around much for this reason, and so in her 50-year life I was the first white person she had ever met, and she was thrilled to welcome me into her home. I was lucky enough to be visiting when she had the one arthritis treatment the family can afford per month, which helps to keep the swelling down. Even a few days later, she showed me the goose eggs developing by her knees and elbows. It was hard to watch and know that I couldn't change the situation for her or her family-- but as soon as I returned home I sent her a grasping tool of the sort given to the elderly in nursing homes here to pick things up from far away when I returned home.

The Xiong house was different from any I had ever been in. It consisted of two long, wodden buildings with a yard in between-- one building for the animals (pigs, goats, a horse) and one for the family. The family house had two levels, with the upper reserved for storage and the lower divided into a bedroom for Limei's parents, a bedroom for Limei and her siblings (if they were home), and an all-purpose kitchen/dining room/living room where the family spent most of their time chatting, preparing dinner using the san jiao (meaning "three legs," a cooking rack) over the open fire, and eating. There were no bathrooms-- while I stayed with the Xiongs such business was conducted in the potato fields or behind the house (depending on what sort of bathroom excursion you were headed on). There was also no running water (the Xiongs get their water from a stream a few minutes down the hill) and minimal electricity, only a few light bulbs to use at night.

Images of the Xiong house





I slept surprisingly well in Limei's extra bed, sheets and blankets wrapped around a wooden board. Limei's father brought us in a couple of bricks heated from the fire to keep us warm in our beds, and we barricaded to door from the inside with a large concrete block to stave off any intruders.

The weather was quite rainy and wet for the time I spent with Limei and her family--it was late July and the wet season had its claws in deep all over Yunnan. This meant that Limei didn't need to spend all of her time herding the family's goats and pigs, as she would have during clearer weather. Instead, after a breakfast of fried potatoes and pork Xiong's mother, father, and older brother (home from medical school just to see the foreign visitor) took turns doing Pumi dances for me and singing traditional songs, sometimes accompanying themselves on a roughly-hewn wooden instrument something like a cross between a guitar and a banjo or pounding the beat on a tightly-rolled up sheep skin that stood in for a drum. The songs and dances ranged from made up on the spot (Limei translated a sad song her mother sang about losing her own mother at age 13) to the thoroughly traditional, to be performed at rituals and on holidays.

For dinner, they killed one of their chickens for me to eat. This was a big deal-- for people living a subsistence lifestyle, a live chicken is a sustainable resource who will provide eggs (for eating and for producing more chickens) throughout its life. A dead chicken is one night's dinner. Thus, killing a chicken for a guest is an enormous honor. So even though I was fairly disgusted by having to watch as they chased the chicken (clearly cognizant of its fate) around the yard, slit its throat, drained the blood, etc, I tried to honor their way of honoring me by not cringing. And in some detached way, it was interesting to watch the process of creating a chicken dinner from start to finish.

The beginning of the process of cooking a chicken over an open fire


Xiong Li Mei and her mother outside their house


Getting water from the giant water vat


After dinner, the songs and dancing commenced again, lasting long into the night and lit only by the fire under the san jiao and the single bare lightbulb.

Xiong Li Mei's mother performs for me

In the morning, Limei was determined to find me some Lisu people to speak to about stories-- my thesis research was focusing on Lisu stories and their relationship with Christianity, and I hadn't had a chance to talk to any Lisu from the Lanping area. We walked an hour and a half down the road. As the rain intensified and I grew tired, Limei insisted that there was no need to take a bus--the village we were walking to was only a few minutes away. My foot was getting sorer and sorer and I was getting wetter and wetter, but I didn't crack until she pointed across the road and said "Okay, now we only need to climb over there." Miserable, I started up a small mountain, my foot throbbing with every step up the steep, muddy incline. As we reached the top I could barely walk, and the rain was coming down in buckets. I was exhausted and overwhelmed and began to cry. Limei was flummoxed, unsure what to do. "Li se," she said to me, "don't cry here. There may be gui around. They will like you too much if you cry." She was referring to a legendary figure in the Pumi and Lisu pantheon, a malevolent, flesh eating spirit that loves to torment humans. Later that night, when I complained of an upset stomach (probably from an overstimulating day and our dinner of roasted pig's head) she wondered aloud if the cause might not be a gui from earlier on the mountain. Regardless, I was finally able to pul myself together when I looked around and found that the worst was over and we had emerged on a level, sandy cow path (with a few cows munching wet hay to prove it.)

The outing unfortunately proved to be mostly fruitless-- we found only a few Lisu home during the summer planting season and were able to convince them to tell me a couple stories, but my black mood prevailed and they didn't have much to offer. Luckily, one of the people at the last house we visited was taking a large load of hay into the nearest village to sell, and he offered us a ride in his huge purple wood hauler. I sat in the cramped passenger seat, with Limei on my lap and the farmer's dog on her lap. Luckily, it was only a 15 minute drive, with the transmission vibrating mightily underneath us all the way, belching diesel.

I was scheduled to leave for Lanping, and then Kunming, early the next morning, but Limei's uncle arrived at the house that night to try and convince me to come to his house nearby for lunch. As politely as I could, I told him that I would be leaving to go back to America before lunchtime but that I really appreciated his generosity. "But," he protested, "I already killed two chickens for you!"

I felt terrible, knowing what a sacrifice those chickens were and what message they sent about his feelings for his would-be lunch guest. But my bus would not wait, and even if I had had the time I doubted I could climb up the enormous hill to his house with my bum foot. The situation was tense-- the family couldn't understand why I wouldn't just postpone the bus trip to honor Uncle, and I desperately wanted not to be perceived as ungrateful or rude. I dodged a bullet by arranging for Uncle Xiong to come for breakfast before I left. He and his two daughters joined with Limei, her brother, and father in showing me a traditional circle dance done at the Pumi New Year. Limei's mother sat on her low stool in the middle of the circle, clapping and singing along, seemingly fine with her inability to dance. Somehow it wasn't as sad as it might have been.

Before I left, we took pictures together and Limei's parents issued a formal invitation for me to return any time with my parents. I was their American daughter, they said. We took our final photographs, then Limei and I left for the first leg of a long trip back to America.

All of the Xiong family, gathered to say goodbye as I leave for Kunming and then the US

Wild Wild East

We've been on the road three days now, to Weishan, Weibaoshan, and today to Dali. Rural Yunnan is amazing. Really beautiful. I've already had some great times, playing with many many small children, learning to dance with old Chinese ladies, watching the sunset on a Taoist mountain. I have about 30 seconds left in this internet bar and I don't know what I'll have internet access again-- we leave tomorrow morning for a remote Buddhist monastery and then move in for a 4-day rural homestay. But I promise an update soon.

To everyone who's been emailing me-- please don't think your letters and notes go unnoticed. They often make my day, and when I have more time I promise to write you back. Thank you all and much love.