CHINA

We had time off from school for the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China and the Mid-Autumn Festival. So, I went with three friends to the northwest of Yunnan, the province Kunming is in. The first city we went to was Tengchong, directly west of Kunming, almost to the Burmese border. We then took buses north along the border, and along the Nujiang (Nu River). It was a pretty great trip, and I feel like I got to see a different side of China from the major cities I have seen in the past. I kept a journal, which I have transcribed below, organized by day. I didn't edit for those of you who wanted a more complete picture, so skimming is encouraged (the most interesting part of the trip is probably "MONDAY," I think). Also, I have pictures up, even though I can't edit or organize them.

WEDNESDAY
Ilaria and I left our apartment at around 6:30pm (that’s 18:30, for all of you running on “military time” like the rest of the world) to take a city bus to the bus station. It was the start of the vacation week – the next day would be the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic, and then two days later would be the Moon Festival. Most people were not working or going to school, and many of those were visiting their families or taking the opportunity to travel. Anyway, it took watching four completely packed busses going past us before we made it on one. When we realized we were not on the right bus, we had to get off and start the process over. So the beginning of our travels was already off to a hectic start. When we finally got to the bus station, we couldn’t even enter the gate. It was completely packed with people, who were so crammed together you wouldn’t have been able to wriggle your way through if you tried. The crowd finally started to move a little, and we made our way in. At the security checkpoint, we didn’t even bother to wait in the crowd of people who I guess you could say were lined up to go through the metal detectors. We just walked past through another set of doors, and nobody seemed to care in the slightest. It was reassuring about the state of security on long-distance buses. Now, at this point, we were faced with having to find a gate. No such thing was to be found. In the back of the station, outside, were lines of buses, which really could be more accurately described as a crowd of over a hundred busses all crammed into a parking lot. It took us forever to locate ours. It required making a new friend who then bugged us the entire time we were waiting to leave about giving him some foreign currency “to remember us by” and about when our other two friends would get there. At one point he accosted a pair of blond, western looking guys with bikes, hoping they were our missing Thai and Italian female travel companions (we actually ran into these two bikers later in our travels – the foreigner community in Kunming is pretty small and compact). Our bus was scheduled to leave at 8:20. Around 9:00, our bus emerged from the bevy of busses we were standing amongst. At around 9:30, the bus driver turned the car on and started to inch his way out f the station. It took about 15 minutes to do so, and then another 10 to make it out onto the street due to the rush hour traffic. And that was how we joined the throngs of people going home or on vacation for this major holiday week.
The bus was a sleeper bus, so not your average seats. Rather, there were about 40 short, narrow beds stacked two high and in three rows up and down the bus. It was a sight. And an experience, feeling nearly immobile in my narrow bunk, which in the middle and top of the bus made me feel like a was in a canoe as we bumped down the highway.
Actually, the first 9 or so hours were relatively smooth. We were on a major road which went until the city of Baoshan, which is directly west from Kunming. Somewhere around Baoshan, I woke up when the bus was stopped. The polic came on and looked at everyone’s ID’s. They took our passports off the bus, but came back after a few minutes and there didn’t seem to be any trouble. We started going again, but this time it was on a different road. Most of the time it felt like we were flying downhill, but I think it was just because we were on a windy, bumpy road. We arrived in Tengchong around 7:45am, at least an hour or two before we were supposed to have gotten there.

