The Shadow Walk: a dawn to dusk procession through Xiamen, Southern China

This Shadow Walk was inspired by a previous walk of mine, The Sun Walk, which I undertook over ten years ago in London. The idea behind that walk to was spend a full day walking in the direction of the sun. This shadow walk was to be its companion piece: I would start the walk at dawn and when the first light cast my shadow onto the ground, I would walk in the direction my shadow pointed towards. At 6.45 AM I was standing expectantly, waiting for this moment, but there were no shadows to speak of.

Waiting for the sun, I watched people coming and going to make incense offerings outside Nanputuo Temple, my starting point. I had seen this ritual many times before but something seemed unusually focussed about it today. I then realised what was different. The tourists had not yet arrived.

Still the sun refused to shine. My rhythm was being dictated by the clouds; I noticed the turtles for the first time. They were in no hurry and set a good example to follow.

A while later, loud chanting started up from within the temple. I went over to listen and, just a moment later, the sun broke through and lit my westward path. 

This gave the impetus to start moving and within three minutes I was already walking down an alleyway I had never noticed before in an area I thought I knew. Using this new system to navigate through the city made me realise that I had unconsciously developed a very incomplete idea of this neighbourhood which I had mistaken for its reality. New alleys, shops and apartment compounds were springing up all around me. After an all too brief spell, the clouds thickened once again and I was left without a shadow to guide my path. I held my course following my original path as best I could.

In the absence of a clear shadow to guide me, I allowed my curiosity to also lead me and it brought me to a second temple, this one in full swing. I decided to take this co-incidence as a blessing. Whilst I was not conducting this walk within any religious framework, attuning myself to both the natural light cycle and the human activity cycle of the city, made it feel as if I were sensitising myself to a larger force, all the same.

In the absence of shadow, I carried the memory of the morning's rays and walked with them up Hong Shan Park. This was going to be a long day of walking but, given that it was just two days till the Winter solstice, it was about as short a day's dawn to dusk walk as it would be possible to do without heading far north to lands of diminishing daylight. Rather than emerging into a frozen sliver of sub-arctic light then, I was walking on a mild winter's day when the temperature was around 20 degrees in the afternoon. A better proposition all round, I feel.

I came across a group of street sweepers making their brooms. I have a longstanding interest in quick-fixes and at first these brooms can look like just that: something cobbled together with a few odds and ends. Looking at how deliberate this operation was, however, made it all too clear to me that this was an older technique that had been modified to incorporate some modern materials. They fixed these thin bamboo branches, still bearing leaves, around broom handles with a length of wire. I could have stayed and watched a good while longer, but I had a shadow to follow. 

The cracks in the city's texture where one era's compounds finish and another's begin were interesting no man's lands. The connecting tissues, such as this water pipe, must hold some stories. 

Some stretches of the walk took me down long soulless streets but at times I also entered maze like neighbourhoods of semi-improvised housing. I say semi-improvised because, in spite of these places' tumble-down home-made feel, they looked like they had been established for many years, held a considerable number of people and had electricity and water. Walking through these hidden quarters, tucked above main roads, I was the object of attention: children would follow me in groups, run ahead to see the face of the foreigner then run back to their friends and report back.

The sun reappeared momentarily and reset my direction. Dim but discernible it was a necessary adjustment.

I noticed that single men were common in the city but women sitting down by themselves were rare.

With no direct sunlight nor shadow to speak of, I headed into a mall to see if 'the shadow' might be found in underground consumer retail units. I had tended to regard the recent Ai Wei Wei lego story as another act of self-promotion on the part of China's most famous artist overseas. Seeing this lego education centre, however, made me reconsider this and wonder if there was not some substance to his point which basically amounted to lego were refusing to sell him their product and were effectively doing the Chinese government's work because the company was more interested in expanding into the Chinese market and did not want to upset the authorities by being associated with dissident art. 

I arrived at a third temple, this one still a building site. A clump of surly looking workmen eating instant noodles glanced up from their bowls, registered me, then sunk their heads back over their food and continued eating in silence. 

The temple was placed on one of the many small steep mountains that punctuate the city. Difficult to build on, these outcrops mostly remain wild, forested places, this one also acting as a park. Following my shadow's direction meant that I came across these mountains much more than I am accustomed to in daily life in the city; they acted as genuine obstacles whereas they are usually easily rendered meaningless by road or tunnel. This task, then, restored a more representative geography to my imaginary city. What's more, it also made me aware of another feature of these mountains: their military bases. I came across working military installations on a number of mountains, these easily defended compounds most probably being a legacy of the city being on the frontline with republican Taiwan. Going about my daily life in the city it is very easy to ignore the fact that there remains this military presence. It required this walk to jog my habits and reveal this side of Xiamen.

