Looking for Dragon Boats
Dragon boats. Maybe you’ve heard of dragon boats and dragon boat racing. But maybe you’ve never seen one. That’s the situation I was in last June as Dragon Boat Festival got closer. Dragon Boat Festival is a Chinese lunar holiday that usually falls in May or June. The festival commemorates the death of an ancient Chinese poet and is known for the colorful boats that get raced during the festival. But even though I’d been in China for 3 Dragon Boat Festivals I hadn’t seen any races. Since I was also trying to do more local stuff I decided to try to remedy that. I had…mixed results.
Practice is better than nothing I guess
I had some trouble finding where to watch dragon boat races. I read some stuff that said there were some in Shenzhen but most seemed to be in Hong Kong or Guangzhou. I decided to head out to watch one of the races on June 7. I did not see any. The article I had read said that there would be races throughout the day. So I dragged myself out of bed far too early for a Saturday and caught the train. I got to Guangzhou, waited in a long line to buy my return ticket, and then went off to find…a bunch of people milling around and not much else.
Now it seemed that there HAD been races that morning. It also looked like there was some little festival of some sort going on. Probably related to the holiday. But there were no more races. The whole day I only saw two or three boats practicing and not a single race. I’d gone all the way out for nothing. Now travel fails aren’t uncommon for me but in this case I’d tried to do my research. I’d read there were races all day. Unfortunately my information was bad…
I tried to make the most of the day though, exploring that area of Guangzhou, poking around some nearby areas, and generally getting really sweaty. It was hot that weekend. So hot. And I decided to try again the next weekend. Because the same things I’d read also said there were races the next weekend.
Some of the stuff I saw that wasn’t dragon boats
So the next weekend I was off again. But with a couple of key differences. First Max came with me. I think she wanted to spare me the embarrassment of failing again. And we were going out Friday night instead of Saturday. That way we could get up a little later that if we were taking the train Saturday but still be out and about in Guangzhou in time for any morning races.
After a failed search for coffee we went to see the morning races and only found practices. It was much more exciting than the little I had seen the week before but still not a race. Not a good start. We heard there were more races in the afternoon on the other side of the river so we wandered around for a little before making our way to the other side of the river. This time we seemed to be in luck. We caught one race and then saw tons of…show-off boats may be the best way to describe them. We saw more races farther up so we kept walking to see them…only to find them blocked off except for press or something? I couldn’t read the sign and was too angry to wait for Max to do it. But we couldn’t go any farther. By then we were getting close to having to catch our train back to Shenzhen so we decided to call it. Although we hadn’t seen much, and we’d been stymied when we almost did, we were still much more successful than I had been the week before.
We had come so close only be stopped by something so confounding. But unlike the first week we did get to see a lot of boats. We didn’t see too many races but we got a front row seat to the festivities and that was pretty great.
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