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Published: October 20th 2008
With an apartment still left to clean, garbage to throw out, money to change, and a whole wardrobe full of clothes to give or throw away, the task of packing our bags was pushed ever closer to our hour of departure. Deconstructing a year of fixed habitation in one afternoon, and stuffing virtually everything you own into the boot of an airport bound taxi, has to rank way up there in terms of liberating experiences. Yet we still woke up the following morning in China to the realization we were travelling with far too much stuff.
Thus our first morning on the road was spent in Kunming Post Office, which maddeningly wouldn’t allow shipments of electrical equipment, CDs, liquids, and, and, and…so even our hierarchical choice of needs was governed. Nevertheless something had to give, and after our purge an inventory of what we had left showed some gaps in our kit (particularly with an eight-month travel buddy onboard). And so it was that our first afternoon in China was spent augmenting in Wal-Mart™.
Yes Wal-Mart, the modern-day bazaar; just as homogeneous as all those McDonalds, Coca Colas and Marlboro Lights sampled down the years in distant lands. However,
its uniqueness manifest itself in the mixture of faces shopping there. There are at least 250 minority groups in Yunnan. It was truly a delight for the senses, my eyes not knowing whether to loiter on the myriad faces or those toffee-coated Oreos staring back at me.
Back out on the street, a walk down the block back to the hostel took on a real ‘Fear Factor’ quality, with people wandering almost aimlessly across busy four-lane roads and traffic junctions where the only law seems to be ‘-lessness’.
Then there are the electric bikes; they look just like regular scooters, ridden by all and sundry, young and old. Plug it in, charge it up and go. Not the fastest things on the road for sure, but then these things are an environmental savior! What a great idea!
Upon closer scrutiny, however, maybe not… I reckon they should be forced to peg a playing card to their spokes by law in order to add ‘brroom, brroom’ sounds, because a silent bike is a deadly bike. You could have Kunming Hells Angels bearing down on you and you’d be totally unawares until you felt their hairy breath tickling the
back of your neck. Add to that the traffic anarchy and ten thousand electric bike riders’ unwillingness to slow down for fear of losing their hard-earned momentum and you have an environmental hazard!
Errands completed, we savored our new professions as tourists with a visit to the book’s top of the ‘sights’. Although hardly temple-starved coming from Korea, Yuantong Si Pagoda impressed nonetheless. An octagonal pavilion in a pea green pond reflected the warm oranges and reds, quite uncommon in Korean temple architecture, creating a serenity most unexpected.
Feeling decidedly upbeat about how much we’d achieved on our first day we struck a left out of the Temple gate, again on the guidebook’s recommendation, to sample the regional specialty of ‘across-the-bridge-noodles’. After ordering randomly from the menu, numbers of small silver dishes appeared, containing slivers of raw meat and some unknown vegetables, and an egg yolk. Then we were presented with a fruit bowl sized dish of hot brothy water, upon which floated an archipelago of oil. All rounded off, it seemed, with a side of cold noodles.
Seeing this mysterious smorgasbord spread out in front of me, I took refuge from any decision-making responsibility by feeding
Lijiang
Old TownKiva a banana, while Jennifer and the two waitresses looked at each other expectantly. The waitresses gestured to intervene, then in a flash they scooped up the dishes, three to each hand, and the contents of our vast table arrangement slipped into the steaming bowls that sat before us.
For weeks building up to this moment our mouths had been watering expectantly for our daily encounters with Chinese cuisine, and this first experience with something new was entirely disappointing. In comparison to Korean soups - a surprise considering the myriad ingredients they’d just poured in - it was downright bland…could it be that after less than 24 hours we were craving fermented cabbage?
Described by the guidebooks as a good place to take a respite from traveling and load up on western food, after three days on the road we weren’t exactly searching for a respite and thus weren’t expecting Dali to fully satiate our needs.
What the guidebook should have read was: ‘If you’re a hard-working Chinese executive who needs a break from the grey architecture of city life, and the hurly burly of the daily commutes, then this newly renovated old town is just the
place for you to escape it all for a few days’. Because in reality that description befits many of the tourists who come here, and it fits me to the T. Apart from the executive bit and the Chinese bit... and of course the hard-working bit.
We branched out in our ‘what can we do with baby?’ repertoire by renting bicycles and making an excursion to Xizhou, 20 km away. The baby seat provided clearly wasn’t built for an eight -month old, so we were forced to improvise. A little cushion along with the standard diaper provided sufficient padding on the cobbled streets while a wrap of material around his neck and upper torso provided extra support and prevented chafing from the oversized harness.