I did not want to give up on the idea of being led by something outside of myself so I came up with the strategy of studying the clouds for a hint of sun, such as the light patch in the sky above. Putting this at my back, I then walked away from in. Whilst less evocative than embracing the shadow, walking away from the light did prove an effective approach.

I realised I have spent too little time in Huli District to get a complete picture of the city. It is a newer area where the housing is cheaper and more industry is to be found. I passed a man who was standing beside an opened fire hydrant, a large hexagonal key lying on the ground. He was mixing cement in paint buckets, not for the first time, I imagine. Nobody, save me, gave it a moment's attention.

The further north into Huli District I walked, the more I passed groups of men playing cards, sometimes with money flung down besides the game too. Seeing group after group of men huddled like this, sometimes with a crowd surrounding them, I realised I very rarely see people playing cards in my part of the city. This left me wondering if cards is a more blue collar pastime in China.

While I was now walking into completely unfamiliar terrain, every now and then I'd cross infrastructure, such as the train track, which offered clues as to where I might be. Rather than helping me gain my bearings, however, this only confused me further. One system of mapping was interfering with the other and the two did not want to be synthesised.

I plunged into a neighbourhood that was being demolished, a process that did not look entirely harmonious. Here my presence was not merely unusual, I received a number of suspicious looks. This was a place to keep on walking.

A four legged walker had already been this way, only he had been heading in the opposite direction. Towards the sun perhaps?

Coming towards the end of the day's walk, I ran into a restaurant staff's motivational dance routine led by their manager. The song, a Chinese cover of Dschinghis Khan, West Germany's Eurovision 1979 effort, is a particularly good one for the job. The lacklustre dancing somehow chimed with my heavy legs and I was more on the side of the staff than the boss up front trying to get them moving. I would like to imagine this song being covered by singers right across Asia and Eastern Europe in all the languages that fall within the boundaries of the once vast Mongol empire.

And this is what the walk looks like if the different points are plotted on a map and a line run between them to show the general sweep of its movement. The walk had too many disparate elements to allow it to be easily reduced to any one single narrative. That, perhaps, was its defining feature: it opened my eyes to the breadth of the life in the city. With more light, perhaps the theme of shadows would have imposed itself more strongly. When walking towards the sun, some 12 years ago, this action offered a sense of hope and adventure. Walking on a cloudy day in a foreign country and having to question the form of the action and nature of what I was seeing, offered far more dilemmas than sensuous experiences. That is valuable too, but it did make the walk less sharp edged. Finally, what this day on the move told me is that it is worth continuing devising new strategies to cross and interact with the city. With each different way of approaching it, the city reveals itself anew and only out of this myriad of perspectives may a more comprehensive image of it slowly crystallise.

The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Tour: altitude tourism in South West China

Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (玉龙雪山) is located near Lijiang in Yunnan, South West China. Lijiang's old towns, once beautiful places, have today become one of the country's top 5 tourist destinations and are swamped with tourism to the near exclusion of anything else. I am here for COART festival, an arts festival which has given me the opportunity to see something of this part of China. I'll write more about Lijiang subsequently but for now I will concentrate on the mountain.

There are different ways to go about ascending; in the old town there are many travel agents who offer package tours that include an ascent as part of a one, two or four day trip around Lijiang. Having already had the Chinese coach tour experience of The Great Wall I wanted to see how the site might reveal itself differently when travelling outside of the structure of a large organised group or, to put it another way, I had had it with the guide turning salesman at every opportunity routine and everything devolving into kitsch. This more independent tour of the mountain began, then, with some advice from the appropriately named K2 hostel, who gave the number of a driver. With the arrangements made for the next day, it was a simple matter of hanging about till she showed up. Yunnan is not a hurried place and it turned out she was waiting at a different gate to the village but, after a while, the van arrived and we got inside. 

She advised us to buy oxygen and pulled up in front of a shop on the edge of the village that sold portable oxygen canisters and nothing else. I've seen some specialist stores before and this place was up there with the best of them. The driver said it would be wise to take some and the man in the store was, predictably enough, more certain still that we absolutely needed to buy some and what's more, we'd need the large canisters. Not knowing what to expect, having never been to so high an altitude before, I suspected he was exaggerating in order to boost sales. Still, we bought two large canister anyway and got back in the van.

We drove for about 40 minutes and during this time the driver expanded upon some of the other tours that could be had in the area. It did not seem as if we were climbing that much, except at the end of the journey, but we must have steadily gained altitude. Lijiang is already 2400 metres above sea level and the base station where we were heading was well over 3000 metres. The air was thinning.

This is a view of the mountains in the background from the car park of the base station. Forget any ideas of Everest Base Station and rudimentary camps used for trekkers and climbers This was a huge car park with shops, a leisure centre and restaurants. They even have a Starbucks.

