Fun with flames and a gorge of leaping tigers

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I'm currently in Chengdu, Sichuan province, after spending about a week in and around Yangshuo admiring karst peaks and educating myself on the differences between various Chinese local beers. The train ride here from Yangshuo (Guanxi province) took almost 24 hours, but like most Chinese trains, it was actually remarkably comfortable and I even managed to get a good nights sleep.

I started writing this blog entry in Yangshuo but didn't end up finishing it as I was too busy rushing around relaxing everywhere. I had heard from other travellers that Yangshuo was a cool place and a bit of a traveller hot-spot, so I decided to check it out as one of my last destinations before settling down somewhere to teach English. There are also plenty of opportunities for teaching English in Yangshuo, but because it's so touristy many people speak English and it would be too easy for me not to learn much Chinese.

The surrounding countryside is absolutely beautiful around Yangshuo though, and I finally managed to rent another scooter. I had heard renting motorised transport in China was difficult for foreigners, but in Yangshuo this is apparently not the case. Unfortunately you could barely call this thing motorised as it was only a 48cc automatic which decided to pretty much break down on me on the way home, but that's another story...

My last blog entry covered my stay in Kunming, after which I headed in the direction of Dali. The supposedly 5 hour train ride actually took over 8 hours, but it was quite good fun nonetheless. A Chinese guy sang a few songs on his guitar, I played some card games with the other passengers, and I massively pigged out on sunflower seeds 😊. After arriving at the train station I took a bus to the old town and found a place to stay. On the first day I walked around the town to check it out (standard procedure) and was approached by one of the bar men from "Bad Monkey", informing me of the live band playing there that evening. I went there the same evening, the band was wicked, and I ended up spending every night of my week long stay in Dali in there. It was a really relaxed place and the owners were cool, and they had quite a good selection of beer - they even had Beer Lao 😊.

While in Kunming I had heard about the so called "torch festival", but I hadn't paid too much attention to where or when it was going to be held as I automatically assumed I wouldn't end up being in the right place at the right time. As it turned out, the festival is held in Dali and all I needed to do was spend a few more days than planned there to see it. I obviously decided to stick around and experience the craziness.

Before the torch festival hit Dali, I spent my time trying different food and exploring the area, although my stay in Kunming had left me with a few unrealistic expectations of China. Having eaten at the same dumpling place every single day but one during my stay in Kunming, I was expecting to find dumplings this good all over China. Unfortunately I was to be disappointed time and time again when trying different dumplings right up until I got back to Kunming a few weeks later and went back to my favourite dumpling place. Kunming also left me expecting to find table tennis tables in every hostel in China, which hasn't turned out to be the case. In fact, I haven't found another table tennis table in a hostel anywhere apart from Kunming. Disappointing, but if you really want to play you can always find table tennis clubs in pretty much any town if you ask around. Besides, the school or university I end up teaching at will definitely have some tables so I should be able to play there quite easily.

Back to food though, Dali did have some of the nicest noodles I have eaten on my trip so far. The Chinese name for them is "dao xiao mian", or in Chinese characters: 刀 削 面. It means something like knife slice noodles, and they are freshly cut from a big piece of dough. Even though the soup they came in wasn't perfect, the noodles were as fresh as they come and absolutely delicious. I obviously returned there a number of times for a satisfying 5 Yuan brunch 😊.

I was hanging out with a Chinese girl called Liu Li most days in Dali, and we rented bikes and tried to cycle to Erhai Lake one of the days. As the lake is absolutely massive it shouldn't have been so hard to find, but it took us a full day of cycling around in the burning sun to actually make it to the lake. On the way we stopped by the three pagodas, an apparently famous landmark in China, but we didn't think the extortionate 120 Yuan entrance fee was worth it considering you aren't even allowed into the pagodas themselves. I took a few pictures from outside the gate and set off again towards the lake. When we finally arrived at the lake we unfortunately ended up at one of the least scenic spots possible. The lake is supposed to be really picturesque, but from where we were it wasn't really even worth taking a photo. We returned to Dali feeling proud we finally found the lake nonetheless.

The second last day I spent in Dali was the day of the torch festival. I didn't really have too much of an idea what it was going to be like, apart from that everyone buys a torch and that you can throw fire at each other or something. Well, what actually happens isn't far off. The 'fire' people throw at each other is actually sawdust which is thrown through the flames of the torch and instantly erupts into a massive ball of flames. At first the streets weren't so busy and people were a little more cautious with throwing flames at each other, but as the night progressed things started to get a little sillier. I of course bought a torch at the start of the night and got involved 😊. The little flame fights you have are good fun, and the most important skill to master is getting another handful of sawdust and roasting the other guy quicker than he sends a ball of fire your way.

After an hour or so of mental fire battles my torch was pretty much finished. I bought a few more bags of sawdust as you don't always need your own torch (just throw the sawdust past someone elses torch), but after another little while of that I decided to just stand back, relax a little and take some more photos and videos. As it got later, people were getting a bit too excited for their own good and it turned into a bit of a burn-the-foreigner festival. Occasionally I would hear someone shout "laowai", the most common Chinese word for foreigners, and it would be time for me to dodge the incoming flames again... Seeing as I didn't have any more sawdust and therefore no way to defend myself, this got pretty old pretty fast and I retreated to Bad Monkey bar for another few cold beers.