THURSDAY
We checked into our hostel when we got into Tengchong, found some steamed, filled buns (baozi), and talked to the people at the front desk about getting a driver to take us to a the Peach Blossom Park. The driver showed up with her two sons, who looked about 5 and 8 years old. She explained that they were sick and so had to come along. I wasn’t really sure why, since it was a national holiday so they should not have had school anyway, but they were very cute and spent the ride like a couple of puppies bounding around on the front passenger seat together. It was kind of like stories of 1950’s America or something. Anyway, we bounced our way up a one lane cobblestone “highway” through the mountains in our “mianbaoche,” which literally means “bread loaf car” because minivans do kind of look like loaves of bread, don’t they? The scenery was absolutely beautiful. We passed bright green-yellow terraced fields of grains and tiny haystacks all lined up, donkeys and cows just standing about in the fields, workers carrying baskets on poles across their shoulders, every once in a while a cluster of buildings that could have been built a century ago, and the hills and mountains everywhere in sight. We paused for the older son to throw up out the window, which I didn’t particularly blame him for given all the bouncing. I think it would have been a scary ride, but knowing our driver’s sons were in the car with us kind of made me feel a little safer about her driving as we flew around bends on this narrow road – and luckily we only came across a few other vehicles, a couple motorbikes, some other mianbaoche, and a small logging truck.
The park was great. Like most (at least that I’ve seen) nature/tourist spots in China, there were mostly stairs that wound through the mountainside. There were hot springs, where the water is naturally hot-tub warm. So, they had constructed shallow swimming pools to bath/swim in. They were very pretty, and set amidst the gorgeous scenery of the mountain, along the way of a small path covered by tropical trees and even a waterfall overlooking one. So, we swam a bit in one on our way back. The path kept going, though, past the springs, past a rickety, swaying bridge over a gorge that we did NOT walk over, to the river, where we looked across to a dam, and the water rushing over giant boulders. Looking downriver, you could see the water winding between the mountains, which sloped up on either side. Elena, the Italian classmate with us, went across the river on a zip-line, but the rest of us were too scared. It seemed like it would have been pretty exhilarating, though, and she seemed to have fun. At this point, there were several huts, with people waiting around to help the occasional tourist fly across the zip-line, or to sell them water and snacks. There was even a donkey waiting in the blazing sun to carry your stuff for you.
When we got back to the entrance to the park, we got some snacks – sweet lemon water and strips of a very firm, almost chewy kind of tofu covered in spices and oils. I have had similar dishes around Yunnan and Kunming, and they are pretty tasty. Then, we headed back down the cobblestone highway on our way to some hot sulfer springs. We arrived at what really seemed more like a spa than a national nature reserve park. In fact, the spa there is probably actually the main attraction. But we bypassed it and headed into the park.
Apparently, the springs were discovered and started to be developed during the Ming dynasty. They are naturally boiling, though about 90ºC (high altitude reduces boiling point possibly? Van? Anyone?). The park was mostly stairs (shock) and patios where each spring bubbled up, usually into cement pools. A small river ran along as well, with a geyser next to it. It was all pretty crazy, especially the parts where you could see the water bubbling up in little puddles in the dirt at your feet. The ground was very warm, and we had been walking all day after not getting much sleep the night before. So we were ready for dinner and bed, but then one of the hotel receptionists came along with a surprise activity. He took us to a kind of lodge-style restaurant in the same square as our hotel. There was a raised stage in the middle of a big open room and the audience sat at long tables around the stage, most still picking at food on their tables. One of the local minority groups was putting on a concert. The performers wore traditional dress and did dances and sang popular Chinese songs. Even I recognized most of the songs. It was a pretty bizarre experience, actually, not really culturally informative or enlightening in the way one might expect when hearing of a concert put on by a minority group to celebrate their culture. It was more like a camp talent show, but everyone was wearing traditional costume. At one point, the announcer brought up a member of the audience and had two of the female performers sit on his lap and feed him bowls of liquor. I think that was the most awkward part, actually. We returned to the hostel and had a very good night’s sleep.

FRIDAY
This morning we woke up and one of the hotel workers helped us find a bus to take us about 40 minutes north of Tengchong to see the volcanoes! Actually, the have been dormant for years. They are monitored, though, and could become active again some day. They don’t seem to be doing anything anytime soon, though. There were three volcanoes in a row at the park we went to, and they are kind of more impressive from afar. They look like sudden hills with flat tops. At the summit, there is a crater, as though someone inverted a regular hilltop. Now, they are completely covered with trees (except for the ever-present stairs), and you would barely be able to know they were volcanoes if it were not for the sunken tops and occasional patch of volcanic rock, most of which seems to have been dug up, though, to make the stone paths and 50,000 of the same carved trinket sold to tourists. We were probable they only non-Chinese people there, but everyone was there on vacation, from somewhere else. Our picture was taken by some of the tourists at several points along our ascent. They did not seem to care that we were pouring sweat and getting burned under the bright sun. Although the park was not tremendously exciting, it was still pretty cool knowing I was on a volcano. These are big things for a city-girl.

SATURDAY
On the bus from Tengchong to Liuku. Award for best cell phone ring tone goes to the man in the fake New York Knicks jersey and camo pants with the ringtone of “I’m a Barbie Girl” (which of course starts from the very beginning of the song). As we go north, the yellow grain fields stop, giving way to more green, and we pass banana orchards every once in a while. Winding our way, mostly alongside the rivers, we make frequent stops to pick up and drop off passengers. We com across water buffalo cows every once in a while and have to slow down as they herd themselves over to one side of the road. Several herds of goats are walking down the street as well. At one point, we stopped for almost an hour in a long line of cars because the road was out. The valley is a lush green, and I found myself pressed to the window to watch the mountains pass by along the river. We are stopped at three police checkpoints. They’re always interested in our foreign passports and laugh at the student ID’s we have found are easier to immediately give alongside our passports, knowing they’ll grill us about why we are in the country. They are also interested in the contents our the large bags our fellow passengers are carrying, which mostly contain fruit, nuts and other commodities. The police seem more interested in scaring people than actually checking their belongings, though.
Liuku is an incredibly ugly cement town set in a one of the most beautiful valleys, right on, and practically over, the river. There is nothing to see in this town, though. People come here passing through to go somewhere else – it’s a tourist town with no attractions.
Walking along the street, it is clear that people in this city are still excited by foreigners. Everywhere, people are yelling hello at us. Our best interaction, I will warn you, contains an expletive, that I feel is better to leave in the retelling for the sake of accuracy. As we are walking down the street, a man yells to us,
“Hello!” we do not respond. He goes one with,
“How are you!” Followed by,
“Welcome!” Then, exhausting his English vocabulary, apparently,
“Fuck you!” all very cheerfully…

