Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things

I had previously visited two of the major attractions on the western outskirts of Beijing: Xiangshan and Badachu. Recently (18 July) I added another, 北京植物园 (Zhiwuyuan, the Beijing Botanical Garden) which contains 卧佛寺 (Wofosi, the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha). Once again, I used a city bus to get there.
The bus passes by some interesting looking temples that I would love to visit someday.
The place is full of lovely landscaping, including ponds and bridges.
There is also a section of the huge park devoted to 曹雪芹 (Cao Yueqin), who wrote the classic 红楼梦 (Hong Lou Meng, Dream of the Red Chamber), which I have written about before.
The location in the hills is quite lovely, and a wide variety of different kinds of trees grace the grounds.
As I mentioned, there is an old temple inside the Garden grounds.
Inside the Glazed Arch is a little pond with koi and turtles.
The Sleeping Buddha itself is in a building where you are not allowed to take pictures.
You can see a bit of the bronze Buddha inside. It’s 5.3 meters (17' 4") long and weighs about 54 tons. The words over the door (明恒月性) I believe are supposed to be read right to left in the ancient manner, and have something to do with the quality of the moon being constant brightness. Either that or some kind of wish for the Ming Dynasty to last forever, since the name of the dynasty, 明 Ming, means bright.

Up the hill behind the temple is a little stream running down a shaded valley.
As you can see, this is a popular area for families to enjoy a little bit of nature.
Further up the valley is a grove dedicated to the metasequoia, also known as dawn redwood. This tree is common in the fossil record from millions of years ago, and was believed extinct until a small stand was discovered in Sichuan in 1944. Since then they have been planted all around the world, but it is still considered a critically endangered species. These trees were planted in 1975.

And for the bird lovers out there...
...I present a blurry telephoto shot of a fairly large bird I saw eating a fruit in a tree near the trail.

Back down in the valley, I found some nifty water plants.
One of the main attractions at the Garden is the Conservatory.
This is where they keep tropical and desert plants. As it turns out, the day I went there was so hot that it was actually cooler in some parts of the greenhouse than it was outside.
And they couldn’t resist adding some water features.
On the upper level is the desert area, with lots of cacti and succulents from various parts of the world. And a little Egyptian statue because just plants are not enough.

On the subject of not being able to resist:
No jungle is complete without dinosaurs.
Or terracotta warriors.

Like I said, the Garden is really huge, and there are parts of it that are currently not used much.
I rather like this picture of a disused path off to an unpopular area.

I’ll finish off with a collection of invertebrates I saw in the Garden.
Dragonfly (蜻蜓 qingting), mantis (螳蜋 tanglang), some kind of beetle (甲虫 jiachong), and millipede (千足虫 qianzuchong).

So that is the Botanical Garden. I must say it is much, much better than the Zoological Garden, and well worth the trip out of the city. It was very hot the day I went, but there are vendors with beverages and ice cream all over the place.

The fruits of someone’s labor

Many readers outside China will have encountered the fruit known as 荔枝 (Mandarin lizhi, traditionally spelled lychee in English, along with several other similar variations) as a flavor in Asian desserts, or maybe in a juice or even liqueur. In Beijing you can buy them pretty readily at the right time of the year, which happens to include now. There are several varieties.

The other day I was at the nearby vegetable market, and stopped by a fruit stand to get some bananas. The woman tending the stand tried to sell me everything else she had, which was quite a selection: mangoes, papayas, dragon fruit, several kinds of pears and citrus, pineapples, and so on. She offered me a lizhi, and when she saw my hands were full, even peeled it for me. It was sweet and juicy, so I bought a few of them to take with me.
Here you see some whole on the stem, one half peeled, one completely peeled, and a peeled one opened up to show the seed. If you’ve never tasted one, it’s pretty hard to describe the flavor. Mostly sweet, though sometimes a little tart near the seed, with a flowery fragrant aftertaste.

This ends the educational portion of our program.

Get ur geek on

In my continuing quest to see everything there is to see in Beijing, today I checked off another of the city’s museums. This time it was the Natural History Museum (北京自然博物馆), which is located near the Temple of Heaven. It took me around an hour to get there on my bike. When I waled up to the ticket office, I was confronted with a confusing sign about how the tickets are free, but you have to call to reserve them five days in advance, and those without reservations will not get tickets. So I rode all that way for nothing?

Well, there was a second ticket office for the Special Exhibit: Mammoth China Tour. I bought a Ұ40 ticket for that, and the kid selling tickets told me I could buy a ticket for the regular museum around the corner. Yes, a third ticket office, this one with no signs pointing you to it, and I know the characters 售票处. The regular museum ticket was Ұ10.

The mammoth show started out rather unpromising.
There were several little souvenir booths and refreshment stands along the outside of the museum building. Note the little toy elephant wandering around in front of the booth.

Inside, you are greeted with a life-size mammoth.
There are some displays about the evolution of the different kinds of elephants that have lived, illustrated with little models or paintings.
You get to see some mammoth bones and tusks, as well as saber tooth cat and other creatures of similar vintage.
The highlight of the exhibit is a display of some actual mammoth parts, with skin and hair still on them.
It’s too dark in this area to get a picture, and anyway there’s a sign that says no photographs along with a guard to enforce it. The guard didn’t look a day over 14, but whatever. I took a picture of the sign as a replacement. The remains are in a glass-walled cold room to preserve them.

