Homestays

Miao Village In Guizhou

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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In Shanghai, exploring the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree web site, I noticed a query from a young woman from Kaili in Guizhou Province who was offering to arrange a homestay in a Miao minority village in the mountains. We exchanged emails and I was excited to meet her. But then I received an email saying she was in Shanghai and could we meet for the train ride to Guizhou in a couple days. I returned that I couldn’t leave that soon but I could meet her in Kaili…then I never heard from her again. A mystery…or maybe she got an offer from someone to pay her fare back to Kaili…who knows. But I knew where I was going next! From Shanghai I flew to Guiyang, capital of Guizhou Province and stored my baggage at a hotel there before boarding a bus for the three hour ride to the city of Kaili.

When I got off the bus there, I was directed to another station around the corner with several rickety old buses waiting for passengers to various villages. I had no idea which bus would take me to Xiuang, the village I had been told by the English-speaking receptionist in Guiyang that would be celebrating their New Year’s holiday. Then I saw a smiling family waiting near one half-full bus. “Xiuang,” I asked. Yes, they nodded. But while we were waiting to board, a couple of men outside a nearby fence a few feet from us motioned us to approach them. It gradually became clear they were taxi drivers that wanted to take us to Xiuang. Between my motions and their language we all agreed to share the cost of the taxi so we piled in and were off…on a harrowing short-cut along steep mountain dirt roads with thousand foot drop-offs…to our village!

The people in the mountains in this southeastern Chinese province are not Han Chinese. Eighteen different minorities live within Guizou province and I was here to visit the Miao people in this gulley-like valley with identical hand-hewn wooden houses climbing the hills on all sides.

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The wooden houses are built on foundations of stone and constructed with wooden pegs…no nails or cement. Steep paths meander among the houses.

After some initial quandry as to where a hotel might be, if there was one, I came across a woman who led me to a small building…who would have thunk it was a hotel…for about $2.00 for the night. I was invited to join the family around their hotpot dinner downstairs…had no idea what I was eating but I was starved and it tasted delicious with smiling faces all around. No extra charge! There was no heat in the freezing room that night so I took the bedding off the other twin bed and added it to mine.

There are at least 130 different types of Miao people living in villages among the mountains and they have different dialects, headdress, and traditions. Yet, they all belong to one Miao minority. Their language is endangered as it has no written form and is used less and less among the younger generation who is often eager to learn English.

The next morning, walking along the main cobblestone path through the village I came across a young French couple…the only Westerners in the town…who were delighted to speak English with someone after hiking all over the mountains from village to village without a guidebook. “Just knock on a door” they said, and show the sign for sleep and eat and show money and you will be invited in,” they said. They were in their second year of travel before returning home to start a family. They had been traveling in the province two months and it was they who took me to Mr. Hou. Mr. Hou was the English teacher in the middle school there that drew students from villages all over the mountains. “By foot,” he said.

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Mr. Hou invited me to stay for two days for $4 a day in his home, generously sharing three banquet meals a day around “hotpot” and dozens of small dishes of whatevers with him and his extended family of which there were many coming and going during each meal! While the men and women prepared the food, the guests all sang a local folk song. Then they asked me to sing a song…and I’ll be darned if my mind didn’t go panicky blank…all I could think of was Row Row Your Boat and I think that is really a French song! So I told them we had rock music and I couldn’t sing rock. They all nodded in agreement…to my relief I was off the hook!

The family and I joined round on 8 inch high stools and watched Mr. Hue chop the meat up on a thick round wood cutting block on the floor. Then slowly bowls of food appeared from another cooking room that the women had prepared and were set out on the floor around a “hotpot”or wok full of boiling broth sitting on a foot high round stand full of lit charcoal. Mr. Hue would chopstick some of the food he considered the best onto my small bowl of rice. The bones and small rejected bits were spit onto the floor. After every few bites the local hooch was poured round and after a song and a whoop everyone would gulp down the fiery fruit-flavored alcohol made by the grandmothers. It didn’t take long for the whoops and songs to exceed the eating. Humorously, I was given “just a small amount” each time..the villagers having experienced past catastrophes with drunk foreigners!

Finally the day came when the New Year’s biggest day would be celebrated…music, dancing…the women in wonderful traditional dress.

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During the daytimes I wandered through the small cobbled lanes leading through the houses and shops…trying my best to avoid the firecrackers thrown at the visitors by the small boys.

