Ten
China:
"The Dinivg Hall on the Secowd Flooy"
Hong Kong radio started fading out as we hydrofoiled up the Pearl River towards Guangzhou - formerly Canton - a 100 mile trip. I tried again an hour later and Saturday morning American top 40 comes on loud and clear. It then segued into a jolting incongruous bit of stirring martial music and an announcer saying, "You are listening to Radio Guangzhou, first English language radio in China". Hm, I thought, maybe I should spend a little time here, but alas it wasn't to be, Guangzhou really didn't want me.
There are essentially only two hostel type places within the city that cater to foreign tourists. Private enterprise has not yet reached China's hotel business, all but recently built upscale joint venture hotels are owned by the government and we foreigners are only allowed in specific places. And they are not cheap, dorm beds cost even more here than in Hong Kong or Singapore. Both are located on a small island replete with parks and concentrated tourism, there was even a tourist map in English at the island's entrance.
Walked a mile or so from the boat dock, dripping wet, the south coastal region of China in August is equivalent to Alabama - 90+ and 90+. Made it to the first one, under renovation. Tried to follow a backward map, or maybe I was just confused, to the second. Predictably I got lost, then eventually found it. There's a sign on the desk "ALL FULL", but there's nobody at the desk, five hotel staff are playing cards in the lunchroom.
Just then a fellow I had met a few days earlier in Hong Kong appears, we talk, he says there are empty beds in the dorm. Encouraged, I walked up to the card players and mentioned what my friend had told me, still "ALL FULL". Under these conditions the guidebooks advise you to smile through gritted teeth, be patient and your needs are often fulfilled. Consequently, I sat down and had a yogurt and began to converse with a couple who'd been waiting two days for accommodations. They had waited till nine PM the previous night only to have to leave and pay $35 for an upscale hotel room. But get on the waiting list they say - they actually did get beds that night. I cooled my heels for an hour, went back to the desk, mentioned the empty dorm beds - "ALL FULL". Well how about the waiting list? - "NO WAITING LIST"
By now I've contradicted them twice and I'm the last person in the city they'd give a bed to. So it’s bye-bye to Guangzhou, China's richest, most up to date city and I'm off to catch the 21 hour overnight boat up the Pearl River to Wuzhou, which is halfway to my first primary destination in China, the small town of Yangshuo, about 400 miles Northwest of Hong Kong. The guide book suggested second class, the afternoon boat only has third. But no problem, In second class I would have been largely isolated in a four bed cabin, whereas in third I was en masse for my first real China experience.
The boat has three decks with about 100 bunks on each, although they really can't be called bunks. Rather there are wooden platforms on two levels running the length of the boat. You get a two foot wide section separated by eight inch high movable partitions and a straw mat. A family can buy several, remove the partitions and spread out. Each slot has a window from which a constant steam of projectiles were emitted - bottles, cans, food and spit. Whatever didn't go out the window went directly onto the floor from which a mountain of debris was swept away every few hours. I brought out my phrasebook and tried to make a little conversation when I wasn't simply marveling at the scene or hanging out up front watching the river and its intense commercial life flow by.
Most travelers take the early boat - I was the only foreign devil on the afternoon run - so they can make a direct connection to Yangshuo and avoid spending a night in Wuzhou which has little to offer. As I learned later they are met by someone carrying a sign which says "Tourists, this way to Yangshuo and Guilin", otherwise there is not a word of English in the boat dock or bus station.
They may stare at you like you just got off the last spaceship from Mars but then they start talking to you in Chinese and are surprised and dismayed when you don't respond. It doesn't help to try to say, "I don't speak Chinese", since that's only our word for their language and unintelligible to them so they just keep trying. Maybe they think I’m speaking a weird Chinese dialect and I'll soon catch on and say something they can understand. Often, baffled, they’d write out the Chinese characters as if that was finally going to reach me. The Chinese language must be the only example of a single written language spawning many mutually unintelligible spoken ones. But the people are terribly curious and really want to talk to you so it can take elaborate gestures to get them to stop. Maybe it's all those American movies dubbed into Chinese on the tube or in the cinema, but I even had a woman who ran a souvenir shop and was an English beginner ask me if the people in America spoke Chinese!
Wherever you want to go the Lonely Planet Travel Guides will make it easier, but anywhere else outside of China they are a lot more dispensable. You are asking for a big headache to try to do China without a guidebook or phrasebook or minimal knowledge of the language. There are actually quite a few comfortable spots, the tricky part often being traveling in between. Two Danish fellows I met were only planning to spend a week in China and didn't want to spend the money on a guidebook. They wandered around Wuzhou for two hours trying to find someone who could point them to the bus station. In fact, as they left the boat dock they came within spitting distance of the bus ticket windows because boat dock and bus station are in the same building, but designed such that with no English signage you could leave the dock, climb the stairs and never suspect that the bus depot was underneath.
