Ni hao,
Again, apologies for my long silence. Lately, I've been travelling and the chinese censors don't seem to like blogs much, so I've been unable to access it...right now I'm in a cafe in Kunming having hit upon the idea of writing it in my email and then pasting it in when I get back to my secure connection in beijing. Hope it works..
So...as I'm not allowed to read my own blog, I can't remember exactly when I left you, but i believe it may have been sometime around the end of November. Then followed a fairly unexciting period of finishing essays and taking exams which is far too dull to write about; finished the acupuncture placement and then had four more weeks in the Xiyuan hospital of gynaecology (lots of interesting things on infertility), dermatology (a bit dull), paediatrics (very cute chinese kids) and surgery (not actually surgery!). And before we knew it, it was all over. However in the meantime there was of course a Chinese Christmas to be had - actually I was surprised by how much Beijing had latched onto the idea (in the commercial sense at least) of the holiday- all the supermarkets had decorations and bad songs - not so different from the uk really! My Christmas was spent in style with lunch at a sumptuous buffet at the Raffles hotel, followed by rather a lot of bad chinese wine for the afternoon, eventually falling asleep during charades..true festive style..All in all it was a surprisingly lovely day.
Then on Dec 30th, nursing a hangover from the 'punk band' night at the local rock club, I found myself sitting in a cafe in Wudaokou waiting for - a wandering sister by the name of Faith Arabella Elliott who had by chance happened to board a plane for beijing and find me there. We had of course about six months of talking to catch up on whilst running around searching for warm clothes in the sub-zero beijing temperatures- I had a narrow escape from one paticular silk market vendor, whose coat I rejected after bargaining her down from 3500 yuan to 200 (I decided I didn't actually like it..) - I managed to get away at last with just a few scratch marks on my wrist and insults ringing in my ears...phew. New years eve was spent playing pictionary in a friend's cosy flat and the next week with me rushing around organising, her exploring the city, a weekend of cycling around the hutong districts and mountain walking with the hiking group, strange evenings involving mongolian throat singing and reggae, several farewell meals...and before we knew it we were on a train headed south.
Well it could have been that simple but, alas, nothing ever is in China...the taxi driver misunderstood that we wanted to go to the west railway station and on realising his mistake promptly dumped us by the side of the road...we shouted abuse at each other for a while as we refused to pay him, until with the help of some friendly chinese bystanders we manged to get another driver to take us down the excruciatingly slow 2nd ring road to the station, making it just in time to buy some unappetising food supplies and jump on the 4.50pm to Kunming (Yunnan province, SW China) This is a journey of around 3000km, 37 hours to be precise, and it passed in the usual manner of such journeys, sleeping, eating, reading, staring out of the window at the mistily indistinguishable scenery and so on. It was much like a russian train except more cramped - I'm not sure whether because the tracks are narrower or people are just smaller..we found a restaurant car where you could stretch out a little but they seemed fairly unwilling to let us stay for long or serve anything at all except sweet milky coffee, and every now and again had a visitor to our carriage in the form of a jolly luggage handler who was very keen to practise his english and tell us many enlightening things such as the current state of relationships in the british royal family and the fact that both beethoven and mozart were from manchester! (we didn't have the heart to disillusion him..)
Stumbled out at kunming at 7am, already too hot from the themals we were still wearing, fought off the barrage of cries of 'dali, dali' (a popular tourist town which everybody will oh so kindly get you a ticket for for just a little wad of cash) to the bus station and got our tickets for the 12 bus to Lijiang. I can't tell you much about Kunming apart from the street food is very spicy and tasty - 8 hours of staring through bus windows at green hills later, and we pretty much fell into the starry night of lijiang and into a hostel where we met a comic korean who mimed his adventures in the snow mountain. Lijiang is a strangely wonderful place- it's so incredibly touristy I didn't see how it could be any more so if it tried...(luckily in winter you can avoid most of the hordes..best time to travel in my opinion!)- but at the same time, extraordinarily picturesque and with a relaxed charm coming not just from the cobbled streets, well kept wooden houses, criss-crossing rivers and canals and compulsory ethnic dress, but also from the waterside cafes where teenagers gathered to play folk songs on the guitar and the old Naxi women chatting in doorways. Lijiang is the centre of the Naxi people, a 'minority group' (there are around 26 of these in Yunnan altogether!) who are descended from ethnically Tibetan Qiang tribes, famous for their matriachal culture and the hieroglyphic language (apparently the only one in the world still in use.) I like the description of how the addition of gender alters nouns- for example, stone + female = boulder, whilst stone + male = pebble! Anyway, the striking black and pink dress is worn by every shopkeeper and waitress, whether they be naxi, han chinese or whatever...very bizarre!