Although the New Years ethnic dances in costumes were delightful and the people warm-hearted and friendly, I was happy to leave the village. The small boys thought it was great fun to make the “foreigner” jump when they threw firecrackers at her feet…one landing on top of my backpack…nearly scaring me out of my wits. And on top of that Mr. Hou felt he had to direct my every move in the home…was terribly worried I would fall off the narrow log ladder to the upper level where he had cleared out a cozy room with a rock-hard bed. After all, I was “old.” 62! So by the third day I had had enough fireworks and directing!

While I was waiting for the bus back to Kaili, (there was no schedule…you just waited for the bus to show up) a newly-arrived young man from Amsterdam and I made friends with some Chinese English-speaking students from Hunan province who were there with their photography teacher and we nearly went to Langde village with them if there had been room in their van. I was sorry not to be able to go with these cheery young people who were so anxious to try out their English…some of the words inappropriately big and ostentatious…and some I didn’t even know the meaning of! Be sure to correct our English, they said! Well, we don’t use that word in normal conversation I would say and they would look so disappointed. We exchanged email “to practice English.”

“Kaili, Kaili, bystanders yelled at me as a small bus appeared…barely missing the food-vendors on either side of the dirt road leading up to the village. Then just as I was waiting to board, a Russian-American in his 80’s from NYC with a false leg nearly toppled off the bus with his bag into the street. We quickly traded some travel stories…he had been backpacking for years all over the world…refusing to give it up…very inspiring…and touching…

I headed back to Kaili, a comfortable and colorful Miao urban city with great food down small alleys, and was pleasantly surprised to find that my hotel room harbored a broadband high speed internet connection! This was not only Asia, but it was China after all and the appetite here for technology and communication devices is insatiable.

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After another bus back to Guiyang I spent the evening walking along the river than runs through the city, meandering up and down streets…getting lost and finding my way again…checking email at a large internet cafe with at least a hundred young kids all noisily playing video games. And eating wonderful street food!

The next night I headed off to Kunming on an overnight train…middle bed in a 6-bed compartment this time…but not without exploring the new Wal-Mart around the corner from the train station to replenish my battery supply!

Message from Ulaan Bataar

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Greetings-
Have been in Mongolia for the past week–initial few days in a ger bordering on a national park–lazy, relaxing days with hiking and Mongolian pony riding (when on the horse my feet nearly reach the ground). Then had only 2 days for Ulaan Bataar, the capital. Weather was so pleasant and culture such a change of pace following Russia that we decided to stay longer. However train only passes through town once a week, more time here than what we need but that’s ok.

First couple of days we did the home-stay thing but the hostess spoke no English and was a bit shy to interact so moved to a hotel. Lodging too expensive but all else cheaper–can take a taxi from one end of town to the other for less than a buck.

Yesterday went to a huge local market. Guidebooks said to take care re thievery (advice in the realm of one’s mother saying to wear a coat). But while there my packback received a gash and a similar long slash across my pant leg in the general area where someone saw me depositing change. I was aware of the contacts so nothing lost but do have a superficial cut on my thigh. That sort of action leaves an uncomfortable feeling. I was told that the local Mongolians are equally at risk but for some reason I stick out in a crowd (boyish good looks perhaps).

This city (Ulaan Bataar) has a bit of a cowboy feel–most roads not paved and well pot-holed, horse carts compete for space with autos who obey some sense of order only peripherally, older folks still wear their long brightly colored coats (deels) with and an orange sash, everyone under 40 in jeans, black leather jackets and constantly fiddling with their cell phones (same-same at all latitudes and longitudes). Tiz too bad as all interesting ethnic features/diversities will soon be lost–well on our way to a homogenized worldwide culture.

The Mongolians have features that are different than other Asians. They seem to universally dislike the Chinese but respond favorably when asked about Russians–surprising as the country was part of the Soviet Union until 1990. All that I have talked to however are much happier with independence. Too many soviet style buildings remain in the city and many of the people within the city still live in gers (50% by one guide book estimate).

Our next move is to Beijing; then no agenda. Probably will work our way down the east coast of China to Shanghai, then either inland or to Hainan Island in So. China Sea off the coast of Vietnam. Our fixed and booked trans-siberian itinerary ends in Beijing so then the fun begins with winging it again, buying train tickets in Mandarin, etc.-Chinese characters even harder for these poor foreigners than Cyrillic. Many Chinese find it difficult to believe that someone does not speak their language. And therein is the adventure.

