Every holiday, many people travel. Recalling last year’s National Day, I also took the children out for a trip with fun, after all, children are just like office workers, and they only have holidays at this time. After taking the trouble to take him out, I must think about one question: what does tourism mean to us?
Definitely not entertainment. There are too many things that can be entertained. It must not be long knowledge. There are too many channels for long knowledge. Isn’t reading faster? Definitely not exercise, it might as well play a game.
I took a car from Hailar to Genhe. It takes three hours by bus and seven hours by train. I hesitated for a long time and chose the latter.
The train is slow. It’s slow because it stops at each station, and those stations seem to make me fascinated. The passengers on the train also seem to be more willing to treat the person they meet as a related person and talk happily. The process of taking the train, in the words of a netizen, is to embrace the road.
Gu Qirun Ichiro had the same feelings as me. He wrote in his book that in the season when the peach blossoms around Osaka are open, he prefers to take a train to see it. At that time, the tram was full of people who watched flowers. The speed was fast and there were many people. He prefers to choose a train, stopping at each station, while shaking his body in the slow carriage, while facing the misty Yamato Plain outside the window, forests, hills, countryside, villages, and towers, unconscious Just forget the time.
We usually go too fast and everything is fast, so I probably travel for the sake of making children experience slow. It is difficult for us to get to know the strange place names, watching the wild flowers, farmhouses and white birch forests that are unknown outside the window slowly sweeping away. All this made me willing to spend twice as much time on a slow train.
After returning to Hailar from Genhe, we went to the grassland and lived in the herdsmen’s home. The next day, we went to see the “sheep bag”, which is where the herders ran sheep. Shepherds live in sheep’s packs at night, far from the settlements, and take an hour to go by tractor. The point is, the wind on the road is very strong, mixed with wind and sand, straight into the face. At the sheep’s bag, when the herdsmen stopped to trim the sheepfold, we walked to see the flock, with the wind on, and walked for 40 minutes in an endless environment without a tree.
In the process, we know how naive our original imagination was. We imagine ourselves sitting comfortably in the shade of the tree, watching the flocks scattered around, eating the grass happily. But actually? We came here on a long journey, and the flocks did not let us approach at all. As soon as we approached them, we stepped back and took us further and further. We had to give up.
I remember the trips that made me unforgettable, all of them are hard and difficult. Once in the summer of 2016, I went hiking with a few friends to Qianhu Mountain. It’s about 3,000 meters above sea level, and for me, it’s already suffering. But the more tormenting is the problem of going to the toilet. I often find a concealed place breathlessly. After releasing my hands, I stand up and see a pony staring at you, which is very awkward.
The other time was in April 2014, I went to Hoh Xil with a few other friends and lived at a local protection station. At that time I was troubled by severe altitude sickness and thought I might be dying. The weather was very cold. We lived in the dormitory of the protection station. Burning firewood in the protection station may exacerbate hypoxia. I have a headache, and I dare not get out of bed or take off my clothes to sleep, because I am afraid that cold exposure will aggravate altitude sickness. In the middle of the night we got up in the toilet and connected it with a washbasin, but at dawn, the urine all condensed into yellow ice.
My friend said something. When she was 18, the summer vacation after the college entrance examination, she rode a bicycle with her friends and walked along the Yangtze River for more than two weeks. In the process, they have lived in small houses on the riverfront, they have lived overnight, pulled their stomachs, hungry their stomachs, and dried their skin. When she returned, she was extremely dark and very thin, her hair smelled bad, only her eyes were dark and bright. After that, she thought of this sentence: Life goes back and forth to nature, so-called extreme poverty, but that’s it.
I am very impressed by this passage. Now, when my child is blown black by the wind and sand, resisted by the herds, and goes to the toilet in the wind of the grassland, he will surely realize this.