With even just a phrase book they could have pointed to the characters for bus station and gotten there easily. It can also come in handy for eating, an often hit or miss, frequently laughingly frustrating experience. You'd think that a restaurant with a sign that says, "Your Patronage is Welcome" would have an English menu or that the people who work in a cafe that touts "coffee" on it's marquee would understand you when you ask for it, but not in China.
In a city which receives few tourists there was a sign next to a hotel reception desk which was all in Chinese except for the following; "THE DINIVG HALL ON THE SECOWD FLOOY". I thought I'd try it. At the entrance to the restaurant was a large signboard with only one English word "MENU", but no English on the menu itself. The hostess made a pantomime of eating as I entered so I assumed that she understood that a Chinese menu wouldn't be sufficient. Moreover I had forgotten my phrasebook and the kitchen was on another floor so just pointing was out. Consequently I disappointed and baffled her and went out to try my luck in a row of sidewalk restaurants out front.
Pointing also has it's pitfalls. Restaurant guy sees me in the market, pulls me over, points at a pot of ham hocks. Not very appetizing, I shook my head no. He points to a second pot and says "woof-woof" - hm...sorry, but no thanks. As fate would have it I think I ate woof-woof once later on in a bus lunch stop. I pointed to a pot of stew that looked good, and turned out to taste good though its taste was unfamiliar, but I didn't really know what it was, so no problem.
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But Yangshuo is different. Heading towards the hotel on arrival I pass a hand-painted T-shirt shop with many shirts outside on display and my eye is drawn to one which says "Big Nose Foreign Devil" in Chinese and English and has a painting of a bearded guy on it that bears an amazing likeness to yours truly, except for having a lot more hair on top. Yangshuo is a totally laid back, outrageously beautiful island of (very basic) English speakers and simulated Western comfort in a vast luck of the draw Chinese sea.
The Chinese consider this area the most beautiful place in the world. Guilin, a city of 500,000 about 50 miles to the north of Yangshuo has been a tourist town for 800 years. China, so big, so complex, has always been their whole world, and especially considering their government is only beginning to let them travel, their ethnocentric attitude is understandable.
Now this brings up an interesting aside. Not long before I began this excursion I was in one of those discussions about why world maps always had to place Europe in the center, wasn't it just too chauvinistic. Europe had to be there, my contention, otherwise the entire center of the map would be blue ocean. Well, not surprisingly, Chinese world maps have China to the left of center, Europe and the Americas all distorted on both edges and the center, one big blue ocean.
Well I've been a few other places and while many are much more spectacular I've never experienced anything so dreamlike or surreal. It is landscape of Disneyland matterhorns, many over 1000 feet high, rising out of a flat plain. In the city park, which covers almost as much area as the city itself, there's a "hill" that's nearly cylindrical and three times as tall as it's diameter. These strange protuberances are called limestone karst.
The mounts appear in every direction as far as the eye can see, and they almost always include caves. Many of the caves have been blocked off for safety or other reasons - maybe to keep people from living in them. Others are open to exploration with guides and include several "water" caves, one of which uses a small boat, and another which requires wading and crawling through some very tight and muddy spaces. The other major area pastime involves exploring the countryside and villages on rented bicycles.
The town itself, about 5000 population, is what I imagine China would look like if every place had a sense of class and some of the resources to back it up. It sits up on an embankment 20 feet above the Li River which has been dredged to accommodate 50 passenger double deck riverboats. For as far as the city fronts on the river, about 1/3 mile, the bank is completely finished in stone with plantings, including vegetables, in places. The stone railing on top has carved posts. Four stairways, including a grand 25 footer, lead down to water level where there is a six foot wide platform for getting into clear warm water. The older streets, including sidewalks and curbs are paved in large stone blocks, even some of the newer curbs are stone.
There are reasonably clean ponds and streams running through the town and to cap it off, especially for an ex-garbageman, the city's streetside waste receptacles are excellent cast iron lions. They are about three feet high and include an open mouth for placement and a hole where the tail would be where women - yes, almost always women - shovel it out and toss it in to their handcarts where it gets sorted for valuables before the trek to the dump on the edge of town.
The main tourist drag, paved in stone, has a concentration of English menu restaurants. All through traffic runs on the edge of town and since, as everywhere in China, most people move by bicycle it can get awfully quiet at night, aside from us boisterous travelers, that is. By 6 PM the restaurants have put most of their tables on the sidewalk and street, leaving just enough room for the two or three vehicles that might pass in the course of the evening. There are additionally dozens of "souvenir" shops with carvings, trinkets, silver, silk, batik and tie dye and these are regularly augmented by an outdoor market with over a hundred booths for which fleets of busloads of tourists are brought in from Guilin.
Stopped in for lunch one afternoon, the waitress approaches wearing "the" Hong Kong T-shirt. It shows a sign painter on a scaffold painting out the British flag in favor of the Chinese with the words Hong Kong 1997 underneath. "Hey I've got one of those, have you been to Hong Kong?" "No, a friend gave it to me." Then she asks how much I paid for mine, I say $1.40, she says "Oh, expensive." They always want to know how much it cost and their response is always equivalent to hers or "([unspoken] You foolish foreign devil), you paid too much".
