Yunnan

What We Miss About Home

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I have been asked about this so here it is: After nearly a year, the thing I miss the most about living in the States is EFFICIENCY.

Everywhere in the world there seems to be a right and wrong way to do everything and pity the poor soul who tries to find a better or different or more creative way of doing something. There seems to be no flexibility and over time the forced conformity would likely drive me nuts! You just have to surrender..

And the other thing I miss is seeing my kids! Other than that I am not missing anything other than my own home brewed coffee with my own ground coffee beans, even though I am beginning to like instant Nescafe coffee which I thought would never happen.

Conversations In Tiger Leaping Gorge

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Wednesday Dec 11
In Old Town Lijiang, Bob joined us for breakfast at our hotel at 9am; met Li at her hotel at 10:30 for minibus trip up the gorge. Bus had no shocks so was a very bumpy miserable ride; Bob uncomfortable on narrow road overlooking the gorge. Drove all the way to Walnut Grove, which is the beginning of the Gorge and had lunch there before the trip back…everyone else but the driver and I got out and walked a couple stretches. Caught the driver rummaging through our stuff couple times while waiting for the walkers. Later Bob said that Li had warned him not to leave money in the bus while they walked.

Talked to a young French walker on his way through to Walnut Grove…he had been working for six months in a L’Oreal factory near Shanghai in order to learn Chinese. I asked him about a working visa…said he thought he was on tourist visa…his supervisors obviously paying off the immigration officials to allow him with his engineering background to work in the factory. His Chinese was great though!

On the way back, Li told us a few things about the minority people…that for the Naxi the Snow mountain is God…that when couples divorce the woman is no longer desirable by other men but that if her husband dies she is desireable. Marriages are popular in the winter.

For the Yi people, the sun is God so they live on the top of the mountains near the Sun God…but they are lazy and when they get money they drink alcohol. There are 30,000 Naxi people in Lijiang.

She went on to say that the government is poor but the leaders get all the money from tourism. The sons of the leaders get to go to school in your country, she said. Almost all the businesses in Old Lijiang are run by the Han Chinese she said…the Naxi are able only to rent out a room or two in their homes. The Naxi also drive the taxis.

Thursday Dec 12
Sakura was trying to heat up the restaurant with a charcoal burner but it produced so much smoke we had breakfast across the canal while listening to Blues Music in the Delta Cafe.

Later, Jana and I went to Sakura’s Bar and…partnerless…watched “American Sweethearts.” A group of very loud Chinese tourists came upstairs where we were watching the movie…we had to turn up the TV to earsplitting volume in order to hear. Seems to be a trait…talking in movies, concerts…any public entertainment venues…

Friday Dec 13-14
Bob took a bus to Kunming and then flew to Chiang Mai Thailand.

Pissing Match In China

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When Bob took a box of purchases to the Old Lijiang post office they asked him to take everything out one by one. This had not happened when we sent boxes from China before. Bob had spent a lot of time carefully packing many fragile items, so, frustrated, he asked them to take the things out since they were the ones that wanted to see the items…a mistake. Then they told him to put them all back in, which he carefully did…but in a huff….another mistake.
Then they told him the box would have to go to the Customs office and they would also take the items out. This concerned Bob because how were we to know some things would not be taken out of the box-and why did the box have to be searched twice? Never question. When Bob told the clerk these things she went to get her supervisor who then told Bob he would have to take the box to the Customs office himself. Bob figured this was a punishment for questioning the clerks. In the meantime I had filled out a form and as we picked up the box to leave, the supervisor wanted 3 yuan for the form. Bob told them that the form was not needed anymore so he gave it back to her and we left. Bob finally walked to the main post office in new town to mail the box home…with no trouble and no more searching. Want power…be a bureaucrat in China!

Echo & Li…Competitors

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Monday Dec 9 2002
In Old Town Lijiang, we are woken up by a knock at the hotel door at 8am. Two couples from Taiwan were on their way to Zhondian with a driver and wanted to know how we found the city. Then we breakfasted at Sakura Cafe.

