Day 28

This is it our journey here in China is near its end. After 30 days on the road we are ready to come back home and see our loved ones. This time spent here has been a life changing experience, one of these welcome breaks in a busy life that opens onto the other side of yourself, a side that you do not have often the occasion to see. It has been a great scientific achievement which will no doubt will lead us to exciting prospects but it has mainly been about friendship with my colleagues and the pleasure of leave behind all pre-concieved ideas andletting ourselves  be guided by our host Yahui who in the most admirable calm has shared his knowledge and his love for his country. We have met a lot of great people on the way who have taught us some lessons of generosity and honesty. Can I be wise enough to bring back home some of this oriental wisdom and integrate it into my daily life?…Hopefully. In any case it is now time for me to say thank you to all the hundreds of people who have followed us during this expedition and with whom I have shared my daily feelings  and reflections. Hopefully some of you will follow the outcomes of our research in scientific literrature but for all of you, enjoy the summer and let’s try not to live our lives like ants on top of a hot stove!
Rudy

Day 27

Today is a special day as it is our last sampling day. We have so far managed to get 15 samples well spread across China, so the pressure is off and we can start to relax. We started the day with a European type breakfast (ie. Coffee, cereals, yougourts, fruit, cakes & orange juice!). We went down to the local market on board a local taxi - a sort of Dell boy three wheeled vehicle. At the market for the first time since our arrival there were no live fish…all frozen. This is because all the local rivers are dry. We travelled for an hour to the next city and again no fish as all the local river are dried up. It is heartbreaking to see large rivers without any water, not a drop. Especially as rivers are the life blood of Chinese society. The causes of such an environmental disaster are unclear but one thing is certain, it is not going to get better with the cities increasing at such a fast pace. According to Yahui, the government plans to bring water from the south to the north through a system of canals. So no water no fish. On the way back, I asked to stop to take a picture of these dry rivers that I could use later for a lecture. A guy came from nowhere to ask what we were doing, then he mentioned an old small reservoir at the top of the mountain and we decided to pay a visit. After a couple of kms of dirt track where the car nearly sunk in the mud, we arrived at the top of the mountains to find a small reservoir (i.e. essentially a large pond) where local teenagers were fishing with home made fishing rods cut from a tree. The reservoir seemed full of fish and the kids had caught..our topmouth gudgeon! Excited we set up some traps and after 30 mins they were holding hundreds of topmouth and nothing else.Life is so strange. On our last day on a lucky stop we were directed to this quiet stunning place in the middle of nowhere, and after so many difficulties finding our fish during the expedition, it was right there waiting for us in its thousands. The fish have been isolated in the reservoir for over 30 years, very similar to our topmouth population in the UK. The circle is now closed, we are heading back to Beijing where we are preparing ourselves for a long day tomorrow, processing the collection of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Rudy

Day 26

Whooah…morning market today was like a bad hangover, in silence like three ghosts (we left Yah to sleep longer as he has to drive all day) we wandered the road of Kangping in search of the colourful parasols indicative of the market. When we arrived a local fisherman had 8 little topmouth gudgeon waiting for us but said that we should have come at… 4 if we wanted to get a chance to get any topmouth. Very funny.
After breakfast we headed up to the local abandoned reservoir, which was a stunning nature reserve with lots of mature ponds (I took a sample of water + sediments for Genoveva) and set up our traps following the advice of a local angler. When we asked if the fish was present and where should we fish, he said yes there are a lot and pointed out to a location as far from where he was as possible. After an hour fishing, and no fish in our traps we realised that all around the world anglers are all the same!!
We headed up for a smaller reservoir further up the catchment, there we had more luck, we met local fishermen who emptied their traps for us and that was enough for us to get a sample. All done with good heart with no charge, no negative feeling pure altruism something we have forgotten in our part of the world. The lake was riddled with maze traps, which are illegal in China but that everyone uses with a general consensus that it is illegal. This is the most amusing side of China and Chinese people who are full of complexity and contradictions which could at first be unsettling for our rational culture but which is in fact very refreshing as it allows the complexity of life and its daily contradictions to be integrated without having to confront or resolve them aggressively. Their society is full of subtlety and poetry, far from our ‘communist state’ stereotypes and we have a lot to learn from it.
This is a good occasion to introduce some Chinese sayings such as "Like climbing a tree to catch a fish" (waste of time) or" like asking a blind man for directions" (another waste of time) or one well suited for our leaders, "a new bottle filled with old wine" (a superficial change). Enough of that, I am being unfair with our leaders as I look at the sky from the bottom of a well (anybody know what that could mean?).
Lunch time in a local restaurant and guess what we had, fried topmouth gudgeon! Not bad but I will stay with sea bass when I return if you don’t mind.
That's it, we are now heading toward Chéngdé a town three hours from Beijing. Used to be a summer welcome retreat from Beijing for several emperors starting with the first Quing dynasty. I am not sure if we will have time to look at it but there is apparently a jaw-dropping colossal statue of Guanyin.
Genoveva and Rafa good luck for the final on sunday. It is broadcast here at 2.30 am but we will be watching...hopefully with both eyes open :-)

