In the last weekend with Rob we went to a city named Yongding (永定) to visit the tulou. Tulou are round buildings where a group of people live in. Other names for these structures are Hakka houses, because Hakka people live in them. And also Earthern buildings, because the early tulou were of earthern construction.

To get to Yongding we had to leave Xiamen in the early morning. Around 8 in the morning we went outside to wait for the bus to pick us up. With music ready to go and water in my backpack we left Xiamen at around 9 with a bus full of Chinese tourists. It’s a three and a half hour drive to Yongding, which was not always as comfortable as you might expect. Our chauffeur treated the bus as a go-cart on a race track. Going from left to right to left to the other lane to overtake other vehicles. Even in the mountain on a two lane road the chauffeur just went into the oncoming traffic to overtake others.

After three hours we arrived safely, however we still had to go back later that day.. With the same driver… The first thing we did after we arrived was order fried rice and noodles! We ate like beasts, or at least some of us… With the final result in the image below.

Beastly Lunch

Beastly Lunch after arriving at Yongding

After lunch we went out to the roundhouses to have a look. We walked around in them, and visited every floor. We only visited two roundhouses, because the bus would take us back two hours after we arrived in Yongding. After lunch we had little time left, since we took our time. Still time was enough, it is beautiful to see these kind of houses. After walking around in them for like ten minutes you have seen all you can see, so you don’t need the whole day to visit these tulou… well you do need to travel 7 hours from Xiamen in total if you want to get back home, which is basically the whole day after all.

Tulou entrance

One of the two entrances to get into a tulou.

The trip to tulou was a replacement for the trip we actually wanted to make. Wuyi mountain… this remains again one of the things we MUST do next time. Hopefully Rob can be back in November for his graduation internship, maybe we can make time to go at that time. I really hope so! The trip to tulou wasn’t a bad replacement, but I heard so much about it that it didn’t completely live up to my expectations. At least we had a hell of a ride to and from there by our retired F1 bus driver.

That’s it again, see ya!