SUNDAY
Three hour bus ride from Liuku to Fugong in the morning. We were stopped once to have our temperatures taken alongside the Nujiang and surrounded by mountains. It was raining at first. The only thing I can compare this road to is Highway 1, but with the river instead of the Pacific Ocean, and the mountains right across. We’ve come across very small towns, some just even a few old houses, some slightly bigger, but all pretty ugly architecture – the worst are the clusters of cinder block apartment buildings set right in the mountains overlooking the river. Very strange. Fugong is pretty uninteresting. We ate lunch (fried rice, cabbage, potatoes, and were also given soup that had some kind of tea or mushroom that tasted smoky, lots of cilantro, and a chili pepper. It tasted like a medicinal tea at first and then afterwards my lips were tingling from the chili pepper.) One of the guys working had a tattoo that I at first thought was a swastika, and then remembered we are very near Tibet, if not in a Tibetan territory according to some lines of thought. Lots of people, men and women, have tattoos on their forearms – usually a character or two or a small design, but sometimes many designs or more complicated ones. After lunch, we desided to get on a bus and keep going north, to Gongshan. Along the roads, people in minority dress are walking around the small towns, or just down the highway. I don’t think they are getting their picture taken by tourists, seeing as they are in the middle of nowhere. It’s all very lush and green. We have passed a couple of churches – there is a relatively large Christian population in this area, alongside Buddhism and local religious practices. Every once in a while, rivers and waterfalls are coming down the mountain, flowing into the river. Power plants have been built on some. The terraced fields are everywhere, and some of the houses have corn drying under the eaves, or on racks. There is not as much corn as in Tengchong, though, where bright yellow corn hung up on the eaves and over the railings of almost every house or barn.
One thing I have noticed throughout our trip is that in most of the cars or busses I have ridden in have colored paper folded up into strips and taped to the front inside roof in crosses, parallel lines, or other designs. I still don’t know their significance, though.
On the bus from Fugong to Gongshan, it is more developed, with more 70’s style cement buildings in the towns. The street started to get narrower, though, and we started pausing more to squeeze by on-coming cars. We were stopped once at a police checkpoint, but no ID’s were checked. A layman just came on and took everyone’s temperatures.
We got to Gongshan shortly before dark and started to look around for a hotel but then immediately left for Bingzhongluo, an hour bus-ride north of Gongshan. The road was very windy. The man sitting next to me talked. He was Baixu, from the area. When I remarked that it was very beautiful, he responded that yes, it was, but the road is very dangerous. The he continued to scare me by saying we would not be able to find a room so late (it was already getting dark). He contacted his friend about rooms for us. However, when we got into town, we saw the hotel we had wanted to stay at right across from where we had been let off, and we got a room there pretty easily. We went to the restaurant across the street from the hotel and ate dinner with a guy from Hebei (near Beijing), who we had met on the bus from Gongshan. We were then befriended by some people from Kunming sitting next to us in the small restaurant. They started drinking with us, so of course the men got drunk, and we weren’t much better off, but they agreed to meet us at 8 the next morning to go to a small neighboring village.

MONDAY
At 8 am we went to the restaurant, but only our friend from the bus was to be found. We ate noddles and then one of our other new friends showed up and told us they drank too much the night before so wouldn’t go to the village, but gave us directions. We set out in a “bread-loaf car” which wound around the gorge and across a suspension bridge until it couldn’t take us any closer to the village on the road. We started walking on a narrow path that in most places was basically just a hole blasted through the rock in the side of the cliff. It was amazingly beautiful, and pretty dramatic landscape – mountains, cliffs, river, rapids, rocks, forest – it’s got it all.
We got to the village, crossed a small bridge over a stream (a pretty wide, rapid stream) that was powering a grain mill, inside of which a woman was grinding cornmeal. It seems to be just after the harvest time, so the drying corn is just starting to be ready to be ground. The people mostly just seemed to be sitting around, as well, drinking baijiu (liquor). We went into a couple houses and talked with people, and we went to a Lisuzu ceremony that we think was probably a funeral.

