Planes, Trains, and Automobiles...and Boats, and Bikes, and lots of walking Part 2...

Okay, so maybe Lesley won't write the second half...
As I write this Lesley is in bed after a hard night of being pretty sick with what from now on we'll refer to it as Chairman Mao's revenge. She remarked that we've have been here for 1 month and she has been sick 4 times with various coughs, colds, and digestive woes. We've all had some form of these maladies, including my cold/cough that lasted about the first 3 weeks of being here, and have been grateful for the tried and true Chinese remedies we can find in almost any pharmacy.

Me sick in Dali ... Lesley sick at home...

Anyhow, back to our travels. At the end of a hard day hiking through what remained of the jungle, and various tea and rubber plantations, we arrived at a small village where we spent the night with a local family. As I was pretty sick during the hike, I was looking forward to a good nights sleep and some bottled water. Neither of these were to be found. Our guide, Mr. Rush, had told us we would be able to get water at our destination, but it turned out that, no, we could not get water until tomorrow after about 1 hour of walking. Our 'bed' for the night was the floor of our guests home, which Lesley and I, Steve and Natalie, shared with the 7 young German engineering students that were with us on the hike.
All this being said, our guests were wonderfully hospitable, the food was good, and there was beer and homemade moonshine that the grandfather of the house made. I didn't try any, but I'm pretty sure it served the dual role of beverage and degreaser...
After a less than restful night, we were off again the next morning. Our hike took us through endless rubber plantations, past local farmers garden plots and pineapple patches(?), and finally, row upon row of banana trees. We ended the hike by being shuttled into the next large town in 3 wheeled taxis. After lunch we walked down to the nearby Mekong river and crossed it on the ferry. Our guide was an educated and philosophical man, and after a discussion about the merits of nuclear power, versus damming rivers in China, we boarded the ferry and recrossed the river back to our original starting point. The description of our tour said we would cross the Mekong river and we were not disappointed. We checked out a local Dai monastery, cruised through a local market, and ended our trek with a bus ride back to Jing Hong.




And finally we come to the 'Plane' part of this long winded blog. After experiencing the wonders of China's train and bus systems, with our shortest trip at about 12 hours, we looked to the sky. Our next destination was the tourist haven of Dali. Our options were a 18 hour bus ride for Y190 (about $38),or a 45 minute flight for Y280 (about $56), no contest. After a pleasantly quick plane ride on Lucky Airlines (likely named because they're lucky they don't bend the landing gear with that kind of touchdown), we arrived in Dali. Now for those who haven't been, Dali isn't really like the rest of China. It's more like a beautiful Swiss town, on the edge of a lake, at the base of a picturesque mountain, but with Chinese architecture and the people to match. Dali is famous for its clean streams running through town, its tourist friendly streets, its local marble (the lamp posts were made of marble), and pot...From the time we arrived at about noon until we turned in for the night, I was offered ganja about 15 times from sweet old ladies who walked up and whispered to me, "You smoky da ganja?". Tempted as I was to spend my remaining days in a Chinese work camp, I declined.

Scenes from Dali, a beautiful Dai temple, carved doors, decorated houses...



The woman in the red vest is our friendly neighborhood 'Ganja Granny'.

We did enjoy Dali, with its many artists, beautiful buildings and temples, colorfully dressed minority women, and foreign cafes. Lesley and I managed to find a bakery run by a German woman, where we indulged in scrambled eggs, toasted bagels, and fresh ground coffee!
After the second night in Dali, Steve and Natalie, our trusty travelling companions, parted company and set of on their own adventure.
After a couple days in our tourist paradise, we headed up the road a few hours to another tourist paradise in the town of Lijiang. The old town section of Lijiang was much like Dali except that Dali is nicely laid out in a grid of streets, while Lijiang is more like a rabbit warren. This subtle difference, in a place where one vendor is often selling the same thing as the next, led to Lesley getting lost for about 3.5 hours after I headed back to our hotel early.

We had planned on heading out from Lijiang to hike through 'Tiger Leaping Gorge', but my cough was not letting up, and after 5 sleepless night, I had to tap out. Despite our change in plans, we enjoyed some brisk sunny days walking around Lijiang and enjoying the sights. There were many temples, carvers, and more colorful locals to look at. The minority people in Lijiang are called the 'Naxi', and Lesley was fortunate to take in some of their local dancing in the town square. One more thing, Lesley was lucky enough to try some local Yak yogurt, and for someone who knows good yogurt like she does, you can see how good she thought it was!

So back to Chengdu we go. From Lijiang we survived a harrowing 8 hour bus ride through a steep sided gorge that followed the Yangze river as it left Tiger Leaping gorge. Our driver didn't see a problem in passing dump truck after dump truck around blind corners! My theory was, he believed the buses horn created a 'force field', a kind of energy barrier, that would protect us from harm. It must have worked though, because he was on the horn constantly, and I'm still here to tell the tale.
The bus ride ended in a dirty industrial town, called Panzhihua, where we hoped to catch an overnight train on the 12 hour trip back to Chengdu. Our plans changed when we arrived at the train station at 5:30 pm, and we were told that the train would be leaving the next day at noon.
We finally got back to Chengdu, the city we have come to think of as 'home', at about 11:30 pm on Wednesday the 11th. After 4 nights in a hotel, we thanked our lucky stars, and our friend Jason who had made some contacts in our absence, and moved into our apartement on Sunday the 15th. 3 hours of scrubbing and cleaning later we began settling in to our new home.


School started on the 16th, but I'll save that tale for Lesley to tell.
Thanks for reading.

Zai jian.

Ian

Being the cultural ambassador that I am, this is me teaching some kids how to play thumb war on the train to Kunming.


