Somewhere on page 19 of my favorite site for travelling in China bytravel.cn, there was an entry for 林寨 (forest stronghold). Crumbling house? Em, eww, maybe. It went on my "to-go list", in case it was nearby something really worth seeing. It ended up being the centerpiece of this trip and deserved every bit of it.
Hope that wasn’t too spooky for ya!
Somewhere on page 19 of my favorite site for travelling in China bytravel.cn, there was an entry for 林寨 (forest stronghold). Crumbling house? Em, eww, maybe. It went on my "to-go list", in case it was nearby something really worth seeing. It ended up being the centerpiece of this trip and deserved every bit of it.
Giant buildings not quite claiming to be castles were similar clustered around corn fields. They shared an identity, but were still individualistic enough to not be repetitive. The charm comes in their ruin unfortunately. Several had deteriorated to the point that only their shells remained. There were a few that functioned as tourist attractions. A local yokel would unlock the main door as if it were a storage unit, and I walked in alone to seeing the central room. The surrounding wall houses apartments overlooking the inner courtyard, where there’s a well. Most of these seemed unoccupied, but a few still dared to live in them.
My map showed it would be faster to take a small road through the mountainous country side than the dog-legged highway. Too quick to collect on my hour of uphill climbing, I headed downhill missing the turn off onto a smaller road. Soon the road came to a sleepy town in the mountains. Corn hung to dry in the inner courtyard of their hollow square dwellings. An old man without any teeth until the edge of his smile told me I’d have to turn back because the road ended here. While I had a couple bowls of instant noodles at the town’s general store, someone told me the road continued to the highway. It was a crude road of red dirt and bits of stone craved from the mountain, but it worked.
Cycling to Covid's Ground Zero