China café

The summer means snakes in Moganshan. I am not referring to their appearance on the menu in the local restaurants, where they are a popular dish, but in the woods and on the roads around the village. Most are harmless, but we have two nasty ones, the bamboo green and the five step.

The bamboo green, as its name suggests, is bright green. By day it coils itself in the tops of the bamboo. At night it slithers to the ground to hunt. Its venom is potentially lethal but, because of its colour and quick movements, it is relatively easy to spot and the chances of a bite are slim. I once lifted our daughter Isabel onto a low wall next to a bamboo green in the dark. Never have I reacted so fast to the innocent question: "What's that Daddy?"

The five step snake is so named because local lore holds that if you get bitten by one, you take five steps and then drop dead. Being brown, fat and lazy, the five step is harder to spot and more likely to be trodden on. A forestry worker was bitten by one last summer and survived, just.



Since the way home from our coffee shop involves a walk through the woods in the dark, we always use torches and tread heavily. The children know the drill.

Going the other way one morning, we met a local man who was running up and down the road and craning his neck to look at the hillside. "Two hundred! Two hundred!" he was shouting. I had to ask him what he was talking about.

"Snake! Worth two hundred bucks if I can catch it and sell it to a restaurant."

Our children now call harmless snakes "two hundreds."

My criminal associates

We might live in an idyllic backwater but three of my local friends are in jail at the moment, one for fraud and two for GBH. In the fraud cause, my friend is the manager of a construction company under the control of a local government property bureau whose chief was on the take. My friend was, I suppose, happy to receive his share. The word is that he will be out soon thanks to his connections and the fact that he was not the main culprit. His foreman, who was dragged down with him, has since reappeared with a very short haircut.

The first of the GBH cases involves a fellow who is excellent company over a few beers and a welcoming host, even if he does look like one of the Sopranos. The story is that his sister was called in for questioning about a business associate of hers who might or might not be involved in a corruption case. Called in for questioning in such a situation means "officially sanctioned kidnap by an anti-corruption police unit which does not officially exist." They lock you in a hotel room with no outside contact, let alone a lawyer, until you spill any beans that you might have.

My friend was intervening on behalf of his sister and he unofficially came to blows with said anti-corruption unit. They suddenly became official and locked him up.

The second GBH case involves our (off duty) police chief and a drunken, verbally abusive double-parker who is now in a possibly permanent coma. There are no mitigating factors so far as I know. I doubt we'll be seeing my friend the chief again soon. That's sad because he used to let me get away with murder. I don't think they'll let him get away with it though.

Don't trust a travel guide

It is widely accepted that to appear in a travel guide such as Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide is a mixed blessing. But I am starting to wonder if a few more travel writers ought not to make a trip to Moganshan, or at least make some phone calls.

We recently had a large group of young Dutch travellers arrive after a three-hour slog from Hangzhou, which is about 40 minutes south of us by train. They had been trying to get to Beijing. They were happy to stumble on our coffee shop but had to leave long before they would have liked to get to Shanghai—and assuming they caught the right train this time—then on to Beijing. Needless to say going directly from Hangzhou to Beijing would have saved them hours.

Our next confused visitor was a family friend on his gap year, who was travelling with a certain well-known travel guide, assumed to be the leader in its field. By good fortune we ended up in the same carriage on the train from Shanghai. If not for that coincidence, he'd have been in Tibet by the time he realised he'd missed the stop. After that I looked up the Moganshan section in his guide and it was rubbish.

Moganshan has limited appeal for foreign backpackers, being a small family resort, but it would still be nice if travellers could find us when they want to. But a word of warning: our coffee shop does not, and will never, serve banana pancakes.