Later, we moved to Mr. Yang’s Inn, a brand new beautiful guesthouse right on the canal where, playing with Fifi, his Lijiang dog and Debu, a pure white 3 month old Beijing puppy, we saw a large group of young people with chef’s hats on walking through the streets…we followed them until they ended up at an orphanage with children whose parents (600 people) did not survive the 1996 earthquake and more than 16,000 people were injured. Turns out we had happened onto a celebration.

On the way we passed a group of men building a traditional Naxi structure…with pegs…no nails. They had a roast pig on the spit…a traditional way to celebrate the birth of a new building, we are told.

Dinner at Sakuras…a western hang-out…guy at table next to us was from Eugene. I said we made a big mistake going home in February! He laughed and said he wasn’t going home until spring to avoid the Oregon winter.

Bob arrived in Lijiang from Dali by 1pm on bus but we didn’t connect. We were communicating via email; he told me to meet him the next day at noon in the Square. Bob couldn’t follow my directions to our hotel so he got one of his own in a Naxi Family House for Y80 or about $10 per night; tiny but very clean with 24-hour hot water.

In the meantime, Jana had gone to one internet cafe and I had gone to another at Sekura’s because there was no room for me. Thirsty, I drank a 40 oz beer while answering email…and feeling quite good, I emailed Jana and told her she should join me in another beer. Later she told me she laughed out loud reading my email.

Tuesday Dec 10
Breakfast in the cold courtyard of our hotel…Naxi fried bread with chives, rice porridge with pork, steamed bun, eggs, stir fried cabbage and coffee. I worked on my journal sitting in my heated bed while Jana washed her hair.

Later, Jana and I ran into Echo and invited her to eat with us…meeting Bob in the town square. Jana and I didn’t know it, but Bob had arranged for us to meet with Li, a Naxi minority woman Bob had hired to take us to the gorge the next day and to take us to a Naxi music concert after dinner. Echo, a city-bred Chinese Han from Beijing, bristled when Li walked up to our table in the restaurant. Li tried to talk Bob and I into watching a Chinese play instead of listening to Naxi music…the previous client of hers from Illinois liked the play much better than the music, she said! Echo, whispering in my ear, insisted she just wanted the higher commission on the play but we persisted in getting to listen to the music. I would find out later that Han Chinese look down on the ethnic minorities…feeling very superior to them. And Echo was horning in on one of the few jobs Naxi people can get that isn’t scut work…as tour guides.

Then there was a mixup on the seats at the concert…some Chinese patrons made us get up and give our seats to them…then Bob questioned whether we actually had Y50 seats…so Li offered for us to move up to the front. But as the concert had already started and we didn’t want to disturb the others, we declined.

Don’t know why we bothered with the consideration…others were coming and going and talking out loud with each other as they pleased during the whole concert.

Naxi Old Town-Lijiang

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Lijiang has been designated a World Cultural Heritage Site by the United Nations. There are two kinds of Naxi dwellings built with wood, clay tiles, earth bricks and hard work…one is a courtyard enclosed by three dwellings and a wall and the other a courtyard enclosed by four buildings with a courtyard on each corner. If one story there will be three rooms….if two story there will be six rooms. The center room is used as a living room and the two side rooms are reserved as bedrooms for the elderly of the family. We watched the construction of one of these houses on a side street…after the pieces were laid out on the ground the villagers all came together for the house raising with ropes and manpower…the pieces being fitted together without the use of nails. We understand that after this the workers throw down candy and money and firecrackers are set off…then all work stops and the villagers share a meal together.

Just as the blood circulates through the human body, says the text on the back of the Lijiang map, so does the water, that originates just north of Lijiang from the springs at Black Dragon Pool, that runs through the Old Town. There are three main arteries of water that divide into succeding other arteries and veins that have been channeled by vertical concrete banks….the pebbled bottom visible through the crystal clear water. Restaurants, cafes and shops charmingly line these canals and the bridges over them.

On each trip to the center of town, the Square Market, we passed one of the many three-pit wells of the town. Granite walls separate the spring water into three separate picture perfect pits…the first used strictly for drinking water, the second for washing vegetables…the third for washing clothes. When the night falls, the local Naxi residents spontaneously gather for a circle dance around a bonfire…the Alili Dance that a woman pulled me into but was never able to master.

