A visit to Wang Kai's home town

Wang Kai invited me, Ling Ling, and Marianne (artist-in-residence at CEAC) to join him and his girlfriend Li Ling for a two-day trip to his hometown, Gantang Zhen （甘棠镇）, in East-Fujian. The high-speed train from Xiamen to Shanghai brought us to Fu'an in two and half hours, cruising comfortably at 205 km/h.
At the Fu'an train station, a friend was waiting with a mini-bus to drive us the remaining 35 km to Gantang Zhen, upstream along the Baima river, passing several large shipyards.
Gantang Zhen is a small town with several hundred years of history. Once surrounded by a city wall, but at the present only the encircling canal remains.

Wang Kai's family lives just at the outside of this canal, close to one of the bridges into the old town. Many of the traditional stone houses in the old town have been replaced with the typical concrete/brick buildings emerging everywhere in China and other developing countries. Wang Kai's family also just build a large five-storey house for three brothers and their families, each having their own store front and entrance. The building is not nearly finished (like so many buildings), and at present only two floors are in use, the upper floors still an open concrete structure without walls. Even the finished floors look like they have been occupied prior to completion, with a mix of brand new furniture on polished floors, bare concrete, and electrical wiring hanging from unfinished ceilings. It doesn't seem to bother anyone. Interesting detail is that the large modern kitchen (with gas stove, microwave, and a range of electrical appliances) also has a traditional wood-fired stove build into one corner of the stone countertop, with a large build-in wok, as seen in traditional Chinese kitchens in villages in the countryside.

Wang Kai's father had booked a couple of rooms in a decent hotel around the corner, and after we dropped our luggage we went for a quick tour of the old town under Wang Kai's guidance.
It was a beautiful day, and Wang Kai showed us the house where his grandmother used to live, now almost a ruin, but interesting to see. The old town still has many stone and wooden houses, some with clay walls, often having the front door wide open, offering a glimpse inside the people's livelihoods.
We visited a small temple, where Kai showed us how to read your future after shaking a container with numbered wooden sticks until one comes out, which leads to a written prophecy.
The town clearly isn't used to foreign visitors, and we got a lot of stares and sometimes a bit more engaging attention. It reminded me of my earlier travels in more remote areas of China, and the curiousity is still mutual. Needless to say, there where many excellent photo opportunities.

Back in the house, we were treated on a terrific home-cooked dinner, with crab, fish, and lots of interesting local dishes. This was only the first, the next days more lunches and dinners would follow, all equally overwhelming, not to mention the locally produced alcohol, consumed in more than adequate quantities. After dinner we went to play pool in one of the local pool halls, where Kai played since he was a teenager. His skills are impressive, and Li Ling's too.
The next day we visited Wang Kai's former high school, where he met Li Ling, who is from a nearby town. Her mother joined us for one of the dinners, this time on invitation by one of Kai's uncles, in an excellent restaurant. Of course we were invited by all Kai's well-to-do relatives who were eager to show us their houses and children. In the country that gave birth to the one-child policy, I have yet to meet a family who actually has only one child. Laws are very flexible in China, if you can afford it.

We also paid a visit to the Zhongde temple （种德禅寺）, a large complex, still partly under construction, financed by a wealthy local who made his fortune in Singapore. You often see Chinese who make a fortune overseas come back to their hometown to use their wealth to build a lasting memory for the community they were born in.
The last day it was raining lightly, which prompted me to buy a pair of rubber boots, which I have been planning to buy for a while, but never found a pair attractive enough. Here I found a nice pair of slightly transparant brown boots with bright orange soles. Smart looking, and only 20 RMB a pair.

Resurrecting a capsized catamaran

In the last lesson of our introductory sailing course （12 hours, 1980 RMB), our students learn how to resurrect the catamaran sailboat after it capsizes. It has never happened to me unintentionally, but it's good to know what to do if it does.
It's surprisingly easy to bring the boat back up, even when it's totally inverted (also called turtled), unless the mast is in the mud, that makes it a bit more difficult, especially with receding tide. That's why we always practice with high tide. Even then, it sometimes happens that the mast hits the bottom, the sea is not very deep here.
This time it was Audrey from Belgium who went for a second try, after she failed to bring it up a day earlier. I went out in the dingy with another of our students, Boris from Germany, to film the exercise.
The sea was calm, with almost no wind, and a sunny sky, excellent conditions for this exercise. To help the boat capsizing, you just hang out, holding on to the main stay as long as possible, until the boat tilts over far enough that it capsizes. You usually end up under the boat or under the sail, so you have to quickly swim out and get back to the boat to not lose it. If it's very windy or in strong current this is even more important. You can not outswim a capsized boat drifting away in strong wind or tidal current.
Once you have climbed onboard the reversed boat, you can take a rest and make sure all passengers are there and calm down any panic. It can be a scary moment when it happens unexpectedly. Boris can attest to that...
The procedure for resurrection is as follows: first take the halyard(s) out of the pockets in which they are stored, and work them up along the deck around the hull on the wind side (you might have to go underwater for this), and pull it around the hull. The halyards are attached to the lower part of the mast, so by hanging on to the halyards when they are looped around the hull, you create enough momentum to bring the boat back up. The trick is to not let go of the lines too quickly, and walk up the hull as the boat slowly comes back up. It can take quite a while before you reach the tipping point, where the boat resurrects itself in normal upright position.
This time Audrey and Paul managed to do it on the first try. Good job!



Side note: During the Xiamen boat show, I saw a Hobie cat with a floatation bubble at the top of its mast, which will prevent turtling after capsizing, and therefore makes it a lot easier (and much quicker) to bring the boat back up. Smart!

Sailing with dolphins

A sunny Monday morning in December. I didn't expect anything out of the ordinary to happen today. This time of year the beach is pretty quiet on weekdays, but I could convince a Chinese couple from Anhui province, who were playing volleyball for a while using the net we set up, to take a half-hour tour on the catamaran.
We had a good wind, with moderate waves (not as crazy as yesterday, more about that later), so we left the beach behind us rather quickly, and crossed into the shipping lane about 2km off shore. I was just about to turn around, when we spotted a white dolphin at close range, about 20m to our left. Shortly afterwards we saw two more, and then another couple further ahead. I pulled the main sail tighter to gain speed, and for several minutes the five dolphins were leading the way, jumping out of the water right in front of us, and at less than 5m distance to our side. A gorgeous sight! Too bad I didn't bring the weatherproof camera.
It's not uncommon to see dolphins here, but I don't see them more often than once a month on average, and never as close, and in such numbers as today. Really awesome!

Yesterday was quite a different trip. Martijn, Felix, and Zeid accompanied me and Ling Ling for a ride in rough but fair weather, with high waves, and a strong, gusty wind. This is what sailing at sea is all about: getting wet, salty water in your face, waves pouring over the deck, inescapable. The boys didn't let the continuous salty spray discourage them from trying to light a cigarette.
Sailing in this kind of weather is a truly different affair than our usual half-hour tours. You can't let go of the rudder for a second, pulling it hard to maintain course, and always ready to release the main sail to prevent tipping over. Luckily, with five people on board we had enough ballast for a stable ride, but still enough speed to make it a real thrill, even without seeing dolphins.