I was a little worried at how Kiva would take to being strapped onto the back of the bike. Not least if it would be safe. But with trucks whistling past on the main road up to Xizhou, he knuckled down, and after a few pit-stops for reassurance he remarkably even managed a nap.
With rain upon us and forecast for the next few days, we chose to head onto Lijiang and hit
Kiva
Lijiang Dali again on the way back down, at which point we hoped the rainy season would be on the back foot.
Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage listed town, was once an important staging post on the ancient Tea-Horse Road. Horses were traded from Tibet and tea from China with the local Naxi people acting as middlemen. From this wealth the town’s fortunes grew and prospered, adopting elements of many cultures and blending into what is today touted as one of the most fascinating ancient cities in China.
We arrived in Lijiang early afternoon, our hostel located just outside, yet high above the old town, affording us a panorama of the old town’s waves of grey roof tops, whetting our appetite for what lay beneath. We hurriedly checked in before clambering down the steps from our hostel and across the road into a thoroughfare of hiking shops, travel agents and restaurants before finally reaching a large water wheel, and consulting the map to gain our bearings wondering out loud, where the hell is this place? Slightly bewildered we decided to take the narrow high road to the right of the river from this point, as the other option seemed
to be a continuation of what we’d just passed.
Wandering up the cobblestone lane a smell of varnish fumes permeated the air. All the shops seemed to be owned and frequented by Han Chinese with the occasional ‘traditionally dressed’ saleswoman or restaurant touts hawking for business. Described by our admittedly outdated six-year-old guidebook as a gathering point for locals, a few of whom we might encounter up close trying to cash in on the tourist trade by selling trinkets, the scene when we arrived in Sifang Square couldn’t have been more different.
Packed with hundreds of Chinese tourists, their Japanese cameras pointed in all directions, many wearing matching floppy hats gathered around pennants on sticks, others loading children onto ponies beside men wearing Marlboro man hats…there under the tree were a handful of elderly Naxi, chewing the fat in timeless fashion, just like the guidebook had predicted. At once alien yet strangely at home amid the fracas, one could only believe they’d had more time to digest the changes than we’d had?
Shortly after a huge Earthquake struck in 1996, destroying large sections of the new city and damaging much of the old, UNESCO declared Lijiang Old
Town a World Heritage Site, perhaps fearing the worst as the builders moved in.
In China, tourist attractions are hyped to the hilt, some of which don’t deserve their extravagant names and descriptions. But when an international organization with the clout and Kudos of UNESCO lavishes praise, there’s really no hype needed - only truck loads of cash to rebuild the place.
However, just as in Dali, Venice, Rome et al, walking a few streets away from the epicenter the tourists fell away and we were able to find something closer to our guidebook induced expectations of Lijiang. The ancient cobblestone streets and winding alley offshoots, the tiled roofs, canals, bridges and waterways strategically crisscrossing town, ingeniously serving as water taps for every house in town, even to this day.
Many people feel the appeal of the Old Town has been lost since its redevelopment; a tourist trap that is somehow ‘fake’. I never walked the streets of Lijiang prior to the earthquake so can only judge as is now. The more I wandered the more Lijiang enchanted. A town at the crux of change in both the history of the Naxi and The Chinese nation as
Naxi
Lijiang a whole, and an undoubted architectural masterpiece, mesmerizing morning, noon and night, in its back alleys, markets, restaurants, bars. The aesthetic beauty of this place is beyond debate.
During the Cultural Revolution the government attempted to rid the land of the ‘four olds’: old culture, ideas, customs and habits. Minority leaders were often imprisoned or sent to work camps for re-education. Their traditions seen as superstitious and backward, any form of ethnicity was seen as ‘little nation chauvinism.’
Clearly times have changed since then. Deng Xiaoping came to power instigating, among other things, the ‘Four Modernizations.’ To get rich was now noble. And today, you have brash commercialism on the newly renovated streets of the Old Town - minority cultures packaged and sold to an ever increasing domestic and international tourist market. Yet only the staunchest communist could deny that the plight of these minority groups has improved over the past few decades, even if alas, it’s all about the money.
Besides, this town’s very existence owes itself to trade. It’s just rolled back into town. Speaking of which, when I reach Beijing I’ll let you know if mummified Mao has rolled in his cabinet.
10km
north of Lijiang and once the capital of Naxi Kingdom, is Baisha, a small farming town that attracts a regular trickle of visitors in search of some authentic Naxi culture. Upon arrival we were immediately approached by an elderly Naxi woman who insisted we accompany her to her house where we could take pictures and dress up in traditional clothing.
