Hangzhou

Tired and jet-lagged we meet Xiao Ming in Shanghai for the hundred-mile drive to Hangzhou. We have come for a wedding and everybody is excited to see us. Coming all the way from Mei Guo we bring big face to the bride and her family. Xiao Ming accelerates the Sentra onto the ten-lane freeway as the sun drops below the smoky horizon. Lingling sits in the back seat and operates the borrowed GPS which constantly rings with reminder bells. "Ding – you are speeding." "Ding – police speed enforcement camera in one kilometer." They chat and catch up, but they don’t speak Mandarin or English except to me, so I understand nothing.

BAM! BAM! Two blowouts on the right side! Xiao Ming moves the crippled car across three lanes to the right shoulder, but there IS no shoulder, only a ten-meter-high vertical concrete wall. It is pitch dark and hazy. There are no street lights. We are stopped dead in the truck lane, and traffic is heavy. I know with the assurance of a man who has just pitched a bowling ball out the window exactly what is going to happen next. We are going to die, ending our happy evening as bloody grease smears on that inescapable concrete bulwark, and ruining the wedding for everyone.

Later that week, in the calm atmosphere of the Victorious Customer Foot Massage Studio, as a pretty young girl puts my heavy cowboy boots out into the hallway with the line of knockoff Guccis, I reflect on how well the Chinese free-enterprise system worked, how we were not only rescued, but repaired and sent on our way with new tires at 8:30 on Saturday night. Small business thrives in modern China and people who want to work can always do well there.

The area around Hangzhou has been populated for seven thousand years and city was officially named in 589 AD, but it existed long before that. It has been the Imperial Capital for several centuries at a time during different dynasties, and it is the home of an ancient, beautiful and cultured people. Like every Chinese city, it has its own language, which is as different from Mandarin (the language of Beijing) as French is from English. The population is nearly nine million and the metropolitan area is over 6,500 square miles.

Construction on the West Lake park started about a thousand years ago when Su Dongpo used 200,000 workers to build the first causeway across the West Lake. Today the entire park district is about the size of Vashon Island and after a thousand years of loving attention it is one of the most beautiful spots on the planet. There are horticultural parks, marshes hosting exotic waterfowl, monasteries, museums, walking paths, bamboo forests, tea cultivation mountains, tea houses and the beautiful lake with its fleets of wooden boats.

Xiao Yun takes us downtown to the outdoor market where family merchants sell jade and silk from mom-and-pop stores or little kiosks. Tea purveyors hand dry fresh-picked tea in little open drying ovens, stirring the leaves with their fingers to evenly remove the moisture and then packaging the beautiful "Long Jing" ("Dragon Well") tea leaves right in front of us.

Arabs came to Hangzhou about eight hundred years ago, and the community is still there. A large 13th century mosque stands across from where Xiao Yun waits in line to buy sesame bread. The bread vendor has a hole-in-the-wall store where two people constantly cook several types of traditional flat bread on a large iron grill. A woman at the window sells the bread as fast as it cooks. The cost is 5 Yuan (eight cents) per loaf. It is a big snack for one person and we get one each to tide us over till dinner. A man with a red bicycle tries to sneak into the pedestrian mall, but a policeman quickly waves him away. We eat our hot loaves, sniffing the roasted sesame seeds, as we climb the escalator to cross the busy freeway on the high foot bridge.

Hangzhou citizens can purchase a Red Bicycle Card that allows them self-service access to thousands of bicycles across the city. Swipe the card to remove a bike from the rack, pedal to your destination, then re-rack the bike for another traveler. Hangzhou used to be very bike friendly, but it’s a little trickier now with the large and increasing auto population. There are many bike lanes but they are not ubiquitous, and traffic in Hangzhou, like anywhere in China, is downright scary. The word for "driving" in Chinese translates to English as "chicken." Crashes are frequent as most drivers have learned to drive very recently. Xiao Yun confidently tells me he has twenty years experience. When he gets confused about which exit to use on the freeway, he just stops in the lane to mull it over for a minute.

We get up early one morning to climb the mountain to the Baochu Pagoda. A little alley with a sign in Chinese is the only indication of the path, but we get directions from a local and soon find the yellow stone gate at the entrance to the long granite stairs. My wife played here as a child, before being taken during the Cultural Revolution. She beams as we start the long climb. Our trail forks into several at different points, and although there are signs, it’s still confusing. She greets a hiker and asks directions in Mandarin. "Why did you speak to him in Mandarin?" I ask. "Because if I talk in Hangzhouhua he will think I’m stupid. Everybody here knows the way."

We hear songbirds cheerfully chirping as we round a turn. I am surprised to see so many, captured in little wooden cages and hung from the trees. Their owners, old men with missing teeth who smoke cigarettes and lounge on boulders, chat with each other while their pets make music. The like-minded form a society, even in the forest.

We visit the ancient pagoda and head down the other side of the mountain, thinking to visit the Yellow Dragon Cave scenic area, where there is a tea house. As we approach I am amazed to hear Steven Foster played on pipa and zheng. It is "Old Folks at Home." An erhu chimes in as we round the corner and we see young musicians on a little stage wearing traditional red costumes. The song finishes and they break into "Red River Valley."

We find the tea house and just outside it, in the little patio between the scruffy wooden buildings, there are a hundred or so people, mostly retirees, sitting in rented chairs in front of another stage. Something is about to happen, but we don’t know what it is. We buy our tea and just as it is delivered, the red velvet curtain rises on the first act of the opera "Butterfly Lovers." Beautiful Chinese music fills the air and the action is directly in front of us, only a few feet away, as we sip our Long Jing tea. I am as happy as a dog in heaven.

"What should we do tomorrow?" I ask.

Biffle French is the National Rodeo Correspondent to the Vashon Loop and self-appointed Cowboy Ambassador to China.