The next day, jan 12th, was faith's birthday which we celebrated with breakfast in the sunshine and then hiring bikes to explore the area a little. En route to the village of baisha, we found ourselves drawn into a weird historical village which had made the transformation from place to theme park so successfully that it was like finding yourself in disneyland in the middle of the Yunnan countryside. I don't think there was one building that didn't sell 'authentic' trinkets. However, chinese tourists appear to love such places, especially with loudspeakers. The more loudpeakers the better. the phenomenen of these in china is still a mystery to me.. it's as if too much peace and quiet would be simply damaging.
Luckily we escaped and found the real village we were looking for, a pretty place in the beautiful green Yunnan countryside, and home to some eccentric characters, including 'Mr. Yang' who served us naxi bread and pickled wild pears, and persuaded us to buy a 'happy birthday' in hieroglyphs he'd painted himself...and Dr. Ho. He was an odd example of soembody who is famous for being famous- he literally leapt out on us in the road and called us inside his clinic - the entire of which was a shrine to himself, it seemed- newspaper clippings, letters of recomendation, even a video documentary and that all-important note from Michael Palin, who had written that 'I will suggest to the other Pythons that they come to you for treatment'! He certainly looked the epitomy of the wise Taoist physician - wispy beard, traditional robes, and he had a room filled with herbs he had collected himself from the mountains - but he seemed reluctant to answer my questions, preferring to talk about his own fane instead. It made an interesting contrast to the generally pretty humble hospital doctors I'd spent time with in beijing - just shows that having a beard isn't everything! If you look up 'the most admired man dr.ho' on google, he told us, you'll find him. It's true...
We rounded off the day with a visit to the traditional Naxi orchestra, during which faith nodded in a scholarly manner over various old chinese instruments, but we eventually had to flee due to the extreme cold (they just don't have heating in the south- I've never sat through a concert in my down jacket, hat. scarf and gloves before!) and the conductor who joked interminably in chinese, into a roadside cafe where we huddled by the fire and made friends with the owner, a regal old naxi woman, and a jolly young han chinese on his holidays, culminating in us all singing each other songs..
The next day we were up in the dark to catch the bus to Qiaotou, the start of Tiger Leaping Gorge. After sitting blearily eating noodles for a while waiting for the bus to leave, we were dropped off a few hours later in a little town where we wandered around a while trying to find the start of the trail. Tiger Leaping Gorge is so called due to a legend with has something to with a, er, leaping tiger, is one of the world's deepest gorges but could disappear if controversial plans to build a series of 8 dams in the upeer reaches of the Yangzi river go ahead. This will force around 100, 00 people to move and wash away much unique local wildlife and history. It will also put huge numbers of people at risk should it burst like the hannan dam in the 80's.
However, for now it's a beautiful, serene area and every bit as dramatic as it's reputation - hiking the high trail takes you right up via the exhausting series of '24 bends' above the foaming water below, and despite the bewildering number of signs directing to the guesthouses that are rapidly springing up along the way to cash in on the popularity of the trek, was in winter peaceful and deserted except a few goat herders and a lone woman sitting at the top selling honey tea, snicker bars and tangerines and ambitiously trying to sell space on the 'lookout rock' (really, they'll try anything in china..). We spent the night at the 'tea horse guest house', drinking beer and looking at the stars with the dutch and english couples also walking, whilst simultaneously trying to hide in a misanthopically british manner from a noisy bunch of americans who arrived later. The next day we carried on walking past more wondrous scenery along with our new friends, reaching 'sean's' guesthouse for lunch before deciding, in the spirit of adventure, to set off with tim and ali (the brits) all the way up, up, up to the icy cold of Shangri-la.