Hope all are well. Please send money.
RLG

Lingering Images of Russia

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Siberian countryside with endless kilometers of grassland and golden pine and white birch trees… small wooden, weathered, unpainted, picturesque, single story bungalows throughout Sibera with blue painted shutters-the banya (toilet and shower) in a small building nearby…Outside the cities groups of small two-story dachas (2nd homes with three-sided pitched roofs with garden in front providing relief from tiny flats and a chance to grow their own vegetables for those who can afford it…intensely flavored wine-red berry jam on Olkhon Island.

Drab, dilapidated Stalin-era block style apartment buildings that make maximum use of space but with absolutely no aesthetic value… there’s definitely a market niche in this country, Bob laments, for brooms, scrub brushes, soap and paint…. black leather jackets, Lenin-style hats (never saw any baseball style hats) and shoes with pointed curled up toes on men and women with spike heels—click click click)…. Especially in evenings, but any time of day, people strolling or standing around with an open bottle of beer in hand… Occasionally someone toppling over from inebriation to be caught by a comrade before falling…people with an aloof veneer-not an air of superiority-just reserved as in “I’m minding my own business…you mind yours”-sometimes seemingly shy but when the exterior is cracked they smile readily and extend themselves with varying degrees of warmth and good humor-especially on the train where we have an opportunity to interact……deep underground metros-monumental works of art in themselves (no photos allowed)…wonderful rich soups and more soup, each a little different than the next…

Experiencing daily life in cozy cluttered apartment homestays with friendly middle-aged to elderly single women who get 30% of what we paid. The provided breakfasts range anywhere from here’s the eggs-cook your own to elaborate spreads in tiny rooms… tiny bathrooms (literally wc’s) with sit down toilets that took three times to flush clean…overheard conversations that sound like arguments in a tone of voice you and I would take offense at but then we think it’s all just bluster…people walking in-between and in front of us with no regard for personal boundaries but not intending to be rude…urban store windows full of fashionable clothing and products that only about l% of the people can afford and then only because they operate on the black market (one woman who works for the central bank whispered “yes, we take white money and black money.”

Irkutsk…”Paris of the East”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Off the train again, we dump our luggage at Nadia’s, our homestay and look for a cafe where there just might be an English menu. We find one…not too expensive…that looks full of the city’s hoi paloi. A tall man in a 3/4 length leather coat and fairly long hair by Russian standards, slowly enters the cafe. He moves almost majestically and sits at the coffee bar drinking a single espresso..jeweled ring on each pinky finger…while he waits for a table…whispering solemnly in the ear of the pretty, attentive waitress. He takes off his jacket and carefully hangs it before sitting down. He has a blue shirt on with pink stripes. I want to cast him in a movie.

Later, behind me on our way to the internet cafe, click, click. I move my smooth slow stroll to the side. Click click, she quickly passes on a mission to some unknown destiny.

To Irkutsk With Vladamir

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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The evening we are to leave Yekaterinburg on the train, Bob loses his change purse containing a credit card getting out of a mini-bus. Olga’s son drives us in his car to the internet cafe on the way to the train station so Bob can email the bank.

Waiting for Bob, he and I have an interesting conversation. I make a comment about the importance of having all the information you can get your hands on and he agrees…free press or no. He tells me he has been reading a web site about American foreign policy and is afraid, that since we invaded Iraq, that someday we might go to war with his country. Alarmed, I try to reassure him that this would be very unlikely and give him my email address and ask him to send me the url.

We get on the train at midnight to find two adult women and a child in our berths and no amount of turning on the lights and loud talking and piling of our luggage in-between the beds will dislodge these people who are stubbornly pretending to be asleep.

We collar the carriage “mother” as I call her (who almost wouldn’t let us on the train in the first place because she was confused by the fact that we were ticketed through to Ulaan Baator) and she finds us a new cabin with Vladamir (is every Russian man called Vladamir?) who seems to be pretty familiar with this route. He is a diesel engineer on his way further east to Chita to “advise,” we gather, considering we have two words in Russian and he has maybe three in English. We settle in, glad there are only three of us instead of four.

The next morning we share each other’s food and he orders delicious Russian borscht for us all from the attendent at the end of the carraiage who makes our soup in a space maybe four feet by three feet at the most. Then Vladamir wants to talk…to tell us everything…in Russian. We get maybe a tenth of it by interpreting body language. “Maxi, maxi, he says and points to Bob when he shows him the map of Nepal and Mt. Everest.

I see some Russian girls dressed in skin tight pants with flat stomach showing beneath a short jacket and above a very short mini-skirt and knee-length spike-heeled boots with very pointy toes and with little short-handled purse slung over the shoulder clicking along the platform. “Russian girls,” I say to Vladamir. This he understands. “Russian gerls! Russian gerls! he exclaims proudly. Cick click they go down the concrete platform. They love the clicking…you can tell. They will spend a month’s earnings on a pair of shoes. There are websites with 40,000 of these girls looking for western men to marry, Sasha told us in St. Petersburg. They are sharp and are disappointed in their own men who only seem to want to spend their time drinking beer and vodka.