Not much to me but 5% of her monthly income, although she did get her meals and a place to sleep, on a table in the restaurant, which she wasn't all that happy about. It was a new venture, in only it's second week and the owner said he would pay her more when business picked up. Meanwhile she was the only one who spoke English so they were requiring her to be on the job from 7 AM to at least midnight seven days a week. She was getting tired and was looking for someone who could relieve her for a couple of hours here and there.
When business slacked off her English study books would come out, the goal to be an English teacher. No food or shelter to pay for, seemingly content to own three changes of clothes, she could save most of her earnings and in two years have enough to pay for two years of college. Government workers get much more reasonable hours and working conditions, often barely working, but there is nothing like wage and hour laws here. At least she has a job at prevailing wages and the opportunity to practice her English.
If China wants to appeal to people in between the hard core traveler and the $100 per night guided tour type, it'll need more places like Yangshuo. But this is much too easy and comfortable and it’s time for me to train west to the town of Anshun which is an hour's bus ride from Huangguoshuo Falls, China's largest, and 2/3 of the way to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, home of the town of Dali, my next primary destination.
China: Getting There is Half the Fun
The China International Travel Service office in Yangshuo will sell you a hard sleeper train ticket for three days in advance - not two days, not four days, only three days - but it costs 20% more than the regular tourist price which is already twice the Chinese price. There are three classes of train travel in China; first class or soft sleeper has comfortable air-con cabins, no problem getting these, not many Chinese can afford them, for tourists it's equal to the cost of flying. There's second class or hard sleeper which is actually pretty comfortable; the "hard" referring to the thinness of the padding and the fact that it has three tiered bunks on an open corridor instead of the four bed private cabins of first class.
This is the preferred mode and consequently they are the hardest tickets to get. China is in the midst of a lot of railway capital construction but they are way behind in acquisition of rolling stock, the shortage exacerbated by the increasing ability of Chinese to travel. Second class also includes reasonably priced soft seat cars which only appear on some trains and finally third class, the dreaded hard seat which the guidebooks can't say enough bad things about and they're all true.
I ask the clerk at the CITS office if the train to Anshun has soft seat cars, she says "Yes" (as it turned out there are two trains daily only one of which has them). "Am I likely to get one if I just go to the station?" "Yes". "And of course, I can always get a hard seat ticket, right?". "Right". I decide to take my chances, anyway it's only 21 hours to Anshun. I take the short bus ride to Guilin and head for the station. There are long lines for everything except first class and a window that says;
"Well Mannered Youth"
(some Chinese)
"Business Scope"
(some Chinese)
"Tickets Purchased with FEC"
China is the only country with two currencies, people’s money and foreign exchange certificates. We are supposed to use FEC for everything, but in practice it's only necessary for planes, trains and hotels. Meanwhile if you get much off the beaten track they don’t even know what FEC is and won't accept it in spite of the fact that it carries a 20 to 30% premium over people's money on the black market. Imports can only be purchased with FEC and not long ago Chinese were not even allowed to hold FEC. It's now on its way out (actually eliminated Jan. '94) since the country wants to join GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) which doesn't allow dual currencies. Until then wherever there are tourists you hear the refrain, "Hello, change-a-money?"
"Are there any soft seats?" "No." "How about hard sleepers?" "Come back at eight AM". "If I come back at eight AM, will I be assured of getting a hard sleeper?" "No." Every major station has its hard sleeper tourist quota which often allows us to ride at a few days notice compared to the months that Chinese sometimes have to wait, but the quota is seldom enough. "But I can always get a hard seat, right?" "Yes, but the train is crowded, there are no seats." "Hm...let me think about this." Guilin somehow didn't agree with me, I really wanted to be on my way and it's only 21 hours. Got a hard seat for the three AM train.
Looking for a reasonably priced place to eat, Guilin can be relatively expensive, as I wander around town with twelve hours to kill, two young guys pull up on their bikes and start conversing. I mention my quest. They say they'll help me, but just then a flower-childlike French guy with an impeccable attitude - he was traveling sans any kind of phrase or guide book - arrives on the scene. He was equipped only with a single page of hand written phrases prepared by a Chinese friend, but the world was his so called oyster, nothing could blow his cool. In a friendly, high spirited way he says he's been warned about young guys posing as students who rope naive tourists into going to a certain restaurant where they get seriously overcharged. The two guys don't want to hear about it, they say "fuck you" and ride off. Guilin also has it's sweet young things who really want you to buy them a cup of coffee except where they take you there's a thirty dollar cover on the first cup.