This village, Wuli, was the most interesting part of the trip. We were there with our new Chinese friend who was from the north. When we got to the town, he got us to all knock on someone’s door to see if we could come in and chat. The first house we went to, the people did not seem too receptive, but welcomed us inside. Their house was basically a log cabin type building up on stilts, like the other houses. It had two rooms, but we only saw one of them. It was pretty dark, there was one small window from which you could see the river down below, after the fields. Then, there was a hole in the ceiling through which smoke from the fire in the middle of the room could escape. The hole was protected from the elements by the roof above. From outside of the house, you could see corn drying in the open space between the roof and the ceiling.
There were about eight people sitting around the fire when we entered. Some of them came and went while we were sitting. They didn’t seem to be doing too much, just sitting around, while the mother of the house tended the fire, on top of which was a large pot filled with what we soon discovered was clear liquor, in which she was cleaning or sterilizing bowls and chopsticks, and boiling smaller pots of food. We went to two other houses as well, and most people seemed to just be sitting around, coming in to visit, and drinking. The harvest seemed to be over, and now people seemed to just be waiting to grind down the drying corn. I felt pretty awkward at first, sitting there in this house we had just invited ourselves into. It seems to be a common practice, though. The people in it gradually started warming to the questions our friend from northern China was asking him. They told us about the school, how not very many people were in it, and about how not many people went to school after middle school. Some houses had electricity, which was evident from the few satellite dishes sitting next to the animal pens under the houses. The electricity often did not work, though, but we couldn’t really figure out the reason they gave for this. Most houses did not have electricity anyway, though.
The man answering most of our questions told us that he was divorced, his wife had left him. Divorce is not something you hear about often in China, and most people don’t exactly look at it warmly. However, in some of the minority cultures, especially in Southern China, it is often more acceptable. This man’s wife had left to go to a city, where she was probably now married to another man, we gathered. She had left their two daughters behind, and now the man’s parents helped him to raise them. Another woman sitting in the house told us about how her daughter had moved to a city in the north to marry. We met another man later who had come from Lijiang, a town a little to the east in Yunnan. He had come to marry a woman who was from Wuli. However, she left him because she no longer wanted to live in Wuli, and was now probably also married to another man in a city somewhere. Their son now lived in Lijiang with the man’s parents. He did not want him growing up in this town, but he also did not want to leave it. He said that when he was older and had money, he might go back to Lijiang, but for now he would stay in Wuli. We were told that it was common for people to come to the town to bring women away to more developed areas to marry awaiting men.
The man from Lijiang took us to a house where he said we could see a Lisu ceremony. The night before, a man had fallen into the gorge. It was not clear whether he was a tourist or from the village, but the ceremony, the man told us, was because someone had died. We entered another dimly lit room, with a small fire in the middle. Some older people were sitting around, chatting a bit while listening to a younger man who knelt in one corner, chanting in front of a table with incense and some other items on it. A pig head was on the floor next to him. His chant was very emotional, and some of the people seemed very serious, but most seemed pretty cheerful, as they sat around chatting. Our northern friend quickly became very uncomfortable, and said that it was not right for us to be there and left. We stuck around a little while longer, to see the chanter give a man the pig head, telling him to bring it outside. He stopped chanting, and we decided we should leave, too. Outside, more people were gathering, mostly men. They sat around, all pretty cheerful, just chatting. Then a group of men brought out a pig which they held down and slaughtered. We left as they were starting to prepare its body to be cooked, bathing it and shaving off the hair. I was glad we left when we did, because as we were walking down the path to leave the village, we saw some men leading a cow up toward the ceremony, and although sacrificing a cow is usually a pretty big deal, I have a feeling this one was next.

When we got back to Bingzhongluo, it was already late afternoon, so we got lunch at our restaurant and then walked south down the road, in the drizzling rain, to see the bend in the river. This bend is very famous, you see pictures of it all over the valley and the rest of Yunnan.

TUESDAY
Woke up early, ate noodles at the restaurant and then caught a bus to Fugong. It was cloudy, but the ride was still beautiful. At noon, we arrived in Fugong and walked around for a bit, taking in the boring buildings. The rest of the way to Liuku was uneventful, not even any police checks. In Liuku, we played pool on the street. The best point was when one of us scratched and an on-looking woman laughed loudly. As we got on the bus, they checked our temperatures along with our tickets. Just as we got outside of the city, the police checked our ID’s. Then we just sat back in our tiny bunks for the rest of the night on the long ride back to Kunming, until we arrived early the next morning.

written by

agentsarainkunming on October 18, 2009 from Tengchong, China

from the travel blog: CHINA

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