Shangri-la was opportunistically so-named by officials due to being 'proved' to be the location of James Hilton's 'The lost horizon' - originally known as Zhongdian, it was a fairly successful strategy to coax the tourists up to this primarily Tibetan town on the edge of the Himalayas. Most of the time was spent trying to wear as many layers of clothes as possible (especially in the unheated dorm room - although we did get electric blankets!), enjoying the winter light in the pretty old town, watching everybody come out to dance in the squsre at night, and visiting a fine and well kept large monastery - the Ganden Sumtesling Gompa. Interestingly there seems to be more religious freedom here than inside Tibet itself where it is so closely monitored.
We spent just a day in its friendly vicinity before clambering onto another early morning bus back to Lijiang, bidding farewell to tim and ali who were going to take the hard, cold route back to Leshan where they were teaching via local buses and the mountians of western Sichuan. The prospect of another 24hours of bus travel not really striking joy into our hearts, faith and I purchased tickets for that evening's flight to jinghong, 800km to the south, which as the first air travel of my entire trip seemed shamefully easy.
Jinghong is the capital of Xishuangbanna region of yunnan, which borders Vietnam, Laos and Burma and is home to many different peoples- with its 20 degree days and tropical flowers it could hardly have been further removed from the northern winter we'd left behind. A little enquiring in the friendly backpacker cafes soon found us a jungle trek and a guide to take us there, and the next day, feeling slightly the worse for wear after an evening's drinking with our new german friends (Jinghong being the kind of place that it's actually quite difficult not to know everybody within a couple of days), we boarded a bus for a small town whose name i forget, not far from the burmese border for the start of our walk. Over the next four days we walked nearly 90km along little paths through terrain varying from forested mountain ridges, to hot, dry sugar cane plantations, thundering waterfalls and luscious deep old-growth rainforested valleys, passing bulang, dai and akr villages and golden hinayana buddhist temples. We stayed in Bulang villages along the way; idyllically beautiful places, if you don't have to do any work, full of marauding black pigs and muddy children, in wooden, bamboo and sometimes, now, stone houses on stilts, sleeping around the edges of a the large dark central room which revolved around the fireplaces, used for cooking, boiling water for tea and warming yourself and chatting by at night. The people we stayed with were kind and shy and cooked delicious meals of home grown rice and vegetables. They were very neighbourly places with a strong sense of community - people will take it it turns to work on each others land, to help build each others houses. There is no word in the Bulang language for 'hello' - if you meet someone along the way, you ask questions - 'what are you doing? where are you going? how is the way ahead? do you know so and so who's cutting that tree down?' and so on.
We were lucky to have a brilliant guide, Anipa, who had grown up in one of the Bulang villages with ambitions; he spoke pretty good english and took his tour guiding very seriously (seeing himself destined for bigger and better) a veritable mine of information about everything from the plants and wildlife to culture and religion, social tradition and politics, and having been walking these paths since childhood, knew every bend and every tree. As he was the same age as us and had quite a silly sense of humour, the three of us made good walking companions and spent a large chunk of time discussing his relationship dilemmas- he had a chinese girlfriend in Kunming who texted him constantly, to his annoyance, whilst just about everywhere he went there would be some female relative or family friend who would nag him to settle down and marry a nice bulang girl until he looked quite harrassed. It's traditional in Bulang culture for unmarried young men to go out in the evening to visit 'pretty girls' who are supposed to sit at home waiting for them to arrive! So one evening Anipa announced we would all go out visiting to see one such girl- however, much to our surprise, there was another visitor already present- a young monk! Apparently in Bulang, culture, the fact that 'monks can fall in love' (if they decide to leave the monastery) is one of the eighteen Bulang 'strange things' that include 'a bus is faster than a train' and 'a horse is faster than a car' (there are historical reasons behind these..!)