Still many hours to go I find a place to peruse the passing throng, a translator appears, a little crowd of spectators gathers around and I wind up in a conversation with Jin, a 32 year old woman selling a gelatin drink from a nearby handcart and a bit later Huang, a young doctor eager to speak English and make a Western contact. She supports herself and aged mom on $45 a month from her business. A nice enough person and not bad looking but way past what a Chinese man would consider marrying age. Even the most Westernized men I met were set on young traditional wives. Huang just feels trapped. When I suggested exchanging addresses a friend of Jin cried out "dangerous". Huang was afraid one of the spectators might be a "spy" and wouldn't give me his while anybody was watching.
The train left exactly on time. Huang accompanied me and said that conductors always leave a few hard sleepers for people who want to upgrade and to make themselves a little extra money - it's also a legitimate way to do it. He talked to the conductor and sure enough there was one available. "Just go down to coach number 6". But I'm boarding number 10. A few minutes earlier it would have been a simple thing to walk the platform for four car lengths. But I'm last one on, the train's beginning to move, and it takes a lot of effort just to get in the door.
There are large sacks, luggage and about ten people stuffed in the entryway and I can barely move. It doesn't seem worth the effort to go the three feet necessary to see what the rest of the car looks like let alone make my way through four cars. I’d better settle in. I sit down on my pack, jammed up against the door, shoulder bag is on my lap, nowhere else to put it. I barely have an inch or two to maneuver. The window has thankfully been broken out of the door and brings in fresh warm nighttime air. This helps to clear the tobacco smoke which puffs out of almost all Chinese men. As we glide by a surreal landscape under a full moon I resolve to make the best of it until we come to a station where I can jump out, run forward the four cars and get that hard sleeper.
Fifteen minutes before six AM and fifteen minutes before we're due to hit a station where I can jump out, the conductor spots me, makes a pantomime of sleep and insists I follow him forward. Hard seat cars have padded but straight backed benches that are three people wide on one side and two on the other which leaves a relatively narrow aisle. In this case the aisle was piled high with luggage and there were dozens of people standing, sitting, or laying down in more or less a state of sleep. Without a lot of sharp words on the conductors part, not to mention slaps, shoves and kicks - including a ten year old boy who was sleeping on the floor in an inconvenient, high traffic spot - it would have been near impossible for me to make the trek.
I followed diligently behind the conductor for four cars stumbling over or crashing into people and/or their possessions. Next came the dining car where I was met by an attendant who asked to see my ticket. Meanwhile we had reached the station and the conductor in the course of his duties had disappeared. My ticket, of course, said hard seat. She therefore pointed me back and I was no longer thinking clearly enough to get out my handy phrase book and try to explain. By this time a lot of people had cleared out of the last car when we reached the station and it looked like I might glom onto a seat. I rushed back, spotted an empty seat, pointed and said something akin to "Is this seat taken?" or "Is this seat free?", which they responded to with nods. It didn't much matter either way, question and response were mere formalities, I was going to sit down.
When the guy whose seat I had taken returned, we just squeezed the four of us in, though a fuss might have been made if I weren't a big nose. As cosmic confluence would have it he was probably the only person in the car or maybe several cars who spoke English, though it was mighty rusty. He used to be a buyer for a state company earning $35 a month. Now he has a clothing store in Kunming where he earns four times as much and makes frequent trips to the coast for stock. The guy next to him was heading to Guiyang, near Anshun and the capital of Guizhou Province, to visit family. He was working near Guangzhou earning ten times what he earned in Guiyang for the same work.
With only half a dozen people standing in the aisles the floor had room to begin loading up very quickly with several ingredients including: #1. Spit; the Chinese love to spit, and while on the one hand some people, mostly in urban areas, might make an attempt akin to finding a tree to spit around to minimize its more disgusting attributes, it's probably equally common, especially in rural areas, to see them spit on a restaurant floor. Men and women both do it but for the men it's more than just spitting; they honker it up first with a great rasping sound. I tried to replicate the sound and action and came to two conclusions; it loosens up that weird tasting stuff at the bottom of your throat which I realized I'd just as soon keep there unless it really gets in the way, and simultaneously it feels like half your throat is getting scraped off. #2. Food; they peel everything and it goes directly on the floor, they cook a lot of meat and fish with bones in, and it too goes direct. The floor of many restaurants, especially in small towns or rural areas, looks like the kids just had a food fight. Then, since it doesn't always occur to them to watch where they are stepping, they're sure to ground some of it in. #3. Cigarette butts; almost every man smokes, probably having something to do with being so otherwise repressed.
Add assorted debris to this sorta spit stew and a big mound of it is swept away every couple of hours. All cans, bottles and styrofoam food trays on the other hand go right out the window, oblivious to the many signs that prohibit the act. If you use the trash container provided, it gets chucked out by the car attendant. This sometimes creates a bit of a hazard for the many people who use the trails alongside the tracks as a pedestrian way. I witnessed a couple of near misses thinking, "dumb shits" only to discover that some teenagers a few seats up were making a game of it - extra points for creaming old ladies!
