After our wonderful visit to Yang Yang and her granny we
were glad to go to our hotel. The Li
River Retreat is on the banks of the Li River and is a little hotel with lots
of charm.
It is set in the midst of the peaks I have already described
and to sit on the terrace of our room and look around makes me realise once
again on this trip what fabulous places we are seeing.
We can hear the calls of many birds we do not know and have
seen a couple which are quite unlike anything we have seen ever before.
I can hear orioles which I used to hear in France but have
no idea which Oriole is it as we do not have a bird book and no opportunity to
Google it to find out.
We are here for two nights so are looking forward to our
time in this little quiet corner of China
Have we seen other quiet corners yet? I don’t think so. We
will make the most of this.
But before we begin a couple of days of doing nothing much
we have another treat in store
Helen picked us up at 7 to go down to the in Yangzhou. We
boarded a little boat with about six other people and went up the river against
a very strong tide.
The little boat had wonderful wooden deck chairs to sit in
that were not fixed to the floor! There
was an assortment of lifejackets and of course no reference to how to use them
As sailors Tone and I are always on the lookout for what we
would do if something went wrong.
Here I suspect we would be taken down the river on the
strong current till we popped out in the Pearl River and then somewhere near
Hong Kong! It was getting dark and there
was no one about who would be interested in time to help!!
So armed with this thought we hoped for the best.
And the best was what we got.
Our little boat met up with the cormorant fisherman in a
smaller tributary of the Li River above the town. As we approached we could see his tiny bamboo
boat with its strong light on the bow.
He had six cormorants and they were all in the water fishing. If you have ever seen this on the telly you will
know that it seems cruel. However we
learned and could see that the cormorant seemed to be able to swallow the
little fishes. Only the larger ones were
stuck in their throats by the line tied round their necks.
As each one caught something worth having the fisherman
scooped the cormorant out on his pole and opened its beak and the fish plopped
out into his basket.
The cormorants are treated more like pets and each fisherman
usually has six birds. They live for up
to 14 years and amongst our man’s flock was a young one who kept trying to hop
out of the water onto the boat. The
fisherman just kept prodding him gently back into the water.
This was a sight I had really wanted to see and it was every
bit as good as I had hoped.
The cormorant fishermen don’t do this now as their
livelihood, but they still keep up the tradition that I saw for the first tie
when I was quite young on a, probably, David Attenborough programme on the
telly!
It was a great evening.
Of course as we headed back to the shore the strong current
was now in our favour and we were back at the bank and home to our little hotel
in no time at all.
Wonderful – another ambition achieved
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