Day 25

The tiredness is starting to take its toll and itis becoming harder and harder to wake up at 5.3am to go to the local market. We didn’t find many specimens in the early morning market today but yesterday we met someone who claimed he could get us a sample of 100 fish. After receiving no news from this contact we headed off to meet him at the seven family village.When we arrived, there was only his wife, two feet in the mud on the side of a busy road trying to sell a few fish in a bin. A few negociations later she agreed to phone her husband who for a substantial payement finally agreed to go and check his traps…then we got our 100 fish! The fish looked different from other places with the head much smaller in proportion to the rest of their body. Genoveva, the fish are preserved in formalin for parasites, life history traits and morphology but fish are individually marked with a fin clip in alcohol for additional genetic analyses. When possible another sample is preserved in alcohol for parasite study and stable isotope analyses.We processed the fish on the side of the muddy road with over fifty women, children and men attracted from all around to see the foreigners who were so interested in such a small fish. They all made fun of us throughout the processing of the samples but all in a friendly maner. They will never look at this fish in the same way again though…Then we quickly headed on our way back to Beijing as we have a couple of river systems to sample before further work on the Academy collections. The weather was miserable, lots of rain and fairly cold. The distances between any sampling locations are massive. It is a bit like sampling in Paris in the morning and staying in Marseilles in the evening.Throughout our journey we have discovered the rural part of China, with clearly defined climatic regions, with the agriculture of maze in the North , wheat in the middle and rice in the south. We also discovered the highest caused of death for Chinese between 25 & 45 years old…motorways. These are lethal and on many occasions I thought that it would be the end of us. The trucks are all overloaded to such an extreme that the roads are littered with pot holes that a team of legionnaires tries to repair every day.Tonight we are staying in Kangping, a somewhat rundown town in the North of Shenyang (Liáoning Province). Here people are more discrete in their surprise of seeing foreigners walking their streets. When they have a chance they ask Yahui where we come from and he replies in a debonaire style ‘Ingua’ meaning England.We will all welcome some sleep as we have agreed on a 5.30am morning (although the hotel manager recommended going to the market at 4…!)

Day 24

This morning after checking the local market we rapidly headed North towards Harbin and the Amur River basin. Torrential rain all day and massive pot holes in the road made our progression fairly slow. This part of the country looks very industrial with an old look of a 70’s communist town as you imagine it from our Western perspective. People here are much taller than in other parts of the country (Russian influence!), are louder when they talk, their dishes are massive and they are not so excited to see foreigners although you still have the occasional Helloooo!
After locating the river and speaking to the locals we rapidly understood that no living creatures could be found in these local black rivers as they are so heavily polluted. So trying to waste no time we went further North trying to find better waters. On the road we found local fishermen in a village called “the seven families” who had already sold out their topmouth gudgeon for the day (highly prized here, I am not sure why) but that they will get some for us tomorrow morning (let’s wait and see). We need a sample from here as the local temperatures in the winter regularly plunge to -40 oC and goes up to +30oC in the summer. It would be interesting to see how the fish have adapted to these extreme temperatures.
Something, I haven’t mentioned so far in the blog (although it fills up quite a lot of our discussion, like old soldiers comparing their wounds) is the state of public toilets in China! You have some really wicked ones with a ditch over which you squat and separated by small walls. When you enter, you have to hyperventilate as the foul smell attacks the back of your throat and from time to time you have the pleasure of seeing a head poking over the wall and saying hellooo!
Tonight, we are all exhausted, a mixture of the driving, the drop in temperature (fit is the first time we have worn our jumpers) and disappointment with our fish collection. We can see that time is running out and we are all anxious to make sure we complete our collection and make this expedition and overall success.
Finally, we had all a deep thought for our friend and colleague Bernd after the football last night (we know the feeling) and say to Rafa and all online Spaniards "Hola" and good luck for the final!
It is midnight here and tomorrow we wake up at 5.30 so straight to bed now and no bedtime story ;-)

