Lions and Tigers and Bears and Chickens

This week has been frustrating. We have our one (legal) travel weekend coming up, and we’ve been making plans about where to go. While most of the group wanted to go south to Sichuan Province, Barry and I had designs on more exotic locales. We’d heard about Kashgar from an expat friend we met at a burger bar downtown, and from that point on we were hooked. Kashgar is in Xinjiang Province in the far west of China, basically in Tajikistan. It’s so unlike the rest of China that the Kite Runner movie uses it as a less-volatile filming location to Afghanistan. We were literally a few hours from booking our flights when the region exploded with ethnic violence between the Han Chinese majority and the Muslim Uygihur population. Once we’d seen that both Kashgar and Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital we’d have to fly through, had been locked down by thousands of People’s Liberation Army troops and that over 1,000 people were injured, we reluctantly changed our plans and are now headed south in a few days.

As much of a disappointment as this was, we still had an excellent weekend. To celebrate Independence day, like all good Americans, we had a cookout on the beach with tons of meat, beer, and (American!?!) football. Patricia brought a football with her, and it’s hilarious to watch the faces of completely mystified Chinese students try to make sense of why stupid Americans refer to this dumb looking brown egg as a football. They were really interested in the rules, but had a very difficult time trying to follow our explanations of them. Eventually, I had to resort to using the closest available thing to a Telestrator that I could find, a patch of sand and a stick. I like to think it helped.

We had a blast at the BBQ, even if it did start randomly pouring in the middle of the afternoon. Thankfully we had better weather the following day, when we embarked on what has easily been the biggest adventure of our time in Dalian. We knew a zoo existed, and we’d heard that they had some pretty ridiculous attractions (more on this soon), but we figured, you know, we’d just go like normal people. The subject came up at work one day, and somebody mentioned that Xie Peng knows a way to get to the zoo…without paying.

Needless to say, the idea intrigued us; not so much for the savings (it costs 10 RMB to get a ticket, about $1.50) but just because the concept of sneaking into a Chinese zoo would be such an intrinsically awesome story. We assumed the plan just involved a quick squeeze through a hole in a fence somewhere (or some comparable act of subterfuge). This was incorrect, as Xie Peng soon followed up with, “yeah, you climb two mountains, it take about two and half hours.” I am so there.

We left on Sunday morning on a bus that took us to some random place downtown. After about 10 minutes of wandering down side streets, we arrived at what looked like the entrance to a big public park (who knows, it may have actually just been a public park, I’m not sure). What I am sure of though , is that we started heading uphill and soon found ourselves in the middle of nowhere in the woods on one of the many mountains that surround the city of Dalian. It soon became apparent that Supreme Leader Xie Peng did not have as firm a grasp on our route as he had previously advertised, and we ended up wandering around for a while before we ran into a fellow hiker with a propensity for animals after the same free zoo admission we were who had a better sense of the area. Sure enough, two hours later, we fell out of the bushes and, well, into the zoo.

I use the term “zoo” here a little bit loosely. I think the actual title of the place is something along the lines of “Dalian Forest Park”. The place is enormous, and we actually had to climb up and over another mountain before we actually arrived at any animal enclosures. I think we might have been able to take a cable car thing and save ourselves some trouble, except that we kinda didn’t have any tickets for it. Oh well, it was a pleasant walk…down a cliff.

By the time we got to the bottom, we’d spent so much time sneaking in that we only had about an hour before the zoo closed, so we had to make sure not to dawdle. This was difficult, because zoos in China do not have nearly the same liability requirements as their American counterparts. This, in turn, makes for much more interesting exhibits. For example, I particularly enjoyed the display called, “Llamas wandering freely around the park that wound up chasing me”, or the timeless classic, “Two rhinos surrounded by a single four foot tall wood fence”. The real draw of the zoo though, is the so-called “violent animals area”. We knew about this because of its widely renowned attractions in which, for about eight bucks, one can purchase a live chicken that one can then toss to its wildly flapping instant death by any of a variety of large predators. I didn’t purchase any such product, but I will admit that I may have snapped a photo or two while some other dude caused havoc in the tiger pit….

Yeah, I bet PETA loves this country.