And that’s what you get for Ұ40. You exit out the back of the building and go around to get to the main museum.
Outside, they’ve got a couple of small dinosaur statues.
When you walk into the entrance, there are three halls you can go into. I went to the right.
This section mainly had old taxidermy and corny displays about our animal friends.
The part about insects reminded me of a low budget version of the Bug’s Life feature at Disneyland.

The dinosaur part of the museum is much better.
There’s a big central room with a bunch of reconstructed skeletons.
These are mostly dinosaurs that lived in the area that is now China, like the Szechuanosaurus.

Then you go through a dark hall to the other big room...
...where they have some big plastic dinos.
Note that the L and A from __TE have fallen down and are resting on a little shelf of the fake rock. Maybe the missing R from T_IASSIC is there too – can’t tell.

When I saw this one:
...I realized that they’re supposed to be motorized in some way and move, but are either broken down or on a coffee break.

There was a little kiddie arcade and refreshment stand in the area below the dino world.

The steps up from there took me to the earliest life on Earth. The most interesting part here was the part about the Chengjiang Fauna.
This is the name given to a bizarre group of fossils dating from the Cambrian Period found in Chengjiang County of Yunnan. They are similar to the Burgess Shale creatures found in Canada.
They’ve even got a sculpture with giant versions of some of the creatures.

After that they’ve got some pretty nice fossil displays.
And then a room with Pleistocene megafauna, including mammoths.
That one’s a megatherium, I think, though its neck seems too long.

I guess I was spoiled by the wonderful new museums in Chengdu, but this one mostly seemed kind of old and run-down. As a dinosaur enthusiast, it was cool to see the Chinese species instead of the ones we always see in North America. I’d say the Ұ40 for the mammoth exhibit was a rip-off, but Ұ10 for the main museum was fair – especially considering it works out to US$1.77 or so. And yes, there were some items “borrowed” from the Ice Age movies.

Rock My World

Further catching-up to do, back to 1 September.

After leaving Lijiang (parts one, two, three), the top thing on our abbreviated Yunnan list was Shilin, the Stone Forest. It’s about an hour’s drive out of Kunming, and as one of China’s most popular tourist spots (among Chinese travelers at least), you’d expect that visiting it would be a breeze. That expectation would not be accurate in this case.

We arrived at the Kunming Airport in the morning and checked our bags at the storage desk. Then we went to the Tourist Information Desk and asked about getting to Shilin. I know my Chinese isn’t perfect, but the lady there basically told me I couldn’t go to Shilin, and tried to talk me into seeing the International Flower Exhibition. I bought a city map to get my bearings and gave up on her.

I had read online that there are buses for the Stone Forest that leave from the train station, so we took a taxi there and looked for the buses. I do know the characters for stone and forest. We saw some buses, but they were obviously privately run, and from what I’ve heard, they’ll take you to the destination, but only after they make you stop at a few shopping areas where they get kickbacks. I called a coworker back in Beijing who has been there, and she suggested we just hire a taxi for the day. I found one, and I managed to talk him down to ¥400. Seemed kind of steep, but he wouldn’t go any lower, and we were basically taking up more than half of a day’s work for him. Off we went.

The drive took us into some mountains that were fairly heavily cultivated. I’ve never seen corn grown on such steep slopes.
When we finally got there, we were immediately assaulted by women in ethnic garb trying to take us on tours in their little electric trams for ¥200 a person. I said “We want to walk,” and asked for directions to the ticket office. The entry ticket is ¥140 apiece, again much more expensive than Beijing attractions. We agreed on a time and place to meet with the taxi driver and in we went.

After all the hassle getting there, being inside was a breath of relaxation.
Like Lijiang Old Town, Shilin is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The area just inside is a tended garden, with mowed lawns and flowering trees among the stone shafts.
If you’ve ever been in a limestone cavern like Carlsbad or Mammoth, you can think of the Stone Forest being the same kind of thing only out in the open air.
There are quite a few ponds among the spires, and they are inhabited by frogs and tadpoles.
The limestone of an ancient seabed has been uplifted and eroded (mostly by water) over the millennia, leaving behind odd-shaped spires and crevices. There are also lots of caves and sinkholes in the area.
We wandered around on the twisting paths for several hours, ending up way off the beaten path.
While there were lots of people near the entrance, not many venture into the outer reaches of the park.
The landscape is just amazing, with interesting shapes at every turn. That one is called Elephant on a Platform.
After a point, we reached Oddly Shaped Stone Overload, and the frequency of clicking the cameras diminished. Even so, we ended up with over 300 pictures.
As with most places in China, there are surveillance cameras, here disguised as trees.
One thing you can say about the park is that the high admission price is reflected in the quality of the restrooms, which were clean, functional, and almost odorless, much better than any other public facilities I’ve yet found here.

There were some very narrow passages.
Here’s one of the groundskeepers taking a little break.
Luckily about the time we were getting worn out and starving (we never did get lunch) we chanced upon one of the popular spots near the entrance.
This little lake is home to an amazing number of large golden fish, and for ¥2 you can get a little bag of food for them.
Lots of people do, and the fish go crazy.
About this time, the taxi driver called and asked if we were almost done. I told him twenty minutes, not knowing exactly how far we were from the parking lot.

Even though it was about five hours until our flight, we had him take us to the airport. Kunming had not been that friendly to us, and we didn’t feel like running the risk of going somewhere for food and not making it to our flight on time. We picked up our bags from the storage area (only ¥20 to hold them half a day), and went to the airport KFC for a much-needed meal.

That covers the scenic parts of our Yunnan trip. I’ll have one more post dealing with what it was like to travel within China during the time of the Olympics.

Pictures by D & I.