The town’s reconstruction after the earthquake coupled with the construction of a new airport has brought in an influx of Han Chinese entrepreneurs running tourist shops and restaurants for Han tourists that are pushing out the Naxi stalls. What used to be the preserve of hardy backpackers, Lonely Planet says, is now a major tourist destination for Han Chinese who only since the end of the Cultural Revolution have had an opportunity to travel the far reaches of their own country.

Lijiang & The Naxi People

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Once in Lijiang, we dumped our luggage at the Shangira Hotel (Y80 or about $10 for a double) that was recommended by Echo. I suspect she was getting a kickback for sending tourists there because it wasn’t anything special. Old Town Lijiang is charming and geared for Western tourists, which, after roughing it for a week was pretty OK with us…in fact I could have spent several weeks here…easy.

The Old Town of Lijiang, which an UNESCO World Heritage Site, is perfectly adapted to the uneven topography of this key commercial and strategic site, has retained a historic townscape of high quality and authenticity. Its architecture is noteworthy for the blending of elements from several cultures that have come together over many centuries. Lijiang also possesses an ancient water-supply system of great complexity and ingenuity that still functions effectively today.
We ate dinner at the Blue Papaya Italian Restaurant. There were two girls at the table next to us that were deep in conversation all through dinner; we wondered how they knew each other and what they were talking about…still sitting there when we left…

Sunday Dec 8
While eating breakfast on the street, I bartered with a Naxi woman for a bracelet…she asked Y250 I responded with 50 and we ended up at Y150. She recognized my earrings from Sapa Vietnam and gave me a thumbs up.

The internet terminals seemed to be divided up into one per cafe so I used the internet at Sakuras while Jana went to another cafe. I drank a 16 ounce Dali beer for Y6 or less than a dollar and emailed Jana at the next cafe that I was higher than a kite. She said she laughed out loud when she read it.

A guy from Canada and a guy from Texas were working at Sakura �s to help out the Chinese waitresses with the English speaking clientele…I said, hey you are from Canada…you’re supposed to be saying…and he finished my sentence…”aboot” and we laughed. And we said the guy from Texas was supposed to be talking in a drawl like a Texan…and he laughed too.

In the town square, Jana sat down to visit with a girl from Denmark while I listened to Naxi people chanting and singing under the trees.

We ate dinner at comfortable and cozy Sakuras that is owned by a Chinese/Korean couple…I had Hot Pot Naxi Noodles and Jana had Curry Beef Fried Rice. Later in the evening we met with Echo at our hotel…she shared her information about the matriarcal minority group that lives on Luku Lake east of Lijian and urged us to join her the next morning for the six hour bus ride there. We were still tired from our travels the week before so we declined. It is usually the guys who like going there as there is no such thing as marriage in the group and at the evening dances the girl invites her chosen man to come home with her by gently scratching the inside of his palm as she holds his hand. Children seldom know who their fathers are.

When I am back home and think about China, instead of remembering the Cultural Revolution and Tianenman Square I hope I remember the wonderful Naxi people I met here.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

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China’s greatest river, known by Westerners as the Yangtse, is called Jinsha Jiang by the Chinese. It’s origin is in Tibet and runs through Tiger Leaping Gorge near Lijiang, east to Chongqing, on through the Three Gorges and Wuhan and then dumps into the South China sea at Shanghai.

At the small town of Shigu the river takes a turn at what is called the “First Bend” and runs from south to north. It is on this stretch of the river that Tiger Leaping Gorge surges through one of the deepest gorges in the world…the entire gorge measuring 16 km and 3900 meters or about 11,700 feet, from the water to the snowcapped mountains of Haba on one side and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain on the other.

The entire gorge can be hiked in two days over narrow trails high above the water with modest guesthouses along the way for overnight stays.

We agree that it is difficult to compare Tiger Leaping with the Grand Canyon…the snow capped mountains on each side of Tiger very deep and beautiful….but the sheer granite walls dropping to the water of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon much more dramatic.

We are happy to report that we survived the incredibly dangerous road trip, the way the coyboy driver was driving, along the curvy narrow one-lane road full of rocks that had fallen from the cliffs alongside the River all the way to the end of the Leaping Tiger Gorge that finally ended at the small town of Qiaotou. During a ten minute break there, Jana bought a bowl of delicious vegetables and rice and paid Y2 for the bowl so she could take it on the bus with her. Then the bus turned east toward Lijaing through a beautiful yellow-leafed forest that reminded us of home in the fall.

