My latest hobby, mountain biking, is benefiting from a prominent sign of progress in these parts: brand new dirt roads.
Thanks to better equipment and engineering, the bright orange scars of the roads are spreading through the forests like a rusty spider's web. Their purpose is to make it easier to harvest bamboo, the prime local commodity. Until now, tough hillmen would have to carry heavy bundles on their shoulders down steep slopes. These days a truck can drive into the middle of the forest and pick up its cargo. Men and women count up the harvest on clipboards as the workers throw fresh green poles onto the new road.
As with most signs of progress, the dirt roads are not pretty, although they do open up the views. But the real shame about them is the damage they have done to the ancient mountain trails, or shan lu. The shan lu are masterpieces of stonework, built by hand centuries ago and still perfectly serviceable. I have spent days happily wandering along these trails. They also have the advantage of following the most direct route between hill villages. In comparison, when local people travel by bus, they take a circuitous route, first going down into the valley and then round the mountain before heading up again.
Where shan lu meandered up hillsides the dirt roads now cut straight through their beautiful steps, burying them under mudslides and breaking them into disconnected pieces. Soon the shan lu will be overgrown and forgotten.
Yesterday I stared sadly at a fragment of a perfect shan lu high in the hills and couldn't help thinking that in England there would be preservation orders, protests to the council, action groups and environmentalists fighting for the local heritage. Of course, there'd be others who supported the new roads, arguing for progress. But not in China. In China we only get progress. No argument.
A chinese "b"
I am the first foreign parent to send a child to the local school and I suppose a few teething troubles were inevitable. Our daughter Isabel is being taught to read and write with the Roman alphabet as well as Chinese characters. But she is not exactly being taught the way I was. For example, she is being taught to write the letter "b" with two separate strokes of the pen, rather than just one. When I picked her up from school last week, I humbly raised the matter.
"I am worried that you aren't teaching Isabel to write the Roman alphabet correctly," I said to the language teacher Ms Shen. I traced a small case "b" on the wall as if it were a blackboard.
Ms Shen watched patiently. "But we're not teaching them the Roman alphabet," she replied. "We're teaching them to write pinyin." Pinyin is the method of writing the sounds of Chinese characters in Roman letters.
"But a 'b' is still a 'b,' and there is only one way to write it," I protested.
"In pinyin it is different."
"No, it isn't."
I struggled to keep calm as Isabel was beside me. The headmistress had appeared too, probably because when you say the letter "b" in Chinese it sounds a bit like what could be politely referred to in English as a "c." I realised what a scene I was making, pointing my finger at a teacher and loudly repeating the "c"-word outside a class of six year olds.
Ms Shen added, "We'll teach them to write your way later, when we do English." I think that was meant to reassure me. It had the opposite effect.
"So it would be OK for me to learn the character for 'good' this way?" I wrote it on the wall with the stroke order back to front, "and learn the correct way later?"
Ms Shen, the headmistress, and the maths teacher who had also joined us, all stared at me as though I was raving mad. "Of course not!" they shouted in unison.
It was tempting, so tempting, to tell the lovely and logical Ms Shen what she could do with her "b." But Isabel was looking up at me, and we were talking about her education, in front of all her teachers. So we went home defeated.
Pickled for winter
The early weeks of November fill me with foreboding, yet are also a guilty pleasure. There's a village tradition, a rite of passage almost, that must be completed by the restaurant and hotel owners before they shut up for winter. That being, everyone has to get plastered. The restaurants are still open, customers are few and far between, so why not have your mates over for a few lunch parties? The owners take turns in hosting them.
Thanks to the fact that lunch begins at 11.30, the days disappear in an alcoholic haze. It's impossible to get anything done. I try to plead that I have to do the school run. "Send a taxi," the others shout, "and have another drink!"
There's no denying that it's fun. It's like the end of term for grown ups. The gossip is juicy, the jokes saucy and the friendships get warmer.
We got off to a roaringly drunk start on Monday and it hasn't let up. I'm having to write this column at an unusually early hour, before I send the children to school. Which reminds me, I must find a way to tell the story of Ms Shen's "b" at lunch today. It'll go down a storm.