She repeatedly shoved a notebook into my hands, which listed recommendations of this very experience in different languages from many a happy customer, and seemed convinced that we would be won over if only we’d read a few more. She persisted and persisted until we finally decided to leave her to it. We exited through a gate tower down a muddy lane until we reached farmland at the edge of town before zigzagging our way back, exploring every nook the town had to offer.
Back in Lijiang we paid a visit to a few travel and tour agencies in order to garner some info on our upcoming trip to Tiger Leaping Gorge, though we quickly surmised the staff spoke barely three words of English between them. Concluding these agencies weren’t set up for the dozen or so backpackers
about town but the thousands of domestic Chinese tourists that thronged the narrow lanes.
All ready to fork out the dough for a tour with baby in toe, we were left with no real option but to do it the old fashioned way and wing it down to the bus station first thing in the morning and hop on a local bus. On arrival in Qiaotou, the town at the entrance to the gorge, we were a little miffed when we were told the Gorge was closed due to heavy rain.
As we stood around weighing up our options a steady trickle of tourists arrived, took one look at the sign, and disappeared into the hands of eager touts who had hastily arranged minibuses to Shangri la. It was an abject lesson in the psychology of crowds.’ Shangri La' being as it is, a creation of the Chinese tourism department; the town having won a competition in 2001 enabling it to use the name in an attempt to attract more tourists; when in reality it remains plain old Zhongdian (The local Tibetan population refers to it by the name Gyalthang).
There were still four of us clinging
to hope of getting in (Kiva clung to mommy and was happy whatever), and fortunately a Dutch couple was travelling a million miles from home with a mobile and I was able to convince them to phone a guesthouse inside the gorge to come get us. This worked a treat; Sean’s GH dispatched a driver to be with us in an hour.
Our ride arrived after about an hour, only for the driver to announce she couldn’t take us into the Gorge as it was closed. If we waited until around five however, the PSB (cops) would go home, and she could sneak us in. “Right on!” I thought, “Risky! they argued; what if the Gorge was closed tomorrow, there would be no point going in, as they had a flight to catch in two days, and couldn’t waste a day of their three-week holiday taking chances. And then there were two.
We decided to book into a hotel for the afternoon so that Kiva could take a proper nap. The book recommended the amiable expat-run ‘Margo’s’ just round the corner. Though as we turned the corner past a group of men manning the ‘Gorge Closed’ sign, one
Old Town by night
Lijiang (from our hostel) of them thought he’d take it upon himself to try to prevent me, physically. When this didn’t work he started raising his voice and shouting “You don’t go!” before proceeding to try and physically stop Jennifer and Kiva.
I soon discovered something very primordial happens to Papa Bear when someone tries to manhandle Mummy and Baby Bear, and the guy was quickly forced to change his tack. Almost as justification for his thwarted actions, in front of his dozen or so accomplices he began shouting “But I told you no!” I wasn’t sure whether he’d unknowingly left his uniform at home or whether he seriously believed his word was law round here. Nevertheless, his mates seemed ready for a bit of a tussle too; Jennifer and Kiva, now clearly untouchable, continued the twenty something metres to Margo’s as Jennifer advised over her shoulder, “Don’t lose it!”
With no provocation forthcoming I was able to remain calm and perhaps even a little boisterous until Jennifer’s return. Margo had provided some info and with a smirk from us and a sneer from them we went off to find ourselves a different hotel. Whilst searching we saw our ride parked up
by the side of the road in waiting. They recommended a rather nice hotel for us with thick curtains, and off to sleep we went.
Some time into our doze we were awakened by a knock on the door. I opened it to find a previously unknown person extending a mobile phone. “Meet us at the van in 15mins”, the lady on the phone said, and it was time to get up.
It took us a little longer than that to get organized and when we exited the hotel, it was raining. A look at the watch told me it was almost two hours from being five pm. When we reached the van at the agreed rendezvous point on the old bridge the driver and her sidekick insisted we could just hide on the floor as we drove past the checkpoint. We hunkered down between the seat legs, attempting to prevent Kiva from tipping off the covert op by letting him chew my watch, passed the hoodlums manning the ‘Gorge Closed’ sign and down past the PSB checkpoint. We were through… suddenly this was starting to feel like the China I’d known from my last trip.
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joerine
non-member comment
:)
nice pics you guys,China is indeed one of the most beautiful places in the world, can't wait for my turn to see it. oh and Kiva is one hell of a cute baby!