About 18 hours into the journey we came to an important junction where many people got on and many others off. As the train pulled to a stop several people tossed their bags in the open windows and quickly clamored in after. The not so bold or agile rushed the doors and surged inside in a frantic dash for a seat, all too aware of the consequences of insufficient action. The first guy in through the window spotted a seat on our bench. My seat companions waved him off, pretending the seat was taken, hoping to keep more space for themselves, but this guy wasn't phased. He smiled, sat down and said (my assumption of course) "I don't give a shit, I'm sitting down anyway, anyone dumb enough to leave their seat at a time like this deserves to lose it" and then he offered everyone a cigarette. I was impressed by how good natured such a frenetic and crazed scene could be.
Anshun is a city of about 100,000 which has nothing to offer the traveler aside from a view of a dirt-poor city. It’s only distinction is that it's a gateway to Huangguashuo Falls. I'm proud to say that I stayed in three hotels in China which served so few foreign tourists, including one in Anshun and one at the falls, that they could not give me change in FEC, though they still demanded FEC payment. Throughout China horses and/or bicycles and/or people provide power to move goods or people. It is said that Calcutta is the last place on Earth with human powered taxis - rickshaws, but they evidently never visited backwater Chinese areas like Anshun. Even wheels are at times a luxury here. Material is frequently moved on people’s backs in wicker baskets using a tumpline - a forehead sash - carrying all the weight. Picture a small woman carrying more than her weight in sand used for construction purposes up an incline from a dry creek bed. My back hurt just watching.
Huangguashuo Falls has a drop of about 250 feet and spreads to 350 feet after a good rain when water volume is three to four times dry season rate. It's impressive, though hardly spectacular, and has the additional attraction of a trail behind the water which alternates between dripping wet stalagtite and stalagmite caves and openings where the water is barely arms length away. It is heavily touristed, almost entirely by Chinese, and there are scores if not hundreds of snack or souvenir or picture taking booths on the park's trails.
I rested up for a couple of nights from my hard seat experience, then back to Anshun. The 50 mile, hour and a half return bus trip wound up taking twice the time and included three bus changes and a breakdown and cost me double the normal 40 cent fare. Went to check my bags at the train station so I could wander around for several hours while waiting for an evening train. The baggage clerk pointed me to the first class waiting room though I was only going second. The attendant welcomed me, brought a cup of tea, then asked where I was going. "Hard sleeper to Kunming". At first she said no tickets, then changed her mind and said she'd get me one, so I sat back and watched the tube - 15 minutes of straight commercials followed by 45 minutes of inspirational songs sung by smiling police men and women in uniform to a sitting audience of smiling police men and women in uniform.
Did it matter that I paid two and a half times what the Chinese pay for the same ticket ($20 for a 400 mile trip), double price plus 50% for services? Please go ahead and take advantage of me, just don't make me ride the hard seat again so soon. Besides I didn't have to queue. Hard sleeper was actually quite comfortable with no overcrowding and minimal trashing, but I was still somewhat weather-beaten from the first trip and hesitated only briefly in Kunming on my way to Dali where I knew I could relax. Caught the early morning bus for the thirteen hour 200 mile ride to Dali.
With few exceptions Chinese roads are really bad, even many that have just been resurfaced are really bumpy. Which is not hard to understand when the asphalt is spread by hand. Even at a maximum speed of 35 mph the constant jerking, tossing and jostling quickly turned my stomach to knots. This kind of trip would have been a lot easier on me 25 years ago. I'm tending to run down and become susceptible every time I extend myself, further encouraging a travel mode that involves more time in fewer places and a stricter rationing of hard travel time.
But often the worst part about bus riding in China is not the bumping but the beeping and I'm sure I got the worst beeping bus driver in all of China on this trip. There's logic, even laws I'm told, which require a lot more beeping than an American would be used to owing to the large number of pedestrians, bicycles, horsecarts and other various slow moving vehicles constantly presenting obstructions and dangers in a relatively narrow road. But this guy was totally compulsive. In a nation of excessive beepers this guy was after a prize.
On the divided highway leaving Kunming he beeped at every cyclist even if they were far from the vehicle lane on the very edge of the shoulder. He beeped at every vehicle he passed. Not just a short beep of warning, but he'd beep several times on approach, then lean on it when we pulled up aside and hold it until we were completely passed. On the country road he beeped every turn and almost every vehicle going the other direction. He beeped at almost everything that moved on the other side of the road even when there was a full lane of safety between us.
After an hour or two I was muttering to myself and making this guy is wacko gestures to the old Chinese guy sitting next to me. Another hour or two and I was hatching diabolical schemes and wishing I had the nerve to disable his big horn but he'd probably have refused to drive without it. He had two horns but rarely used the easily tolerable moderate beep, relying instead almost exclusively on his big blare. When he hit it hard coming out of a tunnel without a single vehicle or person in sight, I could no longer restrain myself and cried out, "What the fuck is he beeping at now?" He looked back to see what the commotion was but of course nobody understood a word of my outburst. By this time I WAS READY TO KILL THE SONOFABITCH! This was too much but what could I do, it's their country and culture, I'm just a guest, a visitor. Next time I'll try to sit near the back of the bus and pray for a sane driver.