Falling Out of Bed in Yekaterinburg

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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This autumn of 2004, our second time around the world, our train wanders through a rolling fairy-tale landscape in Siberia filled with gentle grassland (steppes) and Birch trees (the forest is called taiga) with the sun glinting off the red and yellow leaves. Dilapidated little unpainted houses with gardens of cabbages, carrots and garlic appear every few miles…and the kids at home say they have nothing to do???

We arrive in Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Sverdlovsk Region which is the capital of the Urals Federal District, with the population of 1.4 million people.

We make our way to our next homestay with Olga, a pretty blond dressed in leapard skin tights with a nice caring smile. We are sleeping on a make-down counch next to the wall and during the night Bob crawls over me to go to the bathroom and tips the bed with the two of us falling onto the floor. Whomp goes the bed back down to the floor. My god, I say to Bob, she is going to wonder what the heck we are doing in here!

Olga wakes us up the next morning for guel and raisins and sliced sausage and cheese and black coffee for breakfast. She has already canned several beautiful small jars of zucchini with tomatoes and garlic and big jars of tomatoes, peppers and garlic. She wraps them lovingly in blankets on the living room floor before storing them “so the flavors will continue mixing.” She would earn awards at our state fair. She says her husband left her for a younger woman. Her son lives with his girlfriend, works and attends a local university, one of about 20 colleges and technical schools in the city. Yelsin grew up and was educated as an engineer at one of the local schools before he became political and ended up in the Kremlin.
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In The Metro Never To Return

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Our homestay in Moscow is in the “burbs.” Tanya works for a French men’s underwear company and later admits that her son is the wholesaler and she works for him under the table. When Bob says he wants her to bring home a red French thirty dollar thong for him, she giggles but doesn’t believe him.

She is lively and we love to make her laugh by telling her how good a cook she is…fried potatoes, boiled eggs, sauted chicken, toast and cucumber and tomato salad for breakfast! She says she taught herself English three years ago using a book and audio tapes. Her apartment is brand new IKEA and spotless…when she tells us her mother was German I said to Bob “I knew it!” We sleep in her comfortable living room on a couch made out into a bed…Liam, a 24 year old, from Vancouver B.C., traveling a similar route as we are sleeps in her bedroom and Tanya sleeps on a mat on the floor in the tiny kitchen–her guests supplant or probably exceed her income.

Our first foray into downtown Moscow is quite an adventure…we can’t read the Cyrillic words on the walls of the underground so we look closely at the first three letters…and even then ended up nowhere near where we wanted to go…so reasoning that if we just get back on the train going the way we came from we could start out again where we started out before. But of course there was no way this was going to work in Moscow. What started out to be a 30 minute trip ended up being 2 hours. All we could think of the whole time in the underground was the old MTA song by the Kingston Trio:

Well, let me tell you of the story of a man named [Bobby}
On a tragic and fateful day.
He put ten roubles in his pocket, took his family,
Went to ride on the M. T. A.

Well, did he ever return?
No, he never returned and his fate is still unknown.
(What a pity! Poor ole [Bobby.} Shame and scandal. He may ride forever. Just like Lenin and Trotsky.
He may ride forever ‘neath the streets of Moscow.
He [could have been] the man who never returned…

Forest Mushrooms and Vodka

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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The night before we leave St. Petersburg, Elena and her childhood friend, Dula, breathlessly excited, bring home bags and boxes of forest mushrooms. Bob and I haven’t eaten and we hope the noises coming from the kitchen mean we will be invited to join them for a meal.

Finally, Elena knocks on the door saying “10 minutes! 10 minutes…come!” When Elena says “I must go out first, I smell a rat and grab my purse to join her. “I am buying the vodka,” I insist, glad I had my wits about me on this one at least! The four of us sit down to the little table set with her best for a wonderful meal of musky black mushrooms stewed with potatoes and “grass” salad…toasting with Vodka, (Bob with water because he doesn’t like the taste of alcohol) every few minutes. Bob and I gratefully hit the sack, leaving the two to themselves to finish off the bottle late into the night.