P.S. If you click on the pictures they do enlarge!

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles...and Boats, and Bikes, and lots of walking Part 1...

Well, well, it's been a busy 2 weeks or so since my last post. Lesley and I, along with our friends Natalie and Steve, decided to make the most of the 2 and a bit weeks we had before school starts to see some more of China. Seeing more of China is like seeing more of Canada, not a small undertaking. Add to this that the time before and after the Chinese New Year is a very busy time for travel in China, like 300 million people trying to get somewhere busy.

On January 27th we left Chengdu on what was meant to be a 25 hour train ride to Liuzhou in Guangxi province. Brighter minds prevailed and, to avoid back tracking, we got off the train in San Jiang in Guangxi. A bus ride later we ended up in Long Sheng, where we jumped on yet another bus to get to Ping An village in the area known as 'the Dragon's Backbone'. On this bus we met a local Yao (one of China's many indigenous, and sometimes autonomous, non-Han people) woman named Xi Mi who invited us to spend the night and have New Years dinner with her family in their village on the way to Ping An. We quickly learned, on entering her mother's home, that the Yao live a very simple life and we soon saddled up next to Xi Mi's other family members around the cooking fire which was burning in the living room. Xi Mi's mother was dressed in the traditional Yao fashion. One of their distinguishing features is their hair, which touches the ground, but is worn wrapped in a bun piled on top of their head. Even with this mass of hair, this woman was still only about 4' 6"! Amidst all this traditional garb her cell phone was never far away. In China EVERYONE has a cell phone, and you can get a cell signal almost anywhere...

Now I appreciate fresh food as much as the next person, but it's not often that I get to meet my meat before I eat...Steve was lucky enough to pet the chicken before it met it's end, and I saw the fish swimming in a bowl in the sink before it ended up at the end of my chopsticks. Xi Mi's family was wonderfully generous and sent us on our way the next morning with full bellies.

We reached Ping An before noon and after securing our beds for the night, we set off to explore the incredible terraced landscape of the Dragon's Backbone. I would hazard a guess that people in this region have been living this way for centuries if not a millenia. Now we do have pictures, but they will have to wait until we get back to Chengdu, but if you can imagine the entire North Shore of Vancouver terraced and growing corn, rice, and many other vegetables. Oh yeah, and all the work is done with a hoe and a plow pulled by a small Ox!

At dinner in Ping An our time in China started to show as we all happily enjoyed Pizza in this rustic village.

The next morning we were off again, taking a bus back to Long Shen and then onto Guilin and finally Yang Shuo. Yang Shuo is a busy tourist destination on the Li river, and is home to incredible limestone karst mountains. These mountains create dramatic scenery and feeling that Dragons may indeed exist...On our first morning in Yang Shuo, Lesley and I started our day with a boat cruise on the Li River and spent the rest of it cycling around the countryside with Steve and Natalie. I think bikes have to be the best, although not always the safest way, to explore a place as we soaked up the ambience of the small villages we rode through to choruses of 'Ni Hao' and 'Hello'.

As this is a bit of a whirlwind trip we were off yet again the next afternoon, back to Guilin to catch an 18 hour train to Kunming in Yunan province. I have never done much train travel and enjoy it for the opportunity to take in the scenery, such as the 'Stone Forest' we passed through as we approached Kunming. Travelling by train also makes you realize that in China any land suitable or semi-suitable for agriculture is terraced and put to use, after all, that's how you feed 1.5 billion people. We spent the day exploring Kunming, and thoroughly enjoyed it for all its sights and sounds. That night we boarded a sleeper bus for Jing Hong, and a bumpy, somewhat sleepless 11 hours later we were there. Jing Hong is located in the Xishuangbanna region of southwest Yunan, and is bordered by Laos and Burma (Myanmar). You feel, in this region, like you are in Southeast Asia, not China. The local Dai people are related to Thai people futher south, and along with the Dai, there are Indian/Burmese looking people. Han chinese make up only about 30% of the population in this region. The temples have more of a Thai look, and while all the signs are written in Chinese characters, there is Dai script below. The weather was hot and sunny, and it was a nice change to be in t-shirts and shorts and enjoying fresh pineapple and watermelon juice, as we have been freezing cold since getting to China. We were fortunate to be able to enjoy the local botanical gardens which were beautiful, spacious, and quiet, you could almost forget you were in China.


Take a look at these Koi that were in a pond at the Botanical gardens!


The next day we headed off on an overnight trek through the local countryside to take in the sights and some local hospitality. On the morning we set off I felt awful, Natalie and Steve had had brief boughts of travellers stomach in Yang Shuo, and Lesley was currently struggling with that also. We didn't want to miss the trip though, so we sucked it up and set off on a 17 kilometer hike (to be followed by a 19 km hike on the second day).
Our first stop was in a local Hani village where we had lunch and our guide, Mr. Rush, had to find a local willing to cook for us. We were entertained by the local kids playing jump rope while our meal was prepared in a smoke blackened kitchen. As with most meals in China, from simple ingredients came a plethora of dishes full of flavour to nourish us for the rest of our hike.
Once we left the village we hiked through hills covered in tea bushes, and eventually came upon a house were we sampled, and ended up buying, locally harvested organic Pu er tea. The rest of our hike took us along the sides of mountains that varied in their cover from dense jungle to hillsides clear cut to grow Rubber trees newly planted to supply China's exploding car market with tires. These mountains were once rich in wildlife, including Elephants, snakes, and birds, but the monoculture that replaced the jungle has none of this. In our sights for some of the hike was the new expressway that can get you to Bangkok in 14 hours, the price of progress...

Anyhow, that's part 1. Lesley will put together part 2 and post it soon.

Thanks for reading.

Ian