Dali, situated about 100 miles from the Burma border in far southwest China, is in a beautiful setting on a gentle slope at about 6000 feet elevation between 50 mile long Lake Erhai and a range which parallels it and rises steeply to 13,500 feet at it's highest point. Every mile or so is a small canyon perpendicular to the ridge - the one right above Dali has a whole series of cute little waterfalls. Just back of the city at about 7000 feet is a Buddhist temple. From the temple one can walk many miles in either direction on a wide stone trail that affords sweeping views of the lake and valley. In several places with sheer canyon walls the trail is carved out of solid rock.
Main street is lined with 100 to 200 year old wood front buildings, some of which, only propped up by their neighbors, tilt more than the famous leaner at Pisa. There also are many old stone buildings and frequent use of the marble this area is noted for. Many streets are cut from large stones and others of just rounded stones fit together, which can't make moving those hand carts around any easier. Dali has been around since B.C. times when it was an important trading center. The oldest buildings, located on the edge of town, are the "Three Pagodas" which symbolize this area and date back a millennium. The tallest rises about 220 feet, the other two, placed in a triangle are about 130.
Marley works the 7 AM to Midnight shift seven days a week at her restaurant, which along with several others sits close to the entrance of the "Dali City Hotel #2" where most budget travelers find themselves. She's 23, had a restaurant with her husband Jim - Jim's Peace Cafe - until he split about a year ago. The family takes care of her three year old, everybody lives in back of the restaurant. The building is 120 years old, constructed entirely of wood and held up by two 14" posts. It's sturdy but far from square.
The dining room comes replete with four comfortable corner sectionals, matching no less, bordering a room with funky early twentieth century looking wallpaper that covers a very uneven wall that's partly covered by local art - "Yunnan School, Renaissance in Chinese Art". Have a passable six ounce steak and fries and a 22 ounce local beer all for less than a dollar, and relax to the Commitments, vintage Otis, The Dead and Robert Cray on the boom box. Later on when things quiet down relax with a worldly sampling of Asia travelers and share a local dube.
I can't tell you how it warms my heart to see big healthy marijuana plants growing in the heart of every city in Yunnan Province, including Kunming, the capital, where I spotted a ten footer growing in front of the downtown bus station. Not to mention all along the roadsides, in people's front yards, in city parks or sprinkled among the corn. It's not terribly good but with such largesse who can complain. On the other hand the Chinese Government is not too fond of opium. Last year in the Dali area alone 140 people got a bullet in the back of the neck for opium related transgressions.
Somehow they just haven't figured out the connection between the evil weed and the dreaded poppy. It's definitely illegal but nothing happens if you get caught, though don't get busted with kilos, you'll surely do time. They must like it as a plant because they let it crowd perennials in boulevard planter boxes, but it doesn't seem that many people do it or even know what it is since large plants are most often left unpicked. The minority peoples who are heavily represented in Yunnan are the most likely users and the ones in Dali definitely know enough to pick it and try to sell it at inflated prices to unsuspecting travelers.
There are many natural wonders in this area which carries the brunt of the Indian Subcontinent trying to push its way into China. Three of Asia's great rivers, the Salween which empties into the Andaman sea in Burma, the Mekong which flows into the South China Sea in Vietnam and the Yangtse with its mouth in China at the Yellow Sea, begin high in the Tibetan Plateau, run parallel in very deep gorges only 50 miles apart in the far Northwest corner of Yunnan, then diverge to empty into seas that are more than 2000 miles apart.
Close to the heart of this area is the Tiger Leap Gorge of the Yangtse River so named because at river level it narrows down to 100 feet in several places. The trail runs on the north side of the gorge averaging about 2000 feet above river level. Even at this height some of the rapids can roar. They are powerful, no rafting team has ever successfully negotiated these torrents, with their 25 foot rolls, without fatalities.
But it’s weightier claim to distinction is that at two plus miles it is one of the world's deepest gorges. The south side ranges from very steep to almost vertical. At one point along the trail you have the impression that you are looking at a cross section of a mountain - it displays an 11,000 foot nearly vertical rise from the river to the peak in a flat plane that stretches for miles.
But the trail itself is an easy walking, mostly level 20 miles, even while it had to be carved out of solid rock in many places. It is not a hike for people subject to vertigo but not really difficult since it is never less than three feet wide when there are sheer drop-offs; except that is, when negotiating past an occasional landslide where it can get just one path wide. It can’t be that bad, it’s regularly transversed by pack horses used to supply the local denizens, who are present in every remotely habitable place.