I got some really cool video footage and I took absolutely loads of photos, most of which make the festival look like some kind of crazy riot, but unfortunately I lost all apart from the first few photos from the festival. When I was in Kunming about a month ago my camera got pickpocketed, and with it I lost over 400 irreplaceable photos of everything from the torch festival in Dali to Lijiang old town, hiking the tiger leaping gorge and Lugu lake. When my camera got stolen I even thought the boy was trying to rob me, which is why I had already swung my bag in front of me. Unfortunately it was also raining so I had one hand on my umbrella, and when I was busy paying for the bus the camera in my pocket escaped my attention and subsequently got stolen. I knew as soon as the bus drove away and the boy that had been standing behind me hadn't got on that I had been robbed. A tap on my pocket confirmed that it was now empty... I made the bus driver stop immediately and I sprinted back down the middle of the road to the bus stop to find the boy and give him a beating he was going to remember for the rest of his pathetic little life, but of course he was gone. The camera wasn't particularly important to me, but my photos are one of the things I take great pride in and losing them was a real blow. I always back up my photos, but I hadn't been able to burn the contents of my USB drive to DVD, which meant I couldn't delete photos off it and make room for new ones, which is why I then couldn't fit all my photos onto my USB drive when I tried to back them up several days before my camera got stolen. Never mind.

On the upside, the day after my camera got stolen I went and bought a new one and I love it. My old camera was the Sony DSC-W35, and I basically just bought the same camera 2,5 years later. My current camera is the W150, it has 5x instead of 3x optical zoom and many of the small things that annoyed me about my last camera have been improved. One of the best new features is the image stabiliser, which allows you to take photographs in low light or with full zoom etc and easily get a sharp photo. The only downside to the camera is that the macro setting seems to have got slightly worse, but all in all I'm very happy with it.

I've taken a few photos from the people I was travelling with to at least have a few photos from the places I've been, and when I track down a few more I'll add them to the facebook album as well.

After the madness that was the torch festival was over, I caught a bus to Lijiang. In my mind I was merely using Lijiang as the place to get to the tiger leaping gorge from, but I ended up staying there for quite a few days. Apart from the tourist hordes that clog up the tiny windy old streets, the old town is quite beautiful and I met some decent people. Fortunately the weather was on my side and it didn't rain at all before I set off to hike the gorge. Apparently people die worryingly regularly when hiking the gorge after it has been raining, and after hiking it myself I can see why. In the dry it's not the safest hike in the world as some stretches of the track are pretty narrow and have a massive drop down the gorge on one side. If the track was muddy after heavy rain it would certainly have been quite dangerous. As it was though the walk was absolutely gorge-ous (see what I did there?).

It was a challenging walk, especially seeing as I was silly enough to wear jeans when it was boiling hot. The first four hours are pretty much all uphill, and after that it levels out a little. Unfortunately we had a local with a horse follow us for the first 3,5 hours or so, which was most annoying. The horse had a bell round its neck which kept ringing at irregular intervals, and every time we stopped to take a small rest the damn horse man would unsuccessfully try again to convince us to let the horse carry our bags up the hill. Obviously if we didn't want to walk it we wouldn't have come there in the first place, but this logic was beyond him. When I had been trying to get rid of this guy for over 3 hours and I was just about ready to throttle him, he magically reached some kind of hill station and finally left us to walk the rest on our own.

It took about 8 hours to walk to Halfway House, the place we decided to stay for the night. Halfway House also had probably the best toilet ever. It was only a Chinese squat toilet so nothing special in that department, but the view was absolutely amazing. The toilet only had a low wall on one side, allowing you to look out over beautiful mountains and the impressive gorge. I should be able to track down a photo of the toilet from one of my friends sometime soon 😊.

On the second day we walked down to the river itself, or more correctly, to the "middle tiger leaping stone". We ended up walking another 6 hours or so on day two and went back to Lijiang feeling utterly exhausted but also very impressed with ourselves for walking the mighty gorge 😊.

After letting our muscles recover for a few days, Scott, Liu Li and I decided to go to Lugu lake, in the north of Yunnan province. This is apparently the last matriarchical society in the world, but the villages around where we stayed were all just built for tourists. When we inquired about one of the villages in the area, we were told "it's not ready yet". Well, we weren't looking for a village to be purpose built for tourists, we wanted to see a real minority village. Even though our attempts to find such a village were unsuccessful in the Lugu lake area, it was still good fun to visit. One of the evenings we decided to have some "hot pot", one of my favourite things to eat in China. We opted for a chicken hotpot, after which the owner proudly walked in with a big live chicken and asked us if it was big enough for us. We assured him it would be and he went through to the back to go and prepare it for our hotpot. It might be a little strange to a westerner to see the live chicken that is about to be killed for your dinner, but at the end of the day the result is the same. The difference being that a chicken in a village will have most likely had a much more natural life than a chicken in a massive farm somewhere. Either way, the hotpot was delicious and I added another few strange things to my list of odd foods I've eaten in China, namely chicken's brain, tongue, intestines and lungs, all of which are quite tasty 😊. Of course by now I've eaten much stranger things like pig's brain etc, but I still refuse to eat dog meat, especially after seeing it for sale in Yangshuo. More on that in a later blog entry...

For now I'll leave you with the last of my photos from my old camera, as well as some of Liu Li's photos 😊. Liu Li's video of the torch festival will have to wait until another computer lets me upload it...

Torches and gorges


*Update: The video has been uploaded!

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