Zhondian aka Shangri-La

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Bob took a flight south from Kunming to Mangshi and then on by bus to Ruili near the Burma border.

Jana and I left Kunming on a Yunnan Airlines flight to the village of Zhongdian, a mainly Tibetan town near the Tibet border. The view of the sun glinting off the snow-capped 13 peaks of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Range out of the plane window on the way to Zhongdian was breathtaking. The highest peak is 5596 meters and runs 35km from north to south and 12 km from east to west. Zhongdian, 198 km north of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, at 3200 meters high, marks the start of the Tibetan world.

Jana and I took a cold taxi ride to the unheated Tibet Hotel and booked a $2 double room on the second floor with squat toilets next door. We dumped our luggage and went to the freezing cold hotel coffee shop across the parking lot for breakfast. A young Western couple came in about 15 minutes after we had ordered. We waited about 45 minutes and finally asked the waitress where our food was. After much back and forthing it was finally determined that our breakfast had been served to and eaten by the young couple. He was very apologetic but she kept saying to the waitress “well, you brought it to our table!” So we had to reorder and wait again for our food.

Then we warmed up awhile in the sun on the hotel veranda before walking through Zhongdian-buying our regular supply of necessities- toilet paper and water.

We laughed when we came upon a sparsely stocked department store with Santa Claus singing jingle bells inside the front door. We looked for but could not find a towel to buy as the hotel charged 50 cents touse a towel for the hot water shower that is only available from 7pm to11pm.

Any place in the shade was freezing cold but we were warm as long as we were under the sun. We ate a late lunch at the Tibet Cafe where two young Tibetan waitresses were huddled around a charcoal stove. We talked to a youngish German woman with a small child-the only other customer in the cafe-who had been living in Zhongdian and studying tourism. She suggested that instead of going south to Lijiang on the main road, we take the road from Zhongdian to Baishuitai and then on to Lijiang. The road follows the Yangtzse River through Tiger Leaping Gorge. We looked at all the maps and pictures hanging on the walls; read the travelers tip books and laughed at some of the stories-some of them not so nice about the Tibet Hotel. We ate noodles and shared hot Chocolate cake.

Jana went back to the Tibet Hotel to crawl into bed and get warm with the electric hot pad under the bottom sheet while I walked several miles looking for the Gyalthang Dzong Hotel, a US joint-venture hotel, which was nowhere to be found. After a cold day, we spent a cozy evening reading in our warm beds heated by an electric pad under the sheets.

Thursday Dec 5
The next morning we stayed in our warm beds and worked on our journals and read guidebooks. We looked for a heated restaurant for breakfast but found none. Finally we we found the Camel Cafe on the main drag through town where Jana had Banana Oatmeal Porridge with condensed milk and I had the infamous backpacker Banana Pancake with sugar. Now I know why banana pancakes are so popular with young backpackers…with no syrup the bananas make the pancakes a little moist and sweet.

We found the bus station and bought tickets to the Baishuitai limestone plateau. Then we took the Number 3 bus to the Ganden Sumtseling Gompa-a 300 year old Tibetan monastery complex with around 600 monks. The monastery is considered the most important in southwest China.

Jana had been given a crystal by a friend and was asked to bury it as close to Tibet as we could get. So we spent some time out on the hill behind the monastary looking for an appropriate place when we came upon two old men fingering some beads. Jana chose to drop the crystal among some carved rocks under a tree behind the old men while I recorded the event with her camera. Satisfied with mission number two, we made our way through the maze of buildings, back down to the road, visiting with several young monks along the way…taking picture of one looking out a window with his little dog and another on a cell phone.

We ate dinner at a Tibetan style hotel next to the monastary….sliced sauteed (dry cooked) Yak meat, which was delicious, an eggplant and tomato dish and what turned out to be lamb neck bones on curried rice.

