Last Saturday, my friend and I went for a walk in the woods around his art park. We took along his 2 CB radios, which came in handy.

Our trip-within-a-trip began in a cave just outside the park boundaries, inside one of the karst mountains. The cave had been converted into a restaurant some months back, and then abandoned, so all we had to do was flip the circuit breakers and the place was lit up in multicolored lights. Each passage led into another sitting area or artfully crafted staircase, with ponds, manicured rock gardens, and modern, muticolored light fixtures everywhere. We explored some of the dark chambers past the restaurant proper with our trusty headlamps, each one seemingly opening to the outside through rocky airshafts. We even found what looked like an attempt to grow stalactites by hanging rocks from fishing line from the ceiling, which would be the kind of project that you pass on to your grandchildren.

Emerging out of the fantastic cave into what was, ostensibly, reality, we set off across the fields. Soon we met a water buffalo close-up. Water buffalo are slightly bigger than cows, with beards which make them look distinguished and scholarly, and the older ones have horns as long as your arm. They have the disposition of a shy puppy… they are intently curious about people, but also skittish and unsure about us. Every single water buffalo froze and watched us intently as we passed them. The next day I would walk through a herd, and feel a bit self-conscious under such scrutiny. I don’t know if they were smart enough to detect that we didn’t look, sound, or act, anything like the people they were used to. Probably not; I’d bet that water buffalo think all humans look the same.

Past the cave, the next stop was a storage ground for massive blocks of granite, the raw material for park sculptures. My friend believes these may be the most valuable commodity owned by the park, which is really disheartening for an art park. They were arranged in pattern reminiscent of a dining hall, with two long “tables” and “benches”, and eight blocks stood on end in a cathedral pattern. With a few candles, it would have been a perfect site of a cult sacrifice scene in a terrible B-movie, and if Doctor Who had popped his head out from behind a column at the last moment before the sacrificial blade descended, I wouldn’t have been the least bit suprised. Here we made a delicious picnic of chocolate (imported, of course; Chinese chocolate is barely worth the moniker) and water.

Some farmers nearby were speaking the local dialect, which is different enough from Mandarin, Cantonese, and even the village dialect (all themselves mutually unintelligible) that my friend couldn’t understand it. He did catch them loudly speculating as to our nationality, though. Keep in mind that at six two, I’m more than half-again as tall as most of the villagers, so we must have cut a pretty impressive pair.

After that it was on to another artwork, which I will not say anything about. I would not want to ruin the effect if anyone reading this ever visits it. It was, quite simply, the most amazing thing I’d seen in the park, staggering in its simplicity and audacity. The thousands of dragonflies in the field hovering overhead made it all the more surreal. I remarked to my friend that, as the only real English speaker in the park, he almost had a duty to stay there and keep bringing people in to see the art. It is a tragedy that art of such magnitude is hidden away in a field in rural China, with only the occasional passing farmer to appreciate it.

The solid, uniform, low clouds just above the karst peaks that ring every field in this part of China hold the moisture in and hid that it was getting on towards twilight, but luckily we had brought along a reality-meter which told us to start heading back.

An hour’s walk later, on the edge of town and well over the edge into nighttime, we passed through a forest with low bushes under the trees.  Thousands of fireflies were out. Fireflies fly like moths, not like bees, slowly and seemingly without purpose.  They were all around us, only their pea-sized lamps visible passing just a few feet in front of our faces. And as they faded away into the forest, faraway bushes appeared lit from underneath by so many insect lamps. For a moment, the entire forest would seem to blink in unison, and then, just as soon as you noticed it, the synchronicity would dissolve into chaos again. It put every single Vegas style light marquee, fireworks show, and nifty screensaver to shame.

Hopping a fence and walking down one of the back roads into town, we found ourselves at the front gate of the park, just in time for an ice cream (“chocolate” “flavor,” of course) and a massage (no, not that kind of massage, thanks for asking) from the hotel spam before bed.

The next week would bring us to Guilin, Hong Kong, Macau, and I’ll be seeing a great many more places before I see home again. But this was a day that I’ll not soon forget.