Reality check!

Late post about my strange adventure in the Quincheng Mountains.

Last may, china was hit by a gigantic earthquake which killed thousand of people and left millions homeless. In total 45,552,965 were affected by the earthquake all from the Sichuan province. I decided to visit the Mt QuingCheng, Just 2 hours away from Chengdu and supposedly safe by now as the staff from my hostel told me. To make things more completed I chose to go around the mountain and not hiking in the most touristy area but a more remote village, TaiAn having the reputation to be the heart of some of the best hikes in the region.

What I discovered there looked more like the epicentre of the disaster. Every single roofs along the way to the town had collapsed, the road was partially destroyed, massive rocks and dead trees made it still very difficult to drive through. The taxi made we walk the rest of the way and after a few kilometres a mini van stopped and quiet frankly panicked made me climb in and drove me to the only hotel still standing and looking in one piece.

As nobody could speak English or French, the owner of the hotel called a guy expected to arrive in TaiAn shortly. In a perfect French he told me that an other earthquake just stroked an hour ago, nothing major but made the few people left in the town more than worried. Thomas, was his name happened to work with the governor of the province to rebuild the area. The Chinese army helped the locals for 3 months after the earthquake but since then as I witnessed are left alone, trying to rebuild stone by stone was use to be their shop, house, hotel or restaurant.

Not being able to hike for obvious safety reason I decided to do a photographic work on the people around and the town; Yu, the owner and I spent the night trying to communicate using a English-Chinese dictionary, talking about our families, how grateful she is that nobody from her side got injured and how happy she was that I decided to stay that night. In fact the whole village was happy simply because I was the first western tourist staying overnight since may. She said that the only way for them to survive is that tourists come back there even if the town and the area is not as pretty as it use to be.

I left TaiAn the following morning after exchanging a few pictures and promising that I’ll find a way to promote their hotel, The Li Jing Hotel, which by the way is a fantastic place to stay (and Yu is a great cook), I travelled back to Chengdu going directly to the airport flying in the evening to Wuhan. Somewhere in between the taxi to the airport and Wuhan, my camera was stolen and with it all the pictures shot during this 2 very emotional days. People in TaiAn will need 3 more years to get their town back in shape but I sincerely hope that tourists will not wait so long to visit the QuingCheng mountains.