Everyone knows traveling during the National Day holiday is asking for traffic, crowds, and trouble. And yet, with full awareness, we still went ahead and did the most “clever” thing possible.
October 1: Wedding Duty
The trip actually began with a wedding. My wife’s twin cousin finally got married—one of the twins, anyway—so first of all, congratulations to the newlyweds, and may they have a happy marriage and a child soon.
The groom is seriously impressive: undergraduate degree from Southeast University, a master’s from Tsinghua, and a doctorate from Birmingham. A textbook high-achieving academic all the way through. Since we were there as part of the bride’s side, we went to the groom’s home and noticed something unusual right away: every room had something pasted on the door, even the kitchen doorframe. They looked a bit like Taoist talismans, or some variation of them. I still have no idea what they actually were.
October 2: Setting Off for Wuyuan
A few of us brilliant minds decided that October 2 would be the perfect day to drive to Wuyuan in Jiangxi. Our family and a classmate’s family squeezed six people into a seven-seater and hit the road without hesitation.
Before the holiday, the map app said the trip from Suzhou was just over 500 kilometers and would take a little more than five hours. On the actual day, it suddenly became more than eight hours. Thankfully, both my friend CC and I are experienced drivers, so we took turns behind the wheel. If I’d had to do the whole drive alone, I probably would have been finished.
The seating arrangement was simple enough: the two men in front, the household leadership in the middle row, and the little emperors in the back. Then off we went.
It didn’t take long before the expressway started clogging up. From a distance we saw smoke rising ahead, and soon police cars and fire trucks came racing down the emergency lane. A car had caught fire. I don’t know whether it was spontaneous combustion or the result of a collision, but it looked like a gasoline car. So much for people always blaming electric vehicles.
We left Suzhou at 8 in the morning, stopped at a service area to eat, and didn’t get close to our first destination—Wangxiangu—until after 4 p.m. At a fork in the road, traffic police were asking each car where it was headed and advising people not to continue toward the scenic area. But like so many travelers, we thought: we’ve already come this far, how can we not go in? So forward we went.
Sure enough, not long after passing the intersection, traffic came to a standstill. The navigation app estimated another hour and a half just to reach the parking lot. Then my wife had a flash of inspiration: why not park here and see if we could rent electric scooters instead? That sounded far better than sitting in a jam.
We looked around for shared scooters but found none. There was, however, a Yadea electric bike shop by the roadside. We asked the owner whether rentals were available. He answered like someone who had done this many times before: yes, of course. Clearly we weren’t the first people to try this workaround.
Then came the price. Each scooter cost 150 yuan. We had four adults and two kids, so even squeezing in, we needed two. That meant 300 yuan total. Painful, but there was only that one shop. The alternatives were either paying up or staying trapped in car traffic, so in the end we chose to be overcharged with dignity.
After riding nearly 10 kilometers, we finally reached the entrance to Wangxiangu—and the place was absolutely packed. Everyone had clearly planned to come at night. To be fair, the setting was beautiful: cliffside buildings layered along the mountain, dramatic lighting everywhere, streams flowing through the valley, and the whole place carrying that distinctive elegance of water, stone, and forest.
The only problem was the crowd. There were just far too many people. If the scenic area’s comfortable capacity is one unit, that night it had to be holding at least three or four. On the uphill and downhill paths, people were pressed so tightly together it was hard even to turn your body. It was beautiful, yes, but also a little unsettling. One accident in a crowd like that could have turned serious very quickly.
October 3: Wolong Valley and the Real Highlight of the Trip
We got back to the hotel pretty late the night before, so the next day started at a slightly slower pace. Later we headed to Wolong Valley.
The place has an unmistakable martial-arts feel to it, made even more fitting by the fact that its name was inscribed by Jin Yong himself. We followed the mountain path upward, and every so often a waterfall would appear, or a pool of clear water. The two kids had a fantastic time. They were so tempted to take off their shoes and jump straight into the stream. In Suzhou, you don’t really get this kind of mountain-and-water scenery, so for them it was a genuine eye-opener.
That evening, after a proper meal, we moved on to the centerpiece of the whole trip: Wunvzhou.
Wunvzhou is in Wuyuan County, not far from our hotel. As soon as we entered, we were surrounded by classic Huizhou-style architecture—stone lanes, white walls, dark roof tiles. I remember thinking it was odd that we were in Jiangxi, yet so many villages in the mountains looked unmistakably Huizhou in style. Later I looked it up and found the answer: Wuyuan sits where Anhui, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang meet, and historically it was one of the six counties of ancient Huizhou Prefecture. So this wasn’t borrowed style at all—it was very much part of the region’s own cultural roots.
There was also a line of verse on a wall that caught my attention. It made me think of Tang Xianzu’s famous line, “The one place I am most deeply enchanted by, yet never even dream of reaching, is Huizhou.” In earlier times, Huizhou might have seemed like a world reserved for wealthy merchants and elites. Today, with a place like Wunvzhou open to ordinary travelers, it feels different. It’s not that rich merchants have disappeared, but that ordinary people’s lives have improved enough to enjoy places like this too. If Tang Xianzu could see the present day, maybe he would have written something more cheerful—something like, “Gladly on my way to Huizhou.”
At night, the whole park was stunning. One thing I noticed on this trip is that many scenic destinations in Jiangxi seem designed to come alive after dark. The deeper the night, the better they look.
We had come mainly for the molten iron flower performance. Before seeing it in person, I didn’t really have a concrete image of what “dashuhua” would be like. Then the show began, and it turned out to be astonishingly powerful.
Red-hot molten iron was scooped from a furnace and flung into the air. Before it had time to fall and scatter, another performer struck it hard with a wooden paddle, like a baseball player smashing a home run. In an instant, the molten metal burst outward overhead. The flying sparks twisted like golden snakes, dazzling and brilliant. From above, they poured down in fiery cascades like a volcanic eruption; then, as the sparks thinned, they transformed into something almost like silver blossoms and flaming trees in bloom. The only possible reaction was awe.
After the iron flower show, there was also a large fireworks display, just as beautiful in a completely different way. Some things really don’t translate well into words. They have to be seen.
October 4: The Long Drive Home
By the 4th, it was time to head back. None of us really wanted the trip to end. On the way out, we made a stop at Sanyan Bridge. There were a surprising number of people there too. To be honest, there wasn’t anything especially dramatic about it—it’s simply an old stone bridge set among the mountains, with crystal-clear water flowing beneath it. But the setting was fresh, quiet, and naturally beautiful.
The return drive took even longer than the journey out: more than nine full hours on the road. And along the way we witnessed one particularly bizarre scene.
At one service area, we spotted a car whose front and rear license plates had been deliberately covered with face masks. I had just said to my wife, “Is this driver suicidal? Aren’t they afraid of getting caught?” when a police car pulled up right beside it.
The driver was in the middle of reversing when the officer came over and knocked on the window. Instead of stopping, the driver slammed the accelerator and fled down a small road behind the gas station. The police immediately switched on their body camera and gave chase.
But really, where can you run on an expressway? I have no idea whether the car contained something illegal, or whether the driver had done something else wrong, but it was a wild thing to see.
We finally got home safely at 11 that night. Technically we were away for three days, but when you count it up, a full day of that was spent driving. That’s holiday travel in a nutshell: equal parts misery and joy.