China: Love Those High Heels
Kunming is a Portland sized city (one million plus) and what I imagine, in my limited knowledge of the country, to be China's equivalent. "City of Eternal Spring", it's high elevation, 6000 feet, combined with low latitude, same as Miami, provide moderate year round temperatures. The people are warm and friendly by Chinese standards - word is both people and scenery improve in China as you head south and Yunnan Province is the best. Unlike the country as a whole in which 94% of the people belong to one racial group, the Han, Yunnan is one third minority with half of China's minorities represented.
Kunming's central thoroughfare is lined with 70 foot tall lacy leafed evergreens and because this is China and more than 80% of all movement is on bicycle, the streets, even crowded streets, are amazingly quiet, aside from the few rude hornblowers. In the early evening hours with thousands of people around but few motor vehicles the loudest sound is people talking as they bike by. It's a wonderful experience but better come quick, China with the world's fastest growing economy will soon transform it's peaceful and pleasant street life into a compulsive beepers automania. (author’s note; 1996 - you’re too late)
There is a lot of construction going on and many 100 year old buildings are being sacrificed to that end. Seventy five percent of China's people live in an overcrowded countryside where nearly every inch of farmable land, and much that would in most places be considered unfarmable - rocky hillsides with some terraces only wide enough for one row of corn - is put to use. Therefore little leeway is left for suburban sprawl. The new housing is in characterless, high density, multi-building complexes reminiscent to an extreme of the worst of America's public housing projects, whereas the old buildings are full of character but low density and often poor quality housing.
I asked Guo, a teacher who hangs around the city's Green Lake Park looking for foreigners to talk to, if it were possible for an individual to register disapproval and try to save the old buildings. Yes, you could go to the mayor's office, they'd listen but not really care (sounds familiar). The problem is most of the old apartments have no toilets or kitchens and 80% of the people who live in them would rather see them razed since anyone who is displaced is entitled to a subsidized new apartment.
Kunming has a special massage school for the blind. They work in clinics during the day, then in the evening they set up their chairs on the sidewalk outside of hotel entrances, among other places. There are also blind palm readers and as is common in many Asian countries blind sidewalk musicians. Ragged and/or handicapped beggars and zoned out mumblers are beginning to appear so I asked Guo what happened to the socialist system, why the forsaken people? If you are a citizen of Kunming there is help, albeit minimal, but if you've come from somewhere else you are completely on your own.
Fu Li Ping, christened Bridget at her first college English class, has been moonlighting at the Golden Triangle Cafe for the last eight months. She does it more to practice her English and keep contact with the outside world than the money, 70 cents for a minimum five hour shift, much of which goes anyway to help her mother and married sister. The Golden Triangle has a very relaxed, hip, marginally upscale western atmosphere but you can tell it's still mostly frequented by Chinese by things like duck's stomach and chicken's feet on the menu.
Her primary job is as a translator for the local tobacco company where she earns more than twice what the cafe pays. The factory also provides her with an apartment. The only problem is the gate is closed at midnight, only very rare exceptions are made, and she doesn't get off till at least one or two, so on work nights she sleeps at her sister's place. She recounted stories of trying to get in after curfew - no amount of begging, pleading or cajoling could convince the gatekeeper to open up.
She wouldn't consider marrying a Chinese man, she's been too exposed to western ideas through her studies, besides having had some bad experiences with her own countrymen. But that's moot, at 28 she's substantially over the hill. Meanwhile she couldn't bring a man to her apartment, Chinese or otherwise, the gateman would immediately report her and she'd face a stern morality lecture from her director. She can't register for a hotel room in her own city, the desk clerks would only laugh at her and neither could she discretely visit someone else's hotel room.
China is the only place I ever heard of where guests don't get a key to their room - there was one exception in the eight Chinese hotels I stayed in. There is an attendant stationed on every floor and every time you want in - even if you just went out to pee in the community bathroom - you have to summon her to get back into your room. On the one hand I felt guilty about having to wake up an attendant when coming back from a late nighter, on the other hand, one disappeared while I was in the community shower, requiring me to stand around in my towel fuming for 20 minutes till she showed up.
Last year in Kunming many Chinese women were arrested and jailed on prostitution charges, for up to three years, and their western partners expelled. Likely many were prostitutes, but to many Chinese people any Chinese woman seen with a Western man is automatically for sale, so just friendship can be a risky proposition.
My time with Bridget was much too short and unfulfilling, what with my need to complete a traveling agenda combined with the heavy-handed social restrictions of the Chinese culture. But I haven't felt like this in a long time so getting back to Kunming is going to be a high priority for me.
Ninety percent of Kunming's people live in gated enclaves of work related or otherwise subsidized apartments and as a result they are under constant surveillance. Every person also has to fill out a form every year detailing their family history, including any changes that occurred during the year, and what they themselves have done. Whether a person is allowed to open a business or leave the country can often depend on a clean family history. But it is changing, the people in the booming coastal provinces have much simpler forms to fill out.
