The Anshun waterfall

This is a piece by a contributor, Dustin Ooley, who is a U.S.-China Friendship Volunteer, part of the Peace Corps, presently stationed in at Anshun Teacher's College,
Anshun, Guizhou PRC.

I came to China as a Peace Corps Volunteer in June of 2007. In September I was assigned to Anshun, a somewhat remote city in China’s poorest province, Guizhou. I wrote a satirical article about the waterfall as a comment on the willingness of people to visit me on the sole condition that they got to see the waterfall, Huangguoshu Waterfall (黄果树瀑布). The result was the mistaken notion that I hated the waterfall.

When I travel around China and have a conversation where I need to explain where I live and work, I always use the waterfall for reference: “Huangguoshu Pubu,” I say with interlocked thumbs and dangling fingers – to mimic the shape of our province’s biggest attraction. It never fails to elicit smiles and recognition.

How big is this waterfall? I’ve never heard the same answer twice. The Chinese tell me all sorts of different things about Anshun’s Huangguoshu Waterfall. I have heard that it’s the loudest in the world, the tallest in Asia, the biggest in China, the third largest in the world, and the second largest in the world (right after Niagra Falls, as the man told his son while I listened with skepticism).

“Is it the second largest by volume?” I asked him. He shook his head. “Not by volume, no,” he replied.

“By width, then?”

“No, it’s not a case of width,” he said uncertainly.

This went on for some time and I got no closer to the answer than when I arrived in China two years ago and was told that it was the third largest waterfall in the world. But by using context clues and lots of body language, I had learned the Chinese for ‘volume’ and ‘width.’

The Internet is less than helpful – spewing a variety of heights and widths that suggest the waterfall was measured by advanced guesswork or the eyeballing method, making it difficult to know which information is correct. Unofficially I will say that the waterfall is about 75 meters high and probably more than 80 meters wide (I read somewhere that it was over 100 meters). It’s like one of those philosophical questions: “How can we know this waterfall even exists?” But I assure you it does and it is well worth the trip – even if you have to make an extra stop before going to the much more popular provinces of Guangxi or Yunnan. The guidebooks seldom offer more than a few scant pages about Guizhou, which should be appealing to anyone with a sense of adventure and the proper Giardia medication.

Huangguoshu is large, loud, and remote. I heard the waterfall long before I saw it, walking along the cement path with hordes of Chinese tourists. The path approaches some of the best places for photos of the waterfall itself – platforms stretch to the edge of the water where eager Chinese tourists seem as lost and excited as the foreigners who come to this region. Moving on, the trail winds upward past local vendors selling the most stifling, cheap rain slickers you have ever worn (at the low price of 5 yuan!). I took it off immediately and used it to protect my backpack. Once you level off at the top of the hill across from the waterfall, the mist gets pretty heavy. One of the most exciting aspects of this waterfall is that the trail goes behind the falls – offering people the chance to look out from within the waterfall. The 30 yuan for an almost unending succession of escalators back to the main gate was worth every jiao.

Chinglish signs are abounding and offer the careful observer a private chuckle when they are told that there is, “No Climbing Danger,” or, “No scribbling or firing in the scenic area.”

Getting to the waterfall is relatively painless and one can be in and out of Anshun without spending the night. Take a train (12 yuan) or bus (35 yuan) from Guiyang to Anshun and go to the West Bus Station (客车西站) to buy a ticket to Huangguoshu City (12 yuan). Tickets for the waterfall are 180 yuan, but one of my students had guanxi with someone who worked at the falls – I got in for free.

Afterwards we opted to hire a driver to see other waterfalls in the area, including Yinlianzhuitan Waterfall (銀鏈墜潭瀑布). The taxi driver charged us 80 yuan, dropped us off at a trail that passed another series of smaller waterfalls, and picked us up 2 hours later at the other end. Some say this addition to the main waterfall is essential to make a day of this trip.

To the people of Guizhou, the waterfall is almost a part of their identity. “Have you seen the waterfall?” is usually the third question I hear from inquisitive Chinese. “Of course!” I reply with mock surprise. The pride of their question betrays the notion that they somehow invented this natural attraction.

One of my students wrote in her journal that going to the waterfall was the happiest day of her life:

“When we stepped into the gate, we couldn’t see the waterfall at first instead a beautiful garden. But we could hear of the roaring. After ten minutes’ walking, we saw the great waterfall. The water was a white ribbon link sky and earth. It fell into the lake with a great thunder. There were two or three rainbows in the middle of the waterfall. It made me think that we were live in paradise.”