After buying the ticket for the cable car there was a half-hour queue for the shuttle bus. As is often the case here, we had to queue and a minority tried every trick in the book to jump it. The most common one, which was successfully deployed here, was to have one person in the queue up ahead then other people who vaguely know that person join them. It doesn't matter how vague the relationship is, as long as they could stand beside the person and say hello. And once in, everyone else in their group then joins too. Whole tour groups can sometimes work this technique of one person establishing a bridge and the other 20 then following. This queue was reasonably polite, later in the day when people were in a hurry to get back for dinner, such niceties were dropped and more brazen tactics employed. 

The queue took us not to the cable cars but to a bus that drove a further 20 minutes to the cable car station. Here we got out, queued some more and finally got into one of the 8-person enclosed gondolas. It pulled us high up into the sky and our rapid ascent began. Each time we crossed over one of the supporting pillars the gondola rocked forward and backwards prompting nervous laughter and some white knuckles amongst the 8 of us thrown together in the metal and glass box, dangling giddily from a line leading upto the summit.

As we continued to climb the trees gave way to rocks and snow. I am not so keen on heights, I get mild vertigo, so I looked forward as much as I could at the mountain coming towards us. When I looked behind me at the void stretching out below, I could imagine us falling down into it so easily that I quickly turned forward again. It is an odd thing that altitude does not bother me but heights do.

Arriving at the end of the line we spilled out into a loveless commercial hall that had the surprising addition of a green-screen photo studio. It wasn't in use so I couldn't see what photoshopped location you could be placed into, but the very idea of coming all this way to use a green-screen studio struck me as bizarre. I can only suspect that its purpose is to give you the edge over the other tourists in the altitude stakes by placing you at the very top of the mountain, rather than stopping at the final visitor platform some distance from the summit, as regular visitors must do. 

As you can see, the altitude here is an impressive 4508 metres above sea level. You can travel to this height without having to barely walk a step. That makes this a location that attracts tourists who might not otherwise make it to such an altitude, who, it could be said, shouldn't even really be there. 

From this landing the final ascent on foot is up a wooden staircase weaving around the side of the mountain and its glacier.  

I had never experienced anything like walking in such an atmosphere before. It was necessary to walk slowly and stop regularly to catch breath. Breathing compressed oxygen made this a good deal more bearable. Without it, someone unacclimatised to such thin air as I was, would have been sorely challenged to make it up those staircases. 

An illustration of the change in air pressure was graphically provided by the packet of biscuits which I pulled out of my bag. 

Whilst the tourists edged their way slowly up the stairs, stopping for breath every 20 paces, the local builders had no such problems. This man carried a large bucket of paint up to the hut under construction, put it down, lit a cigarette then started hard manual labour. I'm guessing that over time the body must adapt to the thin air.

And finally this is the top platform at 4680 metres. It offers an excellent view over the glacier, a natural environment I'd never seen up close before, but more than that, it was a curious location that turned out to host three things.

The first of these was a man sitting at a simple open-air table carving tourist's names onto metallic medals. It was a small but popular business with a constant queue.

Next was a small food stall selling wildly overpriced snickers, red bull and sausages, the small red variety that rotate on a heater. He wasn't doing so much business.

And finally there were people, like myself, taking the obligatory selfie or the friends shot like the pair in the background. While I was wearing more than warm enough clothing, what I should have been more prepared for was the sun. It is very powerful and deceptive at this altitude. I got somewhat roasted as the day went on and have the flaking skin now to prove it.

Coming down by the same route there turned out to be more to the trip than expected. We took a wrong bus when alighting from the cable car and were deposited not at the base station but instead at a lake. This was, in many ways, a more beautiful and relaxing place with fewer visitors.

The lake was supplied by the glacier and was of a stunning aquamarine colour. These sunken trees also drew my attention to its artificial construction, accomplished by a series of small dams creating pools where there must have been a faster flowing descent in the past.

With the light hitting that perfect early evening glow the place took on a wonderful energy. There were a few people milling around, even some wedding photography going on, as there is in most tourist spots in China, but the place itself was big enough to absorb all of this. Also, being lower in altitude at a mere 3500 odd meters, it was possible to walk around without having to make constant recourse to the oxygen. Leaving Jade Dragon Snow Mountain behind I thought I had coped with the altitude challenge pretty well but I found that  in the evening a headache came on that refused to leave me till noon the following day. While the bulk of people and the technology goes a long way to opening up a space like this to the casual visitor, it remains a harsh environment. I won't be in a hurry to go further than 4680 metres and, unless I go on a Tibet tour (not impossible), it's unlikely I'll be in a position to do so anyhow. Once, in this case for me, is quite enough.