Day 23

This was not a day to be remembered. We headed toward Dandong, the border town with North Korea and arrived there at lunch time. In an absolute moment of decadence we had a KFC over looking the border (not proud of it!). This was one of those surreal moments where you are not quite sure where you are.Someone tells you that behind the Chinese flag the coastline is a country where a few million people are suffuring daily and you are swamped by an inevitable feeling of voyeurism and guilt about being on the good side of the fence.
Reloaded with our Americanised lunch we headed up towards the mountains. Yes, Fred China is a big country (no actually it is huge!) and to get to a place and get our fish we need to drive long distances. As part of our study we aimed at collecting this small fish from across the geographical range in the native part of China. It was a deliberate choice to go for coverage rather than high resolution in one location. Anyway, we found a lovely river in the mountains but our fish was not there or according to the locals very low in number. I suggested to Yahui that we should check the reservoir as it is the place where our fish normally do best but we had to pay to get in and he refused saying that was not a good location to fish. So we spent most of our afternoon trying to find such good location but without success. At the end of the day we met a couple of local fishermen who told us that the only place to get the fish as they were abundant was the reservoir… (very frustrating). Anyway, this was not an easy moment as losing face is not part of our host's tradition so we headed up to a local hotel and for some dinner (Californian noodles, equivalent to McDonalds in China during the 80’s). By the way,for dinner the hotel was offering some giant living worms (or parasites) which was not my cup of tea. After dinner, Yahui said “I have an idea why don’t we go and fish the reservoir after dinner as it is still open”…but after further lengthy diplomatic talks we headed up towards the local river to fish and caught…nothing!
We went back to our room exhausted from a frustrating day and felt that the day had escaped us without having been able to do much.

Day 22

What a day! The most astonishing moment so far. We set off this morning from Xingcheng and as usual checked the local market but it was essentially marine species. One of the rare towns that still retains its original city wall from the Ming dynasty. Then we drove deeper into Manchoury territory (Liáoning Province) and we went off road through little villages trying to find the river. After a lot of hesitation about whether the car would make it or not, we finally located a stunning part of the river surrounded by mountains. Not a soul just us, the sunshine and the feeling of being alive. It was magical. Yahui taught me how to use the throw net (harder than it seems) and I kept catching our fish despite poor throws while he couldn’t catch any although his throws were very pro… beginner’s luck! This part of the country is called the Gulin of the North with a well known ice valley (the road we took). We were on a little cloud all day and greatly missed Bernd who would have loved it. This part of China is not as touristy as other part of the China and it is dictated by the wild and imposing landscape. There is a constant breeze coming from the Pacific which makes the high temperature very pleasant. Definitely a place to come back.

Tonight we ended up in Zhuanghe a few km down from Dandong, the border town with N. Korea where we are planning to go tomorrow morning. Yahui has some contacts there so we should be able to get a sample from N & S Korea which would be interesting as all their rivers have a very different history to the Chinese ones we sampled.

For dinner we went to a Korean restaurant which consisted of a barbecue incorporated in the table and everyone cooked their own food. Lovely. To digest our feast we went to the square to play a local game which consists of juggling some metal coins attached to a crown of featherswith your feet . You see people playing it all around China in parks and streets with all generations and sexes. I will bring a couple back to the UK (they cost 2p each) and start this Chinese game as a fashion in Bournemouth. I always told my wife that I was a fashion guru but she had some doubts…;-)