The government seems intent on freeing it's people economically while keeping a tight rein politically but most China watchers feel they have opened a Pandora's Box which can never be closed. An Army Lieutenant with eleven years in the service sat down next to me to talk as I was resting in Kunming's main public square among the weekend crowd. "Do you like the military?" "No but I have no choice". We went on to find ourselves in total agreement on the need for China to embrace a free press, free speech and democratic principles.
In Dali I met a vacationing Hong Konger who had recently completed four years of study in Connecticut. His stateside friends think he's crazy for wanting to return to Hong Kong and China but he's a writer and feels that his work can help tip the balance in moving China towards Hong Kong rather than the opposite. Frequently mentioned as a hindrance to China's unfolding was the problem that most peasants knew nothing about politics and cared only about where their next meal was coming from.
The country may be an individualist's nightmare but at the same time it's also a planner's wet dream. They redesign at will with little concern for or regard of the public. Headline in the English language China Daily which does a poor job trying to pass itself off as a newspaper, "(Premier) Li (Peng) Rouses Nation to Strive for Three Gorges". This is a series of dams expected to cost upwards of $20 billion which will flood a scenic wonder and displace a million people in the process. And there is hardly a need for rousing or striving once the premier has spoken.
On the positive side, half of every street is devoted to bikes, extremely little to on or off street parking. All housing is clustered high-density, even some places which barely qualify as villages will include three or four story apartment buildings. Whenever possible villages are placed on slopes rather than more fertile bottomland. City and country are sharply delineated although there is a narrow transition zone where farming and other uses coexist. There is no sprawl, only in the remotest areas will houses be found standing by themselves, and there are no shanty towns. All buildings are concrete and substantial enough but unfortunately almost all that I came across were poorly maintained and had leaky plumbing.
No mention of faulty plumbing could be allowed to pass without bringing up a more in depth discussion of Chinese toilets. They call them water closets, the few that are signed in English that is, the rest give we foreigners a good excuse to learn the Chinese characters for man and woman. They're plentiful and not hard to find - most are not hard to smell either - and that's especially true in rural areas where the stuff's generative powers are highly regarded. Farmers build roadside toilets in the hope that bypassers will leave a load. It is shoveled out, still very fresh, transported to the fields in full, uncovered buckets suspended from a shoulder pole and then placed directly on the soil.
The big problem for many westerners is that while toilet stalls are sometimes partitioned they are rarely enclosed. And the few times in my experience that Chinese men had the option they left the door open.
Finally, Chinese style squat toilets are unfathomly, and when the plumbing isn't functioning, as is so often the case, counterproductively designed. In every other case of squat toilet design the plopping poop is properly placed to land in or close to the drain hole. In China the drain hole is often partly covered by a hood, designed as I imagine, though it never seemed to be a problem, to prevent overpeeing. The poop falls at the other end in a little depression (why a depression?) to be, theoretically at least, whooshed away in a big flush. But since the plumbing is so often dysfunctional, and no backup buckets are provided for hand flushing, one or more piles is often left to sit there forlornly.
There are no fences in the countryside and no billboards to mar the view although almost every brick wall has a political slogan, usually painted in red, on it. Rock is plentiful and labor is cheap so that many constructions like road or rail embankments, drainage ditches and river banks are finished in hand cut fitted stone which gives much of the countryside a permanent and quality look. Rice terracing also adds an element of grace and order.
The one thing that mars the feeling is the condition of the mountains which are at least as bad as the Philippines if not worse. In fact many log trucks, mostly short pieces, can be seen in Western Yunnan but there are few trees outside the remotest areas. Almost every hill or mountain that wasn't cultivated was bare and/or eroded or growing a single species of pine in place of what used to be a diverse semi-tropical hardwood forest. It took 40 miles up a rough dirt road on the way to the Tiger Leap Gorge trailhead to come across older trees which were unfortunately in the process of being cut. Wood is still the primary source of fuel in many places and as a result the hillsides are scavenged for twigs and many trees are stripped of most of their branches. There are occasional signs of replanting but not with any of the kinds of trees that originally grew there.
It is a fascinating country that with almost a quarter of the world's population deserves respect for it's sheer immensity. And considering its size it's all the more amazing how quickly it can change. Travelers who were in China only four or five years ago provided me with some perspective. If I think I'm being stared at in `92, in `89 if you sat down in a bus station you'd have 100 people just standing around gawking. I was able to find someone in every transportation facility who spoke at least a few words of English, back then zero, or worse they'd ignore you, pretend you didn't exist or simply refuse to sell you a ticket.
And their dress has been almost totally westernized in contrast to only a few years ago when a billion people wore the same blue or green Mao jackets. They can still be found in the rural interior but otherwise have largely disappeared. Maybe it's a reaction to all those years of repression and enforced conservatism but the women really love to dress up - more than anyplace I've ever been - and are not at all shy about stretch pants or short skirts. I'd comment about the combination of short skirts and bicycles but it might get me into trouble. And they love those high heels. I've never seen so many high heels just walking around, not to mention hiking mountain trails or sweeping streets or working in a restaurant kitchen or driving little piglets home from the market.