Our last night in St. Petersburg, we invite Elena and Dula to their favorite restaurant (an inexpensive one we never would have found ourselves) for Shashlik of beef, pork and lamb, eggplant appetizers, “grass” salad with tomatoes, cheese, olives and cucumbers, “beautiful water with gas from the Caucasus mountains” and more vodka…all the while entertained by a resident karaoke singer singing traditional Russian songs and served by a lovely man who treats us all like extended family.

Afterward we buy Elena a bottle of Tequila and she gives me a knit neck scarf and a Russian nesting doll. Dula gives me a little bag of mushrooms she dried herself. We all hug and reluctantly leave for a midnight overnight train that will arrive at 8am in Moscow.

St. Petersburg Homestay

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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A Homestay has been arranged for us by our tour company, White Knights, with Elena who lives in (and owns) a 3 room very cluttered flat four flights up in a poorly maintained government building in the heart of St. Petersburg. The muddy alleyway leading to the door of the building is stewn with garbage and open manholes with rats…the chipped stairs, plaster peeling off the filthy walls, broken windows and a smell like damp cat litter in the air testament to the lack of resources and care. It’s a typical apartment house.

“We pay good money to the government for upkeep of the building, she says, but they do nothing!” Elena is a dear and makes sure we are comfortable in our room with two single beds…thin pieces of foam on cheap frames. Elena lives alone…she gets her married daughter who speaks English on the phone to make sure we have all our questions answered and who tells us she will be meeting a student at the apartment the next day to give him an English lesson. He tells us he is an ice skater who will be competing internationally and that he “must have English.”

Elena, who is a retired mathematics teacher only gets $17 a month retirement. She goes to work each day but it is not exactly clear what she does. Most nights she stays with her daughter or comes in very late.

She opens the small refrigerator and shows us eggs and bread we can use to make our breakfast each morning. There is virtually no other food in the tiny kitchen except some wonderful cherry jam and coffee and tea. I don’t think she means for us to eat very much. She shows us how to use the pitcher water purifier which we use to make coffee for ourselves in a small French coffee press she has on her counter.

That evening we find a neighborhood cafe where I nostalgically enjoy “lamb cooked with bones” and Lagman Soup (mutton stew with noodles) just like we had on a trek in the mountains of Khrgystan several years ago.

Bob’s Thai Village Visit

Posted on by Laughingnomad

While Jana and I were playing with Chinese teenagers in Ruili in the south of Yunnan, Bob spent some time in an ethnic village in the mountains in Issan Province southeast of Chiang Mai in Thailand. The people were Thai but smaller and darker…probably with a Lao or Cambodian background… and were very concerned about getting too much sun because darker skin color is discriminated against by other Thais.

Bob said he learned something about Thai culture from the people in this village when he hired a pick-up to take him to a Khmer wat (temple) high in the mountains…only to realize that nearly the entire village was going along when he saw them all piling into the back. And of course before the day was over when they all got hungry he was expected to buy the food! After a couple days feeling like he had been gouged, as he puts it, he discovered that it is the custom for the person with the most wealth and social rank (and foreigners are often perceived to be in this category since they have enough money to travel) to foot the bill.

Relationships in Thailand are governed by connections between the phuu yai (big person) and phuu nawy (little person). Ranking is defined by things like age, wealth, status and personal and political power. The phuu nawy is supposed to defer to the phuu yai and show obedience and respect. So Bob got to ride in the front seat of the pick-up but in turn he had to pay for the pick-up and the dinner. While eating dinner (three barbequed chickens and several spicy papaya salads) he received the choicest portions and they wouldn’t let him sit on the ground but gave him a prime position on the mat. The idea is that whatever wealth you come into is to be shared with the less fortunate and this especially applies to friends and family.

The school aged kids just stared at Bob…considering him a novelty…the little ones were frightened as they often are told by their mothers that if they don’t behave they will be eaten by a farang, a semi-derogatory term for a Western foreigner!

One of the villagers was an elderly blind woman in her 80’s who had never seen a farang so she wanted to feel Bob with her hands. She felt the hair on his arms and, touching each of his fingers and exclaimed, astonished, that the “farang hand was just like the Thai hand”…which cracked up all the bystanders. Bob had no idea what was going on until someone translated. He was very touched by her discovery that a farang was not a monster.

The next day Bob had an encounter with Thai justice when he was stopped on his rented motocycle by a police barricade. Apparently the motorbike license had expired. Three hours later and 500 baht poorer, the key to the motorbike was returned and he was allowed to go on his way.

After a few days kayaking and biking on Koh Chang, an island in the south of Thailand, Bob spent Christmas and the next day on a bus back to Chiang Mai. There he picked up a plane for the short hop back to Kunming, China and met Jana and me at the Camellia Hotel.