In the evening the Tibet Hotel coffee shop was full of smoking Chinese guys so we drank hot lemonade at the Snow Drift Cafe across the street from the Hotel, sat on a couch in front of their charcoal stove and visited with two girls, Phyllis (German but living in Switzerland) and Alex (English but living in the States and attending Ohio State in Columbus) who were on vacation from their MBA exchange program in Shanghai. We exchanged travel tips for awhile and then fell into a conversation about the Chinese economic system or lack therof. I gave them my book, �The Coming Collapse of China� in exchange for some chocolate and Jana heated up a sewing needle with a match so one of the girls could puncture a blister on her foot after her two day trek through Tiger
Leaping Gorge.

At the end of the evening, the cafe dog that had befriended us earlier fell asleep on the couch between Jana and me. We looked at the walls full of pictures of Chinese tourists that the cafe owner had previously led on tours through Tibet. We watched the Tibetan waitress playing with a Chinese puzzle. Then we reluctantly walked back across the street to our cold hotel room.

A stay in this town followed by a bus trip through Baishuitai, along the Tiger Leaping Gorge, to Lijiang would top my list of the ten best places to travel…in good weather.

End of the Burma Road

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Sunday Dec 1-3 2002
Arrived at Kunming from Guilin after 23 hours on the train. We had gained considerable elevation throughout the night. We took a taxi to the Camellia Hotel where we booked a triple room. Driving through the city�s nice clean wide streets in the cool fresh air at high elevation, we were reminded of Denver Colorado.

Jana went to the Kunming Museum. She was given some pictures and documents by a former co-worker that his father had saved from thetime that he worked as an engineer on the Burma Road…the road ended at Kunming and Jana thought there might be a depository of artifacts in the museum. This was the famous 1000km dirt road that was carved out of the mountains from Lashio Burma to Kunming in 1937-38 during WWII with virtually no equipment. It would provide the US forces, in a bid to keep China from falling to Japan, a way of getting supplies into China. Today, Renmin Xilu marks the end of the road in Kunming.

Jana was invited to an inner office to talk to the curator who was very pleased with the addition to the museum collection and of course Jana was extremely pleased that her mission was successful!

At a nearby Pizzeria/used book/cafe for dinner and I found �Behind The Wall,� a travel book about China in the 80�s by the British author Colin Thubron.

Wednesday Dec 4
We feel we have yet to experience local Chinese peasant life…the large cities of Guangshau, Guilin and Kunming are very western cities full of commerce and big upscale hotels and restaurants….all close to the business centers of Hong Kong. We are anxious to get into the countryside. We have seen very few Western tourists-certainly no Americans-but there are many Chinese tourists.

China’s Secrets I Will Never Know

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Major Cities We Visited

“The opening up of China is a stirring idea,” Lonely Planet says. A foreigner traveling alone today is privileged to see more of China than almost any Chinese has seen in his or her lifetime. I wondered what we could learn-traveling alone. Our images and ideas of China have surely been contradictory and distorted over time.

In the years of the Cultural Revolution after 1966 tens of millions of Chinese had become the instruments of their own terror…a million were killed and some 30 million or more were brutally persecuted and displaced or starved to death. How could so many people be so led?

China has a billion and a half people now. And even now cruelty continues…in a book entitled “China’s New Rulers,” the authors recently published some secret Communist Party documents that admitted to 60,000 Chinese killed by police while fleeing between 1998 and 2001…or 15,000 a year. 97% of the world’s executions take place in China, the book says. It is a historic change that China’s people are becoming less and less afraid of the government than it is of them. For example, 54 year old Mrs. Ma wanted her name published when she told about how she was tortured recently in Zhongxiang, near Shanghai, while her son was tortured in the next cell because the Party wanted her to disclose the names of the people in her church or renounce her Christian faith.

China is a big country. In the two months we have left for travel in China, we have chosen to see Yunnan Province in the southwest…the most varied of China’s provinces ranging from tropical rainforest to snow-capped Tibetan peaks. It is home to nearly a third of all China’s ethnic minorities and nearly 50% of all its people are non-Han Chinese.

Historically, Yunnan, in southern China, was always one of the first regions to break with the northern government in Beijing. During China’s countless political purges, fallen officials often found themselves exiled here, which added to the province’s rebellious character…and probably why it has been so attractive to the countless foreign backpackers who blazed the original trails through it.

I wanted to see China for myself…and now that I am here I feel that every individual Chinese I see is harboring a secret I will never know…