Buddhism is a central part of this world- each village has its one temple, and on the second day we visited Anipa's village, and were lucky enough to see a ceremony of tying white string which had something to do with good fortune..The elders of the village then proceeded to get rather drunk on baijiu, and treated us to some Bulang singing - traditionally this is a competiton in which the men and the women sing against each other - we sang them a song in return and felt a bit like celebrities as Anipa translated one old woman's song, which was something about that she couldn't speak out language in order to welcome us but she hoped we would understand through her singing that she was glad were had come.
At the same time all this was happenin, outside sat a travelling silversmith furnishing bracelets from lumps of solid silver with his blackened anvil, furnace of earth and ashes and old fashioned bellows. We asked him to make one for us and sat there in the dirt watching him wring miracles from metal - looking at the silver bracelet on my wrist now it all seems like something of a dream. Altogether we had a very special experience in that village and it was hard to walk away - luckily we didn't have too far to walk that day as the further away village we'd planned to walk to had had an outbreak of fighting amongst the young men...something about arguments over a girl and a tractor....Anyway apparently it had got quite seriously resulting in several people being hopitalised and the army being called in! Everybody seemed to think this was highly unusual - nobody could remember this ever happening before- but rather amusing at the same time! We met one of those involved that same night around a fire at a different village and he told s that it was all the other group's fault..well...obviously..
On the third day we reached the final chinese checkpoint before Burma, which they reluctantly let us through (and we later surreptiously photographed (-
and visted an Akr village where we drank tea with somebody who just so turned out to be Anipa's father's friend and whose son was his schoolmate..who told us stories of serving in the chinese army and showed us his collection of hunting equipment. Akr houses are quite different from the roomy Bulang ones- they are on the ground, not stilts, and are dark and cramped by comparison, with separate rooms for men and women to sleep and live. It's interesting how two neighbouring peoples came to live in such different ways..
On the fourth day we walked a hefty 32km including a long climb up out of a deep jungly valley with giant fig trees and vibrant flowers, to triumphantly arrive at the end of a long hot dusty path in a town just 2km from Burma, caught a bus that bumped and jolted us all the way home in time for tea.
Our final two days were spent mostly wandering around jinghong trying to find bike equipment and information for faith to embark on her Laos adventure (they know her well in the jinghong bikeshop now!) and getting distracted by talking to people in cafes. One particularly surreal moment was trying to perusade a chinese postman to sell her his china post bike panniers, but he wasn't having any of it. We eventually found the only non-postal ones to be had in the town, and seized them with relief. The night before last we went with Anipa, his girlfriend (who had turned up unexpctedly from Kunming, much to our amusement, and turned out to be great and not at all the nagging harpie he'd painted her as..), and their respective cousins, to a nearby hot springs and then for - karaoke! where faith as i suspected embraced her inner mariah carey and we all enjoyed some 'disco'..The final night we sat talking to a born again christian ex yorkshire bus driver about living in jeruselam before being waved goodbye by faith, the girl who worked in the cafe and a small child, to get the night bus to kunming. Where I am now. And she is...I know not...i left her with her brand new bike and a pile of little useful things to be packed into panniers to cycle off to the border. She plans to make it across laos to thailand...the route is changing daily as everybody has a different opinion...but wish her luck!!
And me? i'm reluctantly getting on a plane to beijing in a few hours. Where i will pack up all my enormously heavy books and drag them back all those nearly 7 weeks of travel back, not to mention the nearly 7 months i've been away, in a mere matter of 3 hours, according to relative time differences, on sunday. Have to be in clinic 10am on monday morning for a meeting about my dissertation.
Guess that's that then.
POSTSCRIPT
Back in beijing, horrible plane flight, cramped, delays, fat chinese men taking up all the room...gnnn give me a train any day! Have message from faith: she is halfway to laos border with bike. Go faith!
I feel there should be some philosophical reflection in true 'returned traveller